"Are there still negotiation possibilities?" asked Noam Chomsky. "There's only one way to find out. That's to try. If you refuse to try, of course, there's no option, no possibilities."

"Nobody voted for fracking, nobody voted to cut benefits, nobody voted to trash nature, nobody voted to scrap workers' rights," said one Greenpeace organizer.

"When I hear them say, 'Well, we're so comfortable here,' it's like, 'Great, now you can really help us get the rest of the world done,'" said WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward.

An Amazon Labor Union lawyer called the punishment of Staten Island employees "a violation of workers' rights to join in a collective action about the terms and conditions of their employment."

"This should have been a no-brainer," said the Washington Democrat.

"This is a very specific and narrow request by Trump the merits of which turn on a technical jurisdictional question, but which runs into fatal procedural obstacles long before that," said one analyst. "It's not laughable, but only because it's small."