Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Can coal make a comeback under Trump?

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order rolling back Obama-era rules aimed at curbing climate change.

The president said this would put an end to the "war on coal" and "job-killing regulations".

The Energy Independence Executive Order suspends more than half a dozen measures enacted by his predecessor, and boosts fossil fuels.

Business groups have praised the Trump administration's move but environmental campaigners have condemned it.

Outside the White House, a few hundred protesters gathered to vent their displeasure at the executive order.

Inside, the president was flanked by coal miners as he signed the order, saying: "My administration is putting an end to the war on coal.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption US President Trump said he would cancel "job-killing regulations"

"With today's executive action I am taking historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations."

During the campaign, he vowed to pull the US out of the Paris climate deal agreed in December 2015.

What is Mr Trump's order changing?

President Trump takes a very different approach to the environment from Mr Obama. The former president argued that climate change was "real and cannot be ignored".

Among the initiatives now rescinded is the Clean Power Plan, which required states to slash carbon emissions, to meet US commitments under the Paris accord.

Image copyright AFP Image caption Mr Trump says that the US will no longer wage war on coal

The regulation has been unpopular in Republican-run states, where it has been subject to legal challenges - especially from businesses that rely on burning oil, coal and gas.

Last year the Supreme Court temporarily halted the plan, while the challenges are heard.

The Trump administration says that scrapping the plan will put people to work and reduce America's reliance on imported fuel.

It says the president will be "moving forward on energy production in the US".

"The previous administration devalued workers with their policies. We can protect the environment while providing people with work."

During the president's maiden visit to the Environmental Protection Agency, he signed the Energy Independence Executive Order, which cuts EPA regulations in order to support Mr Trump's plan of cutting the agency's budget by a third.

He recently appointed climate change sceptic Scott Pruitt as its new head.

Trump's 'control-alt-delete' on climate change policy

Trump: The best thing ever for climate change?

What will the impact be?

Matt McGrath, BBC environment correspondent

This order signed by President Trump is both a practical and a philosophical attempt to change the US narrative on climate change.

His supporters say it will create thousands of jobs in the liberated oil and gas industries. His opponents agree the new order will be a job creator - but they'll be jobs for lawyers, not in the coal fields.

Front and centre is practical action on the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Obama project to cut fossil fuels from energy production. Although it has long been tied up in the courts, the new administration will leave it to fester there while they come up with a much weaker replacement.

There will also be new, less restrictive rules on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry and more freedom to sell coal leases from federal lands.

President Trump is signalling a significant change in the widely held philosophy that CO2 is the enemy, the main driver of climate change.

US environmentalists are aghast but also enraged. They will be queuing up to go to court. But in many ways that's playing into the hands of President Trump and the fossil fuel lobby.

"Delay is what they want," one green source told me, "delay is winning."

Read Matt's piece in full

Will the US honour its commitments under the Paris climate deal?

While campaigning for the presidency, Mr Trump argued that the agreement was unfair to the US.

The landmark agreement commits governments to moving their economies away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions to try to contain global temperature rise.

Mr Trump has in the past said climate change had been "created by and for the Chinese".

Image copyright AP Image caption Reducing emissions from coal-fired power plants was a key part of America's commitment in the Paris climate deal

But at the end of last year, he acknowledged that there was "some connectivity" between human activity and climate change.

It is now unclear where exactly the US stands in relation to the deal.

Whatever the US chooses, the EU, India and China say they will stick to their pledges made in Paris.

What has been the reaction?

The president's order will be resisted by environmentalists, who have promised to challenge it in the courts.

Image copyright AP Image caption Campaigning groups are scathing of the president's environment policies

"These actions are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American," billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer was quoted by Reuters as saying.

"I think it is a climate destruction plan in place of a climate action plan," the Natural Resources Defense Council's David Doniger told the BBC, adding that they will fight the president in court.

Another green group, Earthjustice, said it would challenge the measure in and out of court.

"This order ignores the law and scientific reality," its President Trip Van Noppen said.

World v Trump on global climate deal?

Trump team moving away from supporters on climate science

Does Trump believe in climate change?

Tara McKelvey, BBC White House reporter

Yes - at least according to a senior aide.

When asked whether the president believes in man-made climate change, the aide said "sure", adopting a matter-of-fact tone.

This marks a shift. In 2015 the president said that climate change was a "hoax".

By November 2016, the president had softened his position on the matter, saying he saw "some connectivity" between man and climate change.

Now the president has gone further - at least, according to his aide.

The president, a one-time climate-change denier, now believes, that climate change is real - and that humans are behind it.</s>President Donald Trump gave up on health care legislation last week when it became clear the bill he backed could not make it through the House of Representatives his party controls.

Trump surely understands that he suffered a serious setback and is in politically perilous waters. His reaction shouldn’t be surprising, but it is dangerous: Trump is blaming others for his own failure and threatening to let ObamaCare “explode” in order to create a political opportunity for himself.

Let’s remember that health care makes up one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Trump has no problem with blowing it up if it could work to his political benefit — the millions of jobs and lives that could be affected apparently don’t concern him.

This is not an isolated incident. Trump and top adviser Steve Bannon have made clear that they see damage and upheaval in the United States as politically useful. Bannon reportedly declared that “I’m a Leninist” because “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

That statement is astonishing on its own, but it has been borne out by the administration’s actions so far. Trump and Bannon are clearly willing to undermine America’s strengths in order to advance their political agenda. Consider: Their xenophobic policies are harming tourism to the United States as well as foreign applications to U.S. colleges and universities. That means money taken out of the U.S. economy, which makes all of us less financially secure.

Furthermore, the Trump administration’s isolationist policies weaken NATO and undermine longstanding relationships with close U.S. allies. This makes Americans (and our allies) less geopolitically secure.

There is nothing conservative about any of this. Rather, such policies are dangerously radical. It is unprecedented for a presidential administration to give away American assets and, indeed, to actively undermine national and global stability, in the hopes of gaining political ground.

What does this mean for the U.S. as a country, and what can concerned Americans do?

It’s clear what this means for the United States: uncertainty; threats to financial markets, a less-stable world. For individual Americans, it means anxiety. As one observer put it after Trump said that ObamaCare could destruct, to his political benefit: “They’re setting it up to fail, which is irresponsible and unforgiveable.”

Trump and Bannon may thrive on chaos and uncertainty and even cultivate it. This is deeply irresponsible. But what can anyone do?

As last week’s derailment of Trump’s health care bill showed, the U.S. is still a constitutional democracy — as long as Congress is willing to stand up to Trump’s bullying.

