Happening Today: Iran Deal, Schneiderman, George Zimmerman, Calories, Met Gala
May 8, 2018 by admin
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Trump to Reveal Iran Deal’s Fate Amid Low Hopes for Survival
President Trump is preparing to tell the world whether he plans to follow through on his threat to pull out of the landmark nuclear accord with Iran and almost surely ensure its collapse. There are no signs that European allies enlisted to “fix” the deal had persuaded him to preserve it. In a burst of last-minute diplomacy, punctuated by a visit by Britain’s top diplomat, the deal’s European members gave in to many of Trump’s demands, according to officials, diplomats and others briefed on the negotiations. Yet they still left convinced he is likely to re-impose sanctions and walk away from the deal he has lambasted since his days as a presidential candidate. As they braced for an expected withdrawal, U.S. officials were dusting off plans for how to sell a pullout to the public and explain its complex ramifications to the global financial world, said the officials and others, who weren’t authorized to speak ahead of an announcement and requested anonymity.
NY Attorney General Resigns Amid Allegations of Abuse
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who had taken on high-profile roles as an advocate for women’s issues and an antagonist to the policies of President Donald Trump, announced he would be resigning from office hours after four women he was romantically involved with accused him of physical violence in accounts published by The New Yorker. Schneiderman, who had been running for re-election, said he contested the women’s accounts, but “while these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time.” He said he would resign at the close of business today. Two women had spoken to The New Yorker on the record, saying Schneiderman repeatedly hit them during the course of their relationships with him in recent years, and never with their consent. Neither woman filed any police complaints, but both said they sought out medical attention and confided in people close to them about the abuse. A third woman who also was involved with him told her story to the other two women, but said she was too frightened to come forward. A fourth woman said Schneiderman slapped her when she rebuffed him, but also asked to remain unidentified. The New Yorker said it vetted the third woman’s allegations, and saw a photo of what the fourth woman said was her injury.
Zimmerman Charged With Stalking Trayvon Film Investigator
Authorities say George Zimmerman threatened a private investigator working for a documentary filmmaker. Court records show Zimmerman was issued a summons for a May 30 arraignment on a charge of misdemeanor stalking. A sheriff’s report says the investigator contacted Zimmerman in September on behalf of Michael Gasparro, who is making a documentary on Trayvon Martin. The series is being produced by rapper Jay-Z. Court records show the private investigator received 55 phone calls, 67 text messages, 36 voicemails and 27 emails from Zimmerman in December. The records don’t list an attorney for Zimmerman. The former neighborhood watch volunteer fatally shot the 17-year-old Martin in 2012 in the central Florida city of Sanford. He was acquitted of all charges.
Obama-Era Calorie Rules Finally Come Into Force for U.S. Restaurants
After years of delays, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has introduced a law requiring restaurants and other food outlets with 20 or more locations to post calorie counts. In anticipation of the law, big firms like McDonald’s and Starbucks have already introduced the calorie information on their menus and menu boards. For example, a Big Mac Meal at McDonald’s with regular fries and a full-sugar coke contains 1,120 calories, and that information is now posted clearly in the chain’s restaurant locations. According to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, women are likely to need between 1,600 and 2,400 calories a day, and men from 2,000 to 3,000. The food labeling rule had an original compliance date of 2015, but that was extended three times to help the industry understand and prepare for the rules.
Holy Haute Couture: Divine Designs Grace Carpet at Met Gala
Divine designs floated up the red carpet at the religion-themed Met Gala in shimmering golds, reds and fuchsia, in crowns and in crosses, and even a pair of giant wings. One lesson of the night: If anyone can make a mitre modern, it’s Rihanna. The Grammy-winning artist — never one to shy away from a grand entrance — arrived dripping in pearls and crystals in a Maison Margiela by John Galliano minidress, ornate robe and beaded papal headgear. The annual fundraising fete in New York brings out Hollywood’s elite for an evening of fashion and charity and to celebrate the spring exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute — this year, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Along with Rihanna, who reigned supreme, other standouts included supermodel Gigi Hadid in a one-shouldered, beaded Versace gown seemingly inspired by stained-glass windows (or butterflies), and Zendaya, a fierce Versace warrior princess in armor-like layers and delicate chainmail fabric, inspired by Joan of Arc.
