GOP Senator Says Nearly All Senate Republicans Think Trump Could Cause 'World War III'
Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.
It’s another day in Donald Trump’s America, so of course it begins with a controversy that stems from the president’s tweets.
After Trump posted a string of tweets on Sunday morning attacking Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the senator hit back hard, tweeting that Trump has turned the White House into an “adult day care center.”
But Corker—who recently announced that he wasn’t running for re-election—wasn’t done, and called up The New York Times on Sunday night to share his concerns that Trump is putting the country “on the path to World War III,” an opinion he said is shared by nearly all of his Republican colleagues in the Senate.
“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he told the Times, adding “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
Tensions escalated between Trump and Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after the president repeatedly said diplomacy has failed with North Korea. Corker responded by saying that Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly are the only three people in the administration “that separate our country from chaos.”
As of Monday morning, the White House hadn’t publicly commented on Corker’s remarks. But the Tennessee senator, freed from the pressures of having to win another election, has all but invited his colleagues in the Senate to join him in criticizing the Republican president. We’ll have to wait and see if anyone does.
WHAT ELSE?
- Over the weekend, Dove apologized for a looping GIF ad that showed a black woman pulling off a brown shirt to reveal a white woman in a white shirt. It’s hardly the beauty industry’s first racist ad, but this shit is somehow still happening in 2017.
- Harvey Weinstein has been fired from the company he co-founded after staggering allegations of decades of sexual harassment were revealed by The New York Times.
- Today is the holiday conventionally known as Columbus Day. It’s now commemorated by many as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in an effort to rewrite the narrative about Columbus’ so-called discovery of America, which really involved Columbus and his men enslaving, exploiting, and murdering the indigenous people they encountered. And we already have our first very bad take of the day—from Matt Lewis in The Daily Beast, imploring us to please Leave Columbus Alone. No.
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