Just as Republicans in Congress stopped Trump’s health care legislation last week, they can stand against his efforts to spread uncertainty and confusion. They can insist on economic policies that strengthen the United States rather than give away hard-earned assets. They can make clear that the U.S. will honor its treaty obligations and stand with European allies against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism. Lawmakers can work to fix existing problems with the Affordable Care Act rather than actively seeking ways to make it collapse.

Trump has made clear that he’d like everyone to rely on him — “I alone can fix it,” he has said — even when the problems are of his own making.

It is a conventional authoritarian tactic to create a crisis that provides a leader with the opportunity to consolidate power. Trump appears to be adhering to such a strategy — and all of us consequently are at risk. We have the tools to stop this — by speaking up, contacting our elected representatives, and insisting on sanity instead of disorder.

Chris Edelson is an assistant professor of government in American University’s School of Public Affairs. His latest book, Power Without Constraint: The Post 9/11 Presidency and National Security , was published in 2016 by the University of Wisconsin Press.</s>It’s been a little over two months since Donald Trump became commander-in-chief. But for the president’s detractors, it’s felt like centuries — long medieval centuries chock-full of plague, illiteracy, and barbarians running roughshod through the ruins of the old republic. But we aren’t actually living in the dark ages (yet). So we might as well shed some light on what the barbarians have been up to.

Trump has given progressives so many causes for fear and outrage, it can be difficult — both practically and psychologically — to keep on top of them all as they happen.

To help you stay informed despite this challenge, Daily Intelligencer will provide regular inventories of Trump’s assaults on civic norms, common decency, and/or liberal democracy. Here is a rundown of everything the president has done on that front in the period between February 28 (the date of our last edition of “Terrifying Things”) and March 28, arranged in rough order of each affront’s apparent significance and severity. Prior editions can be found below.



Baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping his phones.

On the first Saturday of this month, President Trump announced that Barack Obama had personally wiretapped his phones during the final month of the 2016 campaign.

The president later revealed that this extraordinary allegation was based entirely on publicly available news reports — none of which actually supported the substance of his claim. Asked by Tucker Carlson how he came to discover that his predecessor had spied on him, Trump cited a New York Times article that did have the words “wiretapped data” in its headline. But the story was about intelligence agencies monitoring Russian officials — and how, through that regular surveillance, they may have discovered contacts between those officials and Trump associates.

The article says nothing about Trump Tower being surveilled, let alone about Obama wiretapping Donald Trump himself.

Despite Trump’s tacit admission that his claim was baseless, he continued to insist on its accuracy — even after his allegation was rebuked by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Bill O’Reilly, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the FBI.



It is unprecedented in modern times for a president to publicly accuse his predecessor of seeking to illegally undermine the democratic process — let alone to do so on the basis of nothing but a paranoid hunch. 



Allowed his White House to defame the intelligence agency of a core U.S. ally, for the sake of defending the infallibility of his tweets.

Eventually, the president’s inability to admit he was wrong on the internet sparked a diplomatic spat with the United Kingdom. The crisis seems to have been generated by a glaring contradiction facing Trump’s defenders: On the one hand, the president claimed that his “wiretap” allegation shouldn’t be taken literally, and that news reports about the Obama administration legally investigating his campaign’s Russia ties should be taken as proof that he was right. On the other hand, the White House had previously denied the existence of such an investigation — and suggested that reports to the contrary were “fake news.”



In other words: The Trump administration didn’t want to admit that the president made a bad tweet. But it also didn’t want to admit that American intelligence agencies had found cause to investigate ties between the president and Russia.

And then, a Fox News host’s conspiracy theory provided Sean Spicer with a way to square the circle.

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command,” the White House press secretary told reporters, quoting, verbatim, from the commentary of Judge Andrew Napolitano, a conservative pundit who has claimed that the government concealed what really happened on 9/11. “He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice. He used GCHQ. What is that? It’s the initials for the British intelligence-finding agency.”

Apparently, Spicer was so taken by how elegantly this reconciled the president’s contradictory claims, it didn’t occur to him that accusing a core ally’s intelligence service of participating in the illegal surveillance of an American presidential candidate might not sit well with said ally.

“Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” GCHQ said in a rare public statement. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

The White House then promised the British government that it would not accuse GCHQ of wiretapping Donald Trump ever again, according to U.K. prime minister Theresa May’s official spokesman.

Later, Trump defended the propriety of his press secretary’s slander of our ally.

“We said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television,” the president told reporters. “That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox, so you shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.”

To be clear: The president of the United States argued that it’s perfectly appropriate for the White House to spread conspiracy theories that implicate close allies — so long as a 9/11 truther on Fox News spread them first.

Suggested that being wiretapped by Barack Obama was the one thing he and the prime minister of Germany had in common.

At a press conference with Angela Merkel, a German reporter asked Trump whether “it was a mistake to blame British intelligence” for wiretapping him. Instead of conceding this point, the president decided to remind the world of a recent diplomatic crisis between the United States and Germany.

“As far as wiretapping, I guess, by this past administration, at least we have something in common, perhaps,” Trump said, gesturing to Merkel.

Documents released by WikiLeaks in 2015 suggested that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) had tapped phone calls by the German chancellor and her closest advisers for years.

Gave his daughter an office in the White House and a security clearance — while keeping her immune from conflict-of-interest laws.

Last month, the president used his bully pulpit to upbraid a private company for dropping his daughter’s fashion line. Now, he’s giving that daughter an office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and access to classified national-security information. 



Ivanka Trump will, effectively, be a full-time White House staffer. However, she will not receive a salary or formal title, and, thus, won’t be bound by federal conflict-of-interest laws.

Ivanka claims that she will honor those rules anyway. But as Obama’s former ethics czar Norm Eisen told Politico, “if she can voluntarily subject herself to the rules, she can voluntarily un-subject herself to the rules.”

Allowed his budget director to argue that cutting funding to Meals on Wheels is “probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

President Trump’s proposed budget would increase defense spending by $54 billion — while slashing funding for medical research, climate science, public housing, education, aid to the indigent, development grants for poor and rural areas, infrastructure, and many, many other things.

Shortly after the proposal went public, the White House’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, explained that these changes were inspired by one simple question: “Can we ask the taxpayer to pay for this?” Mulvaney then explained that, while he could ask a “coal miner in West Virginia” or a “single mother in Detroit” to pay for an increase in defense spending, he couldn’t justify taking their money to finance public broadcasting.



At a White House press briefing hours later, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked Mulvaney to address some of the tensions in this rationale.

“Just to follow up on that, you were talking about the steelworker in Ohio, coal worker in Pennsylvania, but they may have an elderly mother who depends on the Meals on Wheels program or who may have kids in Head Start,” Acosta said. “Yesterday, or the day before, you described this as a hard-power budget. Is it also a hardhearted budget?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Mulvaney replied. “I think it’s probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

“To cut programs that help the elderly and kids?” Acosta asked, incredulously.

“You’re only focusing on half of the equation, right? You’re focusing on the recipients of the money. We’re trying to focus on both the recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place,” Mulvaney explained. “And I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them and say, ‘Look, we’re not gonna ask you for your hard-earned money, anymore, single mother of two in Detroit … unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually being used in a proper function.”

Mulvaney went on to explain that the key distinction between the Defense Department and the anti-poverty programs that Trump wishes to cut is that the latter have failed to show “results.”

But for many a “single mother in Detroit,” funding for rental assistance, home energy aid, and food assistance deliver such “results” as keeping her family out of homelessness, her home warm in the winter, and her child well nourished. For many a resident of coal country, the Appalachian Regional Commission has provided desperately needed job training.



Here is how Trump described the return on investment that the Pentagon has provided the American people, back when he was running for president.

Demanded the passage of a health-care bill that he, himself, admitted would hurt his own supporters.

While campaigning for the presidency, Donald Trump promised to pass a new health-care law that would cover everyone; leave Medicaid’s funding untouched; and provide relief to the “forgotten men and women” of middle America.

Shortly after taking the oath of office, Trump threw his support behind a bill that would have thrown 24 million Americans off their health insurance; cut funding for Medicaid by $880 billion; and drastically increase the cost of health care for older, low-income people in deep-red rural counties.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson confronted Trump with that last finding.

“A Bloomberg analysis showed that counties that voted for you — middle-class and working-class counties — would do far less well under this bill than the counties that voted for Hillary, the more affluent counties,” Carlson said.

“Oh, I know,” Trump replied. “But this is going to be negotiated.”

But in negotiations with House Republicans, Trump did not push for any changes that would have significantly ameliorated the negative effects he acknowledged. Instead, the president offered to make the bill even more draconian, so as to appease the tea-party hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus.

What’s more, Trump expressed utter indifference about the substance of the bill in those negotiations, arguing that what really mattered was that passing something would improve his chances for reelection, according to Politico:

Surely, Trump isn’t the first president to ever champion a substantively flawed proposal for purely political reasons. But the scale of his nihilism is breathtaking. By all accounts, the president knew virtually nothing about the substance of his health-care law — beyond the fact that it would violate some of his core campaign promises, while hurting millions of people — and he demanded that lawmakers pass it, as an act of personal loyalty to him, anyway.

Trump is governing the world’s most powerful country with a skeleton crew. The president’s dysfunctional transition left him without a pool of nominees-in-waiting when he took the oath of office. Since then, Trump’s incompetence — combined with his aversion to hiring any Establishment Republican who opposed his campaign — has allowed nearly 2,000 Executive branch positions to collect dust.

As of mid-March, Trump had not nominated anyone for more than 500 top-tier administrative posts, making his transition “the slowest in decades,” according to the New York Times.

Back in February, Trump tried to sell this dereliction of duty as an innovative act of cost cutting.

“A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have,” Trump told Fox News. “I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs.”

But the president has drafted no formal plan for cutting the vacant senior positions, and White House spokesperson Lindsay E. Walters told the Times earlier this month that Trump intended to fill them, eventually.

For now, the executive offices at the State Department remain “virtually empty.” And the high-ranking civil servants who are in place have been largely ignored. As Julia Ioffe reported for The Atlantic:

The White House lent credence to this claim on Monday, when it announced that — in addition to being the administration’s point man on trade deals, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and broader Middle East policy — the president’s son-in-law will lead a new government office with “sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and fulfill key campaign promises ― such as reforming care for veterans and fighting opioid addiction.”

Signed an Energy Independence Executive Order that will not make America more energy independent — but will likely prevent America from honoring its international commitments to reduce carbon emissions.



On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that began the process of reversing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have required states to reduce their carbon emissions by decreasing their reliance on dirty energy sources, like coal. Trump’s order also rescinds a temporary ban on new coal leases on federal land.

The official goal of the law is to decrease America’s dependence on foreign energy, while reviving the long-suffering coal industry.

But there is no rational basis for believing the measure will do either of those things. The United States does not import coal. Reducing regulations on carbon emissions will not allow America to replace foreign energy sources with domestic ones, but rather to prioritize dirty domestic energy sources over clean ones.

This shift would do nothing to bolster Americans’ employment prospects. At present, solar companies employ twice as many Americans as the coal industry does. What’s more, Trump’s executive order won’t even have a significant impact on the economic fortunes of coal miners, themselves.

While the new order will keep older coal plants open for a few years longer, “the mines that are staying open are using more mechanization … they’re not hiring people,” energy economist Robert W. Godby told the New York Times.

“So even if we saw an increase in coal production, we could see a decrease in coal jobs,” Godby told the paper.

Thus, the cost-benefit analysis on Trump’s executive order is effectively this: On the plus side, coal magnates will enjoy a few more years of profits before natural gas, wind, and solar make their industry fully obsolescent. On the downside, it may very well accelerate the onset of an ecological catastrophe that threatens to drown major American cities next century.

























(February 11 through February 28)

Declared the mainstream media the “enemy of the American people.”

Trump and his administration have been waging a war on objective reality — and those tasked with describing it — from the moment he was sworn in. In his first appearance as White House press secretary, Sean Spicer demanded that reporters believe the president’s estimate of the size of his inaugural crowd over their own lying eyes.

Trump’s tumultuous (and not terribly productive) first month only widened the chasm between the president’s grandiose self-conception and what he sees reflected back at him in the mirror of the mainstream press. And this gap has produced evermore extreme attempts to nullify the Fourth Estate.

In late January, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon branded the mainstream media “the opposition party,” and suggested that it “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

Bannon’s remarks were widely described seen as outrageous; at a subsequent White House press briefing, Spicer distanced the administration from Bannon’s sentiments, saying, “The press plays a very healthy role in democracy, no question about it.”

But last week, the president decried the media in terms far more inflammatory than even the former Breitbart mastermind had mustered.

Trump did not have second thoughts about describing several of America’s leading journalistic institutions as enemies of its people. Nor did he subsequently evince concern for whether his rhetoric would inspire some “Second Amendment people” to defend the American people against its “enemies” through extralegal means.