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Meyers: Trump Wanted Me To Apologize On-Air for Making Fun of Him
May 8, 2018 by admin
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NEW YORK—It wasn’t all porn star hush money: Michael Cohen once tried to negotiate an appearance by Donald Trump on Seth Meyers’ show, for what the “Late Night” host pitched as a fun way of coming together after torching Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.
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Meyers had invited Trump after running into him at the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary special in February 2015, a few months before the real estate developer’s presidential campaign launched.
Trump, Meyers told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, started out receptive to appearing on “Late Night,” but the conversation ended once Meyers refused a demand Cohen relayed that was non-negotiable to Trump: He wanted Meyers to go on air and publicly apologize for making fun of Trump at the dinner four years earlier.
Neither a White House spokesman nor Cohen responded when asked what happened.
Back then, Meyers never thought Trump would actually go through with a presidential campaign—“Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke,” Meyers famously joked at the Correspondents Dinner—and Meyers says he believed that “right up to the moment where [Trump] won.”
Now, with Trump in the White House, Meyers doesn’t regret anything he’s done to tear down the president: “it doesn’t resonate when you call not-a-clown a clown,” Meyers said, in an interview recorded in his office at 30 Rockefeller Center, where if you craned your neck out the window just a bit past the pile of books (with Bernie Sanders’ “Our Revolution” on top), you could see Trump Tower a few away blocks up Fifth Avenue.
Before ridiculing Trump became the heart of every comedy show everywhere, Meyers was targeting Trump every night. From behind his desk, he’d tee off with a perspective that was Obama-esque: liberal, but self-aware about politics; both Democrats and Republicans were ridiculous, but Trump’s rise represented something more nefarious that could be neither be tolerated nor taken totally seriously. Meyers donated to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and though he didn’t exactly endorse Hillary Clinton, he ended the run-up to the 2016 election by telling his audience that voting for her was an obvious, if not great, choice.
For all that gets made of businesses losing customers by turning against Trump—or the stunning success of pro-Trump media like the “Roseanne” reboot—late-night comedy is perhaps the clearest example of the appetite for, and business opportunity in, embracing the cultural divide. CBS’s “Late Show” with Stephen Colbert shot past NBC’s “Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon in TV ratings once Colbert turned his monologues into gleeful nightly trashings of Trump. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel became a national sensation when he broke into tears while talking about Obamacare and his infant son’s heart surgery—and has earned liberal praise for every Twitter fight that he’s had with a Republican politician since.
“[Trump] turned himself into an object of ridicule,” Meyers said, explaining why so many comedians are taking target at him. “This is a case of judo, where you’re using someone else’s momentum against them. It’s not like we’re attacking. We’re just sort of like steering his weight and letting him take himself down.”
Meyers’ audience is up this season over last, averaging1.58 million viewers each night—way ahead of CBS’ “Late Late Show” or ABC’s “Nightline,” both of which he beats in all 10 of Nielsen’s demographic categories. And he’s done so while using his show to get into the weeds of what’s happening in politics. On “A Closer Look,” a recurring 5-8 minute segment, Meyers covers daily details of not only the Trump-Russia-Mueller soap opera, but also issues like the West Virginia teachers’ strike or the student walkouts protesting gun violence. His audience isn’t just those who stay up past his 12:35am start time; it’s viewers who will check out clips online the next day, and will, Meyers hopes, come back over and over again to hear his take on the day’s important news.
Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have appeared on the show, as have 2020 Democratic hopefuls including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He invites on journalists and authors, mostly to talk about Trump. And though Meyers has had conservative guests like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, in an audience QA a few hours after our interview, Meyers said it’s harder to book Republicans than he assumes it would be with “a conventional Republican president,” since he thinks they know he’ll try to make them answer for Trump.
