Fear of Protesters Prompts Cancellation of Trump Trip
■ The White House’s decision to call off a trip to Milwaukee rather than face protesters will quite likely embolden the burgeoning protest movement.
■ Jerry Falwell Jr., a foe of Obama-era higher education regulations, will head President Trump’s higher education task force.
■ Federal Election Commission reports show money kept flowing from President Trump’s campaign to his company coffers, even after Election Day.
Stoking protest nation
The decision by the White House and Harley-Davidson to cancel President Trump’s trip to Milwaukee for a factory visit on Thursday rather than face protesters is sure to have repercussions for the already energized activists opposing Mr. Trump’s presidency.
Harley-Davidson was worried about the protests likely to greet Mr. Trump and the possible harm to its popularity, just as Peyton Manning was last week when he dashed out the back door of a Republican retreat in Philadelphia rather than risk the cameras.
But if the mere threat of demonstrations can spook the president, the protesters are sure to be emboldened. The Democratic National Committee is already mocking the decision.
“Donald Trump is a real tough guy when it comes to locking up a scared 5-year-old boy trying to find his mother,” said Zac Petkanas, Democratic National Committee senior adviser. “But as soon as he has to face the American people to defend his illegal anti-Muslim ban, he chickens out. What a profile in courage.”
Jerry Falwell Jr. to lead higher education task force
The Obama administration’s efforts to regulate the once flourishing for-profit university system did not get a lot of attention, but they had big consequences.
Critics of the universities saw fake diploma mills that recruited students with advertising on buses, on subways and even in homeless shelters, and then helped them get guaranteed student loans from the federal government. Money in hand, the for-profits often left the students to their own devices. If they dropped out, or got degrees that proved worthless in the work world, so be it: The taxpayer would pay off the loans if the students couldn’t.
The Obama-era regulations tightened up recruiting rules and tied loans to the schools’ records of getting their students the jobs they were promised. Many for-profit universities went under.
Now, President Trump — who just settled a fraud suit against his Trump University — has asked Liberty University’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., a stern critic of accreditation rules, to head a White House task force on higher education, assigned to focus on “overregulation and micromanagement,” a Liberty spokesman told NBC News.
“The goal is to pare it back and give colleges and their accrediting agencies more leeway in governing their affairs,” Mr. Falwell, an evangelical Christian, told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Joe Biden forms his foundation
Whether former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will actually run for president in 2020 at age 78 is still uncertain, but some of his plans for life after 44 years of public service became a bit more clear on Tuesday after he announced the formation of the Biden Foundation.
And not surprisingly, Mr. Biden used one of his father’s favorite aphorisms to mark the occasion.
“My dad used to have an expression, ‘It’s a lucky person who gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters,’” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “We look forward to this new chapter.”
Mr. Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, intend to use the foundation to advance some of their dearest foreign and domestic policy priorities, including their cancer initiative, combating violence against women, and supporting U.S. military service members and their families, according to the announcement.
Several of the Bidens’ closest friends and family members will serve on the board of the charity, including former Senator Ted Kaufman and Valerie Biden Owens, Mr. Biden’s sister.
Source:- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html