Instead, he reiterated his charge one week later, at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. And they are. They are the enemy of the people,” Trump said. “Because they have no sources, they just make ’em up when there are none … I’m against the people that make up stories and make up sources.”

Previously, the president had criticized the press for printing “illegal leaks” from anonymous government officials and suggested that those officials have often shared false information. But he’d never before claimed that major newspapers were fabricating sources out of whole cloth and presenting works of fictions as reportage.

Still, Trump insisted that he had no problem with the real media.

“I’m not against the media. I’m not against the press,” Trump said. “I am only against the fake-news media or press.”

He then lambasted the “fake news” media for failing to appreciate this nuance. “Fake,” the president said. “Fake. They have to leave that word.”

On Friday afternoon, the White House appeared to put the president’s distinction into practice: When reporters from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, CNN, and other major mainstream outlets showed up for a scheduled, off-camera briefing from Sean Spicer, they were denied entry to the White House press secretary’s office.

Breitbart News, the Washington Times, and One America News Network were waved in. Spicer also welcomed some mainstream outlets, including erstwhile “enemies of the people” ABC and CBS. Reporters from Time magazine and the Associated Press were allowed in, but chose to boycott the briefing in protest of the other outlets’ exclusion.

“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”

Held a nuclear strategy session in the public dining room of his Florida resort.

Instead of hosting the Japanese prime minister at the White House, Trump opted to fly Shinzo Abe down to the private resort he owns in Palm Beach, Florida. This choice of venue cost American taxpayers millions in additional travel-and-security expenses. But it also allowed the president to directly profit off the diplomatic meeting, while increasing the perks of being a member of his club. Now, Mar-a-Lago members don’t merely have access to golf, a private beach, and a network of fellow plutocrats — they also get seats in the president’s open-air Situation Room. Per CNN:



The White House later claimed that Trump and Abe did not engage in detailed security discussions in Mar-a-Lago’s dining room. But Trump indisputably took a break from discussing the nuclear crisis to reward one of his longtime members with a wedding-night visit from himself and the leader of Japan.

Trump also allowed one of his guests to post a picture to Facebook of the man tasked with carrying America’s “nuclear football.”

Trump’s weekend visits to Mar-a-Lago cost American taxpayers more than $10 million in his first month in office, according to the Washington Post.

Allowed one of his senior advisers to complain about CNN’s political coverage to the network’s parent company — which has a proposed merger pending before the government.

The fact that the American president has displayed a fondness for authoritarianism — and an indifference to ethical norms — is concerning for a whole host of reasons. One is that these qualities raise the possibility that Trump might use the powers of his office to coerce private industry into doing his administration’s bidding. Shortly after the mogul’s victory, Vox’s Matt Yglesias treated this subject at length in an essay titled, “We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions.”

In that piece, Yglesias argues that America has long been prey to venal corruption, which consists of rich people buying favors through campaign contributions. The U.S. is not, however, a systematically corrupt nation — one in which “political favor becomes the primary driver of economic success.”

To explain how Trump might begin systemically corrupting American institutions, Yglesias writes the following:

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that senior White House adviser (and Trump son-in-law) Jared Kushner “complained to Gary Ginsberg, executive vice president of corporate marketing and communications at CNN’s parent Time Warner, about what Mr. Kushner feels is unfair coverage slanted against the president.”

Allowed his administration to ask the FBI to leak favorable information, in violation of rules protecting the Justice Department’s independence.

Earlier this month, anonymous U.S. officials told the New York Times that Trump campaign aides contacted Russian intelligence operatives, multiple times, during the 2016 race.

The day after the Times reported on the Trump campaign’s Russia contacts, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had a conversation. Which one of these men brought up the Times story is unclear — according to the White House, McCabe told Priebus that the paper’s report was overblown. However the subject came up, Priebus eventually asked McCabe to tell the press that the Times story was baloney — or, at least, have that information leaked, anonymously.

Even if the White House’s story is true — and the Times’ story is false — this request was problematic for at least two reasons. For one, Justice Department rules forbid the White House from discussing the details of ongoing investigations with the FBI — let alone investigations into the president himself — unless those details are “vital” to the president’s duties. For another, the FBI is not supposed to publicly comment on ongoing investigations.

Hours after his administration admitted that it had asked the FBI to leak classified information, the president condemned the FBI for leaking information.

Declined to publicly condemn the shooting of two India-born engineers by a man who (allegedly) said “get out of my country,” as he fired.

Declared himself the “least racist person” — then asked a black reporter to set up a meeting for him with her friends in the Congressional Black Caucus.

Minutes after declaring himself the least racist person in existence, Trump took a question from American Urban Radio Networks’ D.C. bureau chief, April Ryan.

Ryan asked if Trump planned to seek the advice of “the CBC” when crafting his urban agenda. The president was confused. Ryan explained that she was referring to the Congressional Black Caucus.

“Do you want to set up the meeting? Are they friends of yours?” Trump asked the African-American journalist.

“Set up a meeting,” the president interrupted. “I would love to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus.”

Trump also informed a Jewish reporter that he was the “least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” before explaining that a lot of supposed acts of anti-Jewish intimidation are really just false-flag attacks designed to make Donald Trump look bad. 





*An earlier version of this list included the president’s failure to condemn the shooting of two India-born engineers in Kansas by a man who (reportedly) shouted, “get out of my country,” as he fired. But, after more than a week of silence, the White House did release a formal statement condemning the shooting on Tuesday.





“Week” 8 (February 4 through February 10)



Declared the “court system” a threat to national security.

Donald Trump spent much of his presidential campaign promising to use executive power to discriminate against Muslims. Upon election, he promptly banned immigration from several Muslim-majority nations, via an executive order that was Breitbart-tested but not cabinet-agency-approved.

This led to chaos at airports, on-the-fly revisions to the government’s interpretation of its own order, and a bevy of legal rebukes.

Last week, judges in New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and California stayed the order — or aspects of it — on a variety of legal grounds. Then, on Friday night, U.S. District Judge James Robart delivered the body blow.

Unlike other plaintiffs, the state of Washington did not challenge discrete provisions of the executive order, or merely the process by which it was implemented. Rather, the state argued that the order was in fundamental tensions with both federal law and the Constitution. Robart ruled that Washington’s argument was likely to succeed on the merits — and ordered a halt to nationwide enforcement of the travel ban.

The president responded by suggesting that Robart might not actually be a judge.

Then, he framed the existence of judicial review as a sign of national decline.

Still, superficially, Trump’s complaint was with an individual judge, not the Judicial branch, itself. But then the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the White House’s request for an emergency stay of Robart’s decision — and the president made his contempt for the rule of law explicit.