It’s become an anti-Trump home base. Michelle Wolf, a former “Late Show” staff writer, will be with Meyers on Thursday for her first TV appearance since her White House Correspondents Dinner routine. And on the night of our interview with Meyers last Tuesday, Kathy Griffin made her first talk show appearance since the president and Secret Service went after her for a photo shoot last spring in which she held a prop of Donald Trump’s bloody, decapitated head. On “Late Night,” Griffin went on a full, free-association blast attacking Trump, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump (she called them “Date Rape and Eddie Munster”), but then confided to Meyers as she was walking off set that she was relieved not to be booed. “I know we talk about some serious stuff,” warm-up comedian Ryan Reiss said before the taping with Griffin, getting the crowd ready to cheer and laugh, “but it’s a comedy show.”
Meyers’ first up-close encounter with Trump was in 2004, when the future president hosted “Saturday Night Live” to promote “The Apprentice.” In one sketch, Meyers played Trump’s son on a public-access show called “Fathers and Sons.”
“He did not strike me as somebody who had ever even processed if something was funny or not,” Meyers said. “If the joke was about him being handsome or rich, he liked it. If the premise was based on his looks or his success, he would say, ‘Oh, I like that.’ But he wouldn’t laugh or smile.”
Meyers said his big insight into how Trump works happened thanks to a sketch that was puzzlingly scrubbed from the internet and is unavailable on “SNL” DVDs: “Donald Trump’s House of Wings,” which featured the businessman in a gold suit and tie promoting a new venture—a hot-wings bar in Englewood, New Jersey—and Meyers, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Kenan Thompson in chicken suits dancing around him.
“He always thought it was so stupid and every time we rehearsed it, he would talk about how dumb it was and how it wasn’t going to work. And then when we did it—and even if you watch it at air, the audience like loses their mind. They love it and he has this moment where the minute they like it, he likes it. He could immediately process that it was working, and then as it went on, he kept getting better and better. He would dance more,” Meyers said. “What I have seen at rallies when he was running for president and things were all of a sudden like bits that worked—like when ‘Build the wall’ or ‘Lock her up’ became catchphrases, I realized, ‘Oh, that’s the same brain that eventually was convinced that ‘Donald Trump’s House of Wings’ was a winner is the one that’s realizing ‘Lock her up’ is a winner.’ And the only thing is that the audience likes it.”
Meyers is also struck by how the Correspondents Dinner routine still seems to eat at Trump, who has continued his habit of periodically dinging the comedian on Twitter (“Seth Meyers was terrible co-hosting with Kelly. Marbles in his mouth- he must stop picking at his hands–insult to the great Regis Philbin!” Trump tweeted in 2012, and in 2014, “That Seth Meyers is hosting the Emmy Awards is a total joke. He is very awkward with almost no talent. Marbles in his mouth!”). The morning after this year’s dinner, he joined the grievance pile on by tweeting that Wolf “couldn’t even deliver her lines-much like the Seth Meyers weak performance.”
Meyers’ said that complaint “makes me feel good.”
“When he says, ‘There’s a weak case for collusion,’ I feel as though, ‘Oh, he doesn’t understand what weak means,’” Meyers said. “I just think it means he doesn’t like it. He wishes it would go away. And I am judgmental on my performances. There are things that I’ve done that I think, ‘Oh, that was flat.’ I don’t walk around thinking everything I did was great. But I look back on that night and I’m like, ‘Oh, anybody who thinks that’s weak has a misunderstanding.’”
Meyers fans will wait for hours to see him tape the show in a brick-lined studio around the corner from the “Saturday Night Live” space, and once they get in, use their chance to ask him anything during an audience QA to ask him if he likes cats, and what time he goes to bed at night.
One asked him his dream guest. “Vladimir Putin,” he said. He joked that he has just two questions for him, but declined to name them.
Another viewer asked Meyers about the Correspondents Dinner again, prompting a long response about how great a night it was and how another try couldn’t compare.
But as to if he’d ever host again, he answered quickly: “I would not.”