DEMS/GOP/SPENDING/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Donald Trump is the first American president to live his whole life in a city, but the war on American cities in his presidency so far has put him and congressional Republicans on the wrong side of a ‘moral battle,’ said Steve Benjamin, the new president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Last week, Benjamin, who is in his third term as mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, took over the bipartisan group with a pledge of inclusion. But one day into his new job, he was out with a statement responding to the White House’s proposed $60 billion in cuts to the spring spending bill, including $15 billion in social safety-net spending, almost half of which targets the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The move, said Benjamin, would be ‘disastrous for cities from coast to coast.’ The proposed cuts are the latest split between the White House and the leaders of America’s cities. At stake: policies that shape the lives of the Americans—80 percent of the population—who live in urban metropolitan areas. The bipartisan group of mayors has taken on Trump over his proposed Obamacare repeal, the elimination of the state and local tax exemption, the crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, infrastructure proposals that seem to go nowhere in Washington and the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census—which many mayors fear will lead to an undercounting that will reduce the federal funding and representation their cities receive.”
-Edward-Isaac, Dovere, “‘I Don’t Know Exactly What the President Cares and Doesn’t Care About’,” Politico, May 15, 2018