This was not merely an intemperate tweet. It was the president instructing the American people to view the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil as an indictment of the judiciary. And it isn’t just Trump himself who’s pushing this line. In its legal challenge to Robart’s ruling, the White House argued that the federal judge was in no position to rule on the propriety of the executive order, because he lacks access to classified intelligence.

This is an argument for allowing our fear of terrorism to overwhelm our commitment to the rule of law — a line of reasoning that poses a far greater threat to the American form of government and way of life than any closeted-jihadist refugee ever could.

Insisted that his Supreme Court pick had no problem with attacks on the judiciary, in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary.

Trump’s Supreme Court nominee had little choice but to condemn the president’s attacks on his branch of government. In private meetings with senators ahead of his confirmation hearings, Neil Gorsuch described Trump’s remarks “demoralizing” and “disheartening.”

But the president found it hard to believe that his Supreme Court pick would object to attacks on “the court system.” And so — even though White House adviser Ron Bonjean had confirmed that Gorsuch had criticized Trump’s comments in his meeting with Richard Blumenthal — the president accused the Democratic senator of lying.

The president’s case here was airtight: Richard Blumenthal once apologized for saying that he had served “in Vietnam,” when, in fact, the senator had merely served as a Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam War, but was never sent overseas. (By contrast, the president spent his Vietnam fearlessly weathering round after round of unprotected sex.) Therefore, both Blumenthal and Bonjean are lying.

Trump proceeded to chastise CNN’s Chris Cuomo for refusing to ask Blumenthal about his Vietnam record during a Thursday-morning interview … even though Cuomo asked Blumenthal about his (utterly irrelevant) Vietnam record during that Thursday-morning interview.

There seems to be no lie too obvious — nor attack too hypocritical — for the president to deploy as a means of evading responsibility for his mistakes.

Trashed New START during a call with Putin — after putting the phone aside to ask his advisers what that (nuclear-arms treaty) was.

“I was a good student. I understand things,” President Trump assured America on Wednesday. “I comprehend very well, okay? Better than, I think, almost anybody.”

But many within the White House beg to differ. In leak after leak, anonymous administration officials paint the president as less teacher’s pet than class clown — one who refuses to do his homework, demands the Cliffs Notes for every reading assignment, and struggles to comprehend the most basic aspects of the curriculum.

The latest SOS from the West Wing was intercepted by Reuters:

New START is pretty fundamental to U.S.-Russian relations. At his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed his support for the agreement. Trump, himself, was aware of the treaty’s significance — if not of its proper name — last year, when he complained that Russia outsmarted Obama on “START Up.”

To avoid such lapses in memory, presidents typically request an in-depth briefing from the National Security Council before dialing up world leaders. But, according to Reuters’ sources, Trump received no such briefing before hopping on the horn with Putin. (Considering that Trump has often bragged about being too smart to read long things, it seems safe to take Reuters’ word on this one.)

The source of Trump’s antipathy for New START is unclear. On the one hand, the president has expressed enthusiasm for a new arms race. On the other, he has called nuclear weapons the “single greatest threat we face” — and has a habit of disparaging any deal that he did not, himself, negotiate.

Which is to say: The best-case scenario here is that our president would like there to be fewer nuclear arms in the world — but is willing to jeopardize that objective if it means honoring an agreement Obama negotiated.

Trump long ago concluded that it would be unreasonable for the American people to expect him to divest from his business interests, just because they elected him president. To forfeit the empire he spent his whole life building was simply too great a sacrifice. While he would cease managing the Trump Organization, he would, nonetheless, retain majority ownership of its assets.

Most Americans sympathized with this position.

Then, Trump decided that having someone outside his family run the organization in his stead — so as to put meaningful distance between himself and its management — was also too great a burden for him to bear.

Trump proceeded to reason that he couldn’t fairly be expected to not invite the children running his business to policy meetings with tech entrepreneurs; or to not meet with his business partners while president-elect; or to ensure that his D.C. hotel did not court the patronage of foreign diplomats (in arguable defiance of the Constitution).

And, then, on Thursday, the president decided that we also can’t expect him not to attack private companies that refuse to maintain a relationship with his daughter’s poorly performing brand.

Suggested that publicly criticizing his military decisions is tantamount to aiding “the enemy.”

Last week, President Trump sent a team of Navy SEALs to raid a compound in Yemen — with the aim of capturing or killing the head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Qassim al-Rimi.

When the raid was over, al-Rimi was still alive, and on the lam — while one SEAL, 14 (alleged) Al Qaeda fighters, an 8-year-old American citizen, and an unconfirmed number of other civilians lay dead.

The SEALs did manage to collect some phones and computers, though the value of the information contained therein is not publicly known. Meanwhile, in light of the raid’s many civilian casualties, the Yemeni government is starting to rethink its support for U.S. ground operations on its soil.

Surveying these results, Arizona senator and prominent war enthusiast John McCain dubbed the mission a “failure.”

On Thursday, Trump suggested that McCain’s comment was harmful to national security — and also the kind of thing that a loser would say.

Got angry at his press secretary for being impersonated by a woman.

















“Week” 7 (January 27 through February 3)

Used the executive branch’s immense authority over border control to inflict arbitrary cruelty on thousands of Muslim immigrants, create chaos at airports all across America, and sour diplomatic relations with the rest of the world.

Many of the actions catalogued in this post serve as testaments to our new president’s incompetence; others, to his mindless bigotry. Late last Friday, Trump signed his name to a document that affirmed both of his signature qualities — and upended the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people.

That executive order — as of Friday evening temporarily blocked by a Seattle judge — suspended the admission of all refugees to the United States for 120 days; suspended the admission of Syrian refugees indefinitely; prioritized the refugee claims of non-Muslims in the Middle East; and banned citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.

These measures were advertised as means of protecting national security. But there is little evidence that they will do any such thing. America already has one of the world’s most rigorous systems for vetting refugees, and the deadliest terror attacks on U.S. soil in recent years were executed by our own disaffected citizens.

Even if one believes that protecting homeland security requires barring travelers from the Muslim world, there is no coherent argument for why visitors from Saudi Arabia should be allowed, while those from Iran should not. In fact, no foreign national from any of the seven blacklisted countries has committed a fatal terrorist attack in the United States since 1975.

As an effort to prevent terrorism, Trump’s executive order is incoherent, and likely counterproductive. The order’s broad, overt denigration of the Muslim world aids every jihadist who wishes to tie his heinous cause to a broader war between Islam and the West. But jihadists aren’t the only ones who long for such a “clash of civilizations” — some of the most powerful people in the Trump White House believe Judeo-Christian civilization really is at war with Islam.

