President Trump nicknames Sen. Dick Durbin "Dicky Durbin" and accuses him of misrepresenting Trump's alleged "shithole countries" comments in the Oval Office earlier this week:
61% of Republicans are satisfied with the direction of the country, the highest level of satisfaction in a decade, according to a new Gallup poll released Monday.
Amid the backlash from Trump allies over the President’s reported “shithole” countries comments at an immigration meeting, Sen. Dick Durbin told reporters today that he “know what happened" and "stand behind every word that I said.” The Illinois Democrat also said reports saying White House officials are debating internally whether the President said 'shithole' or 'shithouse’ does not change "the impact” his racially-charged rhetoric had caused.
The backdrop: Durbin was at the bipartisan immigration meeting at the Oval Office last week, when Trump reportedly called Haiti and African nations 'shithole’ countries. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has also indicated that reports of Trump's remarks are true.
The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency says the operator who "selected the wrong menu option" has been "temporarily reassigned, but an AP dispatch from Honolulu says residents and tourists "remained rattled."
Why it matters: "The blunder that caused more than a million people in Hawaii to fear that they were about to be struck by a nuclear missile fed skepticism Sunday about the government's ability to keep them informed in a real emergency."
42% of employers will close in the United States in observance of Martin Luther King Day, making the holiday slightly more popular than February's Presidents Day, per Bloomberg. But there's a huge difference in who gets the day off: 72% of civil and nonprofit workers could sleep in this morning while just 16% of manufacturing workers could do the same.
Why it matters: MLK Day's jump over Presidents Day comes at a fraught political time for issues relating to race, given the violence surrounding last summer's white nationalist rally in Charlottesville and the Trump administration's attempts to clamp down on immigration.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, an important note from a N.Y. Times roundup yesterday examining the reaction from black churches to President Trump's policies and comments:
"In interviews at churches in Washington; Atlanta; Kansas City, Mo.; Miami; and Brockton, Mass., black Americans ... said they saw America slipping into an earlier, uglier version of itself."
Mitt Romney, presumed to be running for the Senate in Utah, criticized President Trump for his reported comments in the Oval Office last week. It's the first time since Sen. Orrin Hatch announced his retirement that Romney has demonstrated a willingness to take on Trump.
So far this year, President Trump has felt it necessary to declare publicly that he's "not a racist” and that he's "a very stable genius" — and it's Jan. 15.
This morning on "Fox & Friends," which gets the president's attention like no other news show, Brian Kilmeade had this advice for Trump on his heated immigration remarks: "If the president wants to get ahead of this, to get momentum, he should make it clear: He's commenting on the countries, not the people in those countries. I would love for the president to go out and clarify the remarks."