Many of those same people see Muslim immigrants as threats to national security, whether they’re terrorists or not. The two main authors of last week’s order — Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — have explicitly argued that such immigrants are a threat simply because their religion will prevent them from assimilating into our society. Once you stipulate this view, the order becomes more coherent: The goal is not to stop terrorism but to halt the dilution of the white Christian population in the United States. It’s about protecting “ethno-national” security.

Nearly 60,000 immigrants had their visas revoked to satisfy Bannon’s Islamophobic paranoia. Countless refugees were stranded. But the costs of Trump’s order don’t merely fall on non–U.S. citizens. America relies on many of the countries Trump blacklisted to provide doctors for our understaffed hospitals. Now, some medical groups are preparing for a shortage of physicians in our nation’s underserved rural areas. The order has also disrupted the smooth functioning of American universities and tech companies that rely on immigrant labor.

Finally, even if one shares Bannon’s worldview — and believes all this is a small price to pay for saving America from the Muslim hordes — the implementation of the order revealed the new administration’s profound incompetence. The White House sought little input from legal counsel, Congress, and relevant cabinet agencies. It provided Customs and Border Protection with little notice of its plans. This led to chaos in airports all around the United States as visa-holders arrived to find their legal status had been terminated while they were midair. And the vagueness of the order’s wording produced confusion about who was and was not impacted by the rules. At the beginning of the weekend, the order applied to legal permanent residents and dual citizens of the blacklisted countries; by Monday it did not.

The sloppiness of the order did have its own silver lining: It exposed many of the Trump administration’s directives to effective legal challenge. Days after the order went into effect, judges in Massachusetts and California had issued injunctions, restraining the order’s enforcement.

But the rule of law does not seem to matter very much to the “law and order” president. As Slate’s Jeremy Stahl wrote Thursday:

Here’s what Stahl means by “Kafkaesque” and “legal chicanery”: The judges in Boston ordered the government to cease detaining or removing individuals with “valid immigrant and non-immigrant visas.” But the Trump administration claims that it had already revoked the visas of all nationals from the blacklisted countries, prior to the order — a fact that was not publicly confirmed until Friday.

And so, Customs and Border Protection agents have carried on following their orders.

Created a diplomatic crisis with Australia — and threatened to invade Mexico.

Australia is the kind of friend that takes your side even when you’re wrong. In geopolitical terms, this means that when the United States asked for some help with our quagmire in Afghanistan, Australia sacrificed 42 of its young people to our cause.

So, when Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull reminded President Trump of America’s commitment to take in 1,250 refugees currently residing in an Australian detention center, he had little reason to believe that he’d be met with a torrent of verbal abuse.

But he was.

“This is the worst deal ever,” the president said during the Saturday call, according to the Washington Post. Trump proceeded to inform our dear ally “that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day — including Russian President Vladi­mir Putin — and that ‘this was the worst call by far.’”

When Turnbull tried to direct the conversation to less contentious subjects, Trump abruptly ended the call — 35 minutes before it was scheduled to expire.

Later in the week, Trump tried to patch things up with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto … and kind of, sort of, threatened to invade our southern neighbor.

“You have a bunch of bad hombres down there,” Trump told Peña Nieto, according to the excerpt obtained by the Associated Press. “You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

Mexican officials later characterized this as a friendly offer, rather than a military threat.

Nonetheless, neither of these phone calls increases one’s confidence in the diplomatic chops of our commander-in-chief.

Allowed his press secretary to falsely claim that Iran had committed an act of war against the United States.

The Trump administration spent much of the past week rattling sabers at Iran. Not all of this belligerence was unprovoked — Iran did test an intercontinental ballistic missile Sunday, in (arguably) a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

But one thing Iran definitely did not do was “take action against” an American Navy vessel. But that didn’t stop White House press secretary Sean Spicer from saying that it had.

“I think General Flynn was really clear yesterday that Iran has violated the Joint Resolution, that Iran’s additional hostile actions that it took against our Navy vessel are ones that we are very clear [we] are not going to sit by and take,” Spicer said Thursday, intimating that Iran had committed an act of war against the United States.

In truth, a Saudi Arabian warship was attacked by fighters that the Pentagon suspects were Houthi rebels — a Shia militant group in Yemen that the Saudis have been slaughtering for over a year. Iran does back the Houthis, but the latter isn’t really the puppet of the former — the Houthis are less concerned with expanding Tehran’s sphere of influence than winning their nation’s civil war.

And yet, the White House eagerly painted a (suspected) Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia as a (confirmed) Iranian attack on America. Which makes you wonder whether or not the Trump administration will do everything in its power to avoid launching another Middle Eastern war.

Retained the author of a reactionary screed that likened the 2016 election to Flight 93 as a national-security staffer.

Michael Anton is a former Bush administration speechwriter and current national-security official in the Trump administration. This week, we learned that he is also the author of an essay titled “The Flight 93 Election.” In it, Anton argued that the 2016 election put conservatives in a position akin to passengers of Flight 93 on 9/11: They could either “charge the cockpit” or “die.”

“If you don’t try, death is certain,” Anton wrote. “To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.”

Anton’s reasoning was simple: “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

Thus, absent an immediate restriction of “Third World” immigration, America, as conservatives knew it, would end.

This is not merely an argument against Hillary Clinton, but an argument for authoritarianism. If a Democratic victory in 2016 could have brought national ruination, surely the same would be true in 2020. Which is to say: One of the president’s senior national-security staffers is an opponent of American democracy.

Suggested that Frederick Douglass is still alive in speech on Black History Month.

At his speech honoring African-Americans’ historical contributions to our republic, the president said this about Martin Luther King Jr.

And this about Frederick Douglass:

Sean Spicer was later asked what Trump had meant by this.

“I think he wants to highlight the contributions that he has made,” Spicer said. “And I think through a lot of the actions and statements that he’s going to make, I think the contributions of Frederick Douglass will become more and more.”















“Week” 6 (January 7 through 27)

Told a demonstrable lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration — and predicted that the media would “pay a big price” for refusing to repeat it.

Donald Trump’s inauguration attracted a much smaller crowd to the National Mall than Barack Obama’s did in 2008. This was not a surprise: Washington, D.C., is a majority African-American city, and the first black president won its vote overwhelmingly. Trump, by contrast, received a mere 4 percent of the district’s ballots. Further, Obama entered office with an approval rating of 80 percent; Trump was sworn in with one around 40.

But while Trump’s (comparatively) sparse inaugural crowd comported with demographic and polling realities, it was wildly inconsistent with the president’s expectations. And so, as he often does when reality disappoints his fondest wishes, Trump discovered a set of alternative facts.

“I get up this morning and I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field,” Trump said. “I said wait a minute, I made a speech, I looked out, the field was, it looked like a million, a million and a half people … it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”

“So, we caught” the media, Trump said, “and we caught them in beauty. And I think they’re going to pay a big price.”

That big price turned out to be a scolding from the new White House press secretary. Armed with visual aids, an ill-fitting suit, and secondhand indignation, Spicer condemned the press’s shameful attempts “to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.”

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer baselessly declared, before vowing, “We’re going to hold the press accountable.”

Spicer then informed the White House press corps that the CIA had given Trump a “five-minute standing ovation” at the end of his speech (the audience stood throughout the speech, having never received permission to sit. Trump would later claim that this had been the “biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl”).



“That’s what you guys should be writing and covering,” Spicer said, then left without taking a single question.

Told congressional leaders at a private meeting that he only lost the popular vote because undocumented immigrants cast millions of ballots against him.

In November, Trump tweeted that he had actually won the popular vote, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” That was disturbing for several reasons, all detailed in an earlier installment of this list.

But Trump’s repetition of the claim — in a private meeting with congressional leaders, whom he has no hope of conning on this subject — raises the alarming possibility that the president genuinely believes in his own conspiracy theory. Which is to say, the president believes that “3 to 5 million” undocumented immigrants risked deportation to illegally vote against him.

Even though there is literally no evidence for that claim. And no losing down-ballot Republican candidate has demanded an investigation into the matter. And he, himself, loudly opposed all attempts to audit the election’s results — until reporters alerted him to this apparent contradiction. Then, the president announced an investigation into such acts of voter fraud as being registered to vote in two states (which is a crime committed by several of his advisers and family members, if it were actually illegal).

On Tuesday, Sean Spicer affirmed that this is, in fact, the president’s genuine understanding of how Hillary Clinton won more votes than he did.

“The president does believe that, he has stated that before,” Spicer told reporters at a White House press briefing. “I think he’s stated his concerns of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign and he continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have presented to him.”



If true, then Trump’s claim about illegal votes is not just a dangerous challenge to popular perceptions of democratic legitimacy and a pretext for voter suppression — though it is both these things.

It is also a sign that the president may have developed his talent for conning the insecure by practicing on himself.

Suggested America might once again have the opportunity to confiscate Iraq’s oil.

Trump has long maintained that one of the biggest mistakes the United States made in Iraq was that it did not expropriate the nation’s most valuable natural resource. The president is fairly certain that, had the U.S. stolen Iraq’s oil, the region would be far more stable than it is today.

Trump reiterated this view in his speech at the CIA on his first weekend in office — and then suggested that his administration might have a chance to rectify America’s great error.

“Now I said it for economic reasons,” Trump said while introducing Representative Mike Pompeo, his pick to lead the intelligence agency. “But if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil. But, okay, maybe we’ll have another chance.”

This is the kind of thing a reality-television star can say to Fox & Friends, without putting lives in danger. That’s less true when the president of the United States says it to the CIA.

There are 6,000 U.S. troops in Iraq right now. It will not make their lives easier if Iraqis believe that America wants to steal their oil. Nor, for that matter, will it help if the local population thinks that the United States created ISIS.

And yet, President Trump has said both those things in just the past few weeks.

Allowed his company to leverage the cachet of his election into a massive expansion of its hotel empire.

“There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five,” Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger told Bloomberg Tuesday. “I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.”

Meanwhile, the Trump-owned Mar-a-Lago country club will be doubling its initiation fee from $100,000 per year to $200,000. What, precisely, made membership in the club twice as valuable as it was one year ago is anybody’s guess.

If all goes as planned, future generations will have convenient access to Trump-owned properties wherever they are in the country.

Ordered the Department of Homeland Security to issue a weekly list of crimes (allegedly) committed by undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities.

There is little evidence that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than the general public. Trump’s list serves no purpose other than to sow fear and loathing of a vulnerable minority group. It is move as vile and absurd as having though government publish a weekly list of “robberies committed Jews” or, say, “sexual assaults perpetuated by real estate moguls.”

Prepared to radically reduce American funding to the United Nations.

In the wake of the Second World War, the United States led the effort to establish the United Nations — an institution that would, among other things, promote American values and protect American interests. To this day, the U.S. enjoys the power to unilaterally veto any substantive resolution that comes before the body, and, less officially, to defy the U.N.’s understanding of international law whenever it feels like invading a sovereign country.

But now, Donald Trump is preparing to undercut this tool of American hegemony — and global peacekeeping and poverty reduction — with a stroke of his pen.

The Trump administration has drafted an executive order that would reduce American funding of the U.N. and other international organizations by at least 40 percent, thereby devastating international peacekeeping and refugee-aid efforts.

Signed a bevy of executive orders that were drafted by the White House’s Breitbart wing — and no one else.

Part of why Trump was able to dash off executive orders at such a frenetic pace during his first week in office — even as the rest of his transition is woefully behind schedule — is that he neglected to have them reviewed by relevant cabinet agencies, congressional committees, or legal counsel.

Rather, the documents were drafted with the consultation of virtually no one but Breitbart mastermind Steve Bannon, and his fellow right-wing nationalist Stephen Miller, according to Politico. And as it turns out, governing by Breitbart op-ed has its drawbacks.

For example, Trump’s executive order on the Keystone XL was drafted without the consultation of the State Department, despite the fact that the company behind the pipeline is suing the U.S. for $15 billion — and aspects of the order could plausibly strengthen the company’s case: Among other things, the order requires any company building a pipeline to use materials manufactured domestically — a provision that may contravene various trade treaties that the U.S. is bound by.

Stood by as his top advisers leaked like a sieve.

Before Trump finished his fourth day in office, “nearly a dozen” of his senior aides and advisers had planted embarrassing stories in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Politico about how their boss can’t handle embarrassing coverage in the mainstream media. Specifically, advisers detailed the president’s fury and anguish while watching cable-news coverage of the Women’s March and reports that the crowd at his inauguration was … less than record-breaking.

Those advisers also spilled the beans on every power struggle currently being waged in the West Wing — including who might be trying to get who fired.

In some ways, these developments are the opposite of terrifying. On many fronts, it’s probably better for Trump to have a bizarrely transparent and dysfunctional administration than a well-organized, tight-lipped one: It’s hard to organize mass deportation when everyone’s trying to keep the boss from having a temper tantrum — or else scheming to get each other forced out.

But these are still the people we’re relying on to keep the government functioning and avert nuclear war. The fact that the U.S. president is a a 70-year-old child — or, at the very least, that his own advisers are eager to portray him that way in the press — is more than a bit disconcerting.

Declared that his election had restored American democracy, in an angry, authoritarian inaugural address.

On Friday, a president who had lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots announced that, with his inauguration, the American people had been put in charge of their own government for the first time in decades.

“Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” Trump declared. “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

The new president went on to assail the various elected leaders arrayed in front of him as a parasitic cabal that had “protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.”

Thus, Trump established himself as the only true representative of the American people. But Trump’s speech forgot the 54 percent of the electorate that did not join that movement — along with every American who felt that Barack Obama represented them, during his time in the Oval Office.

Not once did Trump acknowledge the existence of such voters. But he didn’t need to, because his claim to being the people’s president did not rest on objective measures of popular opinion, but on his unique ability to divine — and execute — the national will.

Trump is the voice of the people, because the people said so, in his own voice.

Replaced the White House website’s page on climate change with a vow to drill for oil on federal lands.

Minutes after Trump was sworn in, all mentions of man-made climate change were erased from the White House’s official website. In its stead appeared the president’s “America First Energy Plan,” which promises the elimination of the Obama administration’s “harmful and unnecessary” restrictions on carbon emissions and water pollution.

“We must take advantage of the estimated $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves,” the plan reads, “especially those on federal lands that the American people own.”

This is in the wake of reports that 2016 was the warmest year in recorded history — as had been 2015 and 2014 before it.

It is not unusual for presidents to excise their predecessor’s pages from the White House website. But Trump’s revision put his priorities into sharp relief.

At his first press conference as president-elect, Trump revealed that he had no intention of divesting from his globe-spanning business interests, despite government ethicists’ insistence that he do so.

Defamed a hero of the civil-rights movement in a series of racist tweets.

Georgia congressman John Lewis announced that he would not be attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, as he believed that Russian interference rendered his election illegitimate.

Considering the lack of public evidence that the Trump campaign actively abetted Russian hacking, one could reasonably argue that Lewis’s claim was hyperbolic, or even irresponsible.

But Trump made no such argument when he responded to Lewis’s slight. Instead, he decided to defame the congressman and the voters he represents.

Beyond the bleak comedy of a millionaire’s son — who spent the late ’60s dodging the draft and STDs — deriding a hero of the civil-rights movement as “all talk, no action,” Trump’s tweets are remarkable for their naked racism.

Since winning the White House, Trump has largely eschewed the appeals to white racial resentment that fueled his campaign’s early days. But Lewis’s insult brought the president’s racial animus back to the surface.

It’s true that Lewis represents much of Atlanta, which, like many other American cities, suffers from an unacceptably high rate of gun violence. But the city is also among one of the nation’s most economically vibrant metro areas — and is not “falling apart.”

What’s more, Lewis’s district also encompasses some of his state’s wealthiest suburbs. Thus, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump’s dire portrait of the place Lewis represents was based entirely on the color of the congressman’s skin — the president saw that Lewis was an African-American, and then described the conditions that he believes African-Americans live under.

Trump’s final tweet to Lewis is his most alarming, as it describes a completely fictional crisis of urban disorder — there was a time in our history when America’s inner cities were set ablaze by the rage of the dispossessed, but we aren’t living in it. Thus, Trump’s tweet appears designed but to stimulate his white, rural followers’ fear and loathing of “urban” America, and all that “infests” it.

Suggested that America’s intelligence agencies might be turning the United States into something akin to Nazi Germany. 



Earlier this month, CNN reported that intelligence officials had alerted the president-elect to the existence of an unverified research report, assembled by an ex–British spy, which claimed that Donald Trump’s campaign had been in close contact with the Russian government through much of 2016 — and that the Kremlin possessed “compromising” information about him.

It’s not clear who leaked word of these salacious allegations. The dossier that BuzzFeed published had been commissioned by Trump’s opponents during the 2016 campaign, and had been circulating among journalists and political operatives — as well as intelligence officials — for months. It is possible that CNN would have needed an intelligence-community source to report that our spy agencies had briefed Trump on the dossier. But the list of people who could have sent the documents themselves to BuzzFeed extends well into the private sector.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump decided to pin the blame on the intelligence agencies he would soon rely upon — and in the most incendiary possible terms.

Allowed his secretary of State nominee to pledge that America would block China’s access to its disputed islands in the South China Sea — a promise that, if kept, would almost certainly mean war.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would-be secretary of State Rex Tillerson promised to block China’s access to its disputed islands in the South China Sea — an action that would almost certainly entail a military confrontation between the world’s two greatest powers.

“We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops,” Tillerson said. “And second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”

It’s unclear whether Tillerson conferred with Trump about that stance. But Trump has been nothing but belligerent toward Beijing since winning the White House. Beyond threatening to slap massive tariffs on China’s exports and revoke America’s support for the One China policy, the president has also staffed his administration with multiple China hard-liners, including Peter Navarro, who has described the nation as a “despicable, parasitic, brutal, brass-knuckled, crass, callous, amoral, ruthless, and totally totalitarian imperialist power.”

In response to Tillerson’s statement the Communist Party–controlled Global Times wrote, “Unless Washington plans to wage a large-scale war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to the islands will be foolish … If Trump’s diplomatic team shapes future Sino-U.S. ties as it is doing now, the two sides had better prepare for a military clash.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer reiterated the administration’s position, saying, “If those islands are in fact in international waters and not part of China proper, then yes, we’re going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country.”

Named his son-in-law a senior White House adviser, in defiance of norms (and, very likely, laws) against nepotism.

Two weeks ago, Trump named his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser. Anti-nepotism laws prohibit federal officials from hiring relatives to work for the agencies they lead, but Kushner’s lawyers have concluded that the White House is not an agency. And the Justice Department has decided to buy into that theory. 



Last week, Trump once again suggested that America’s support for NATO was contingent on its allies “paying their fair share,” while calling the organization as currently constituted “obsolete.” He also predicted the slow collapse of the European Union, and suggested that such a collapse would be a good thing. In response to his remarks, German president Angela Merkel said that Europe has its fate “in its own hands.”

Repeatedly denigrated America’s intelligence agencies, then leaked plans to downsize them.

Trump initially claimed that the CIA’s findings could be dismissed — sight unseen — because the agency is staffed by the “same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He then argued it was impossible for anyone to know who had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email account.

Last week, Trump reiterated that argument, telling reporters, “the whole age of the computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.” Then, the president-elect went a step further, suggesting that regardless of who committed the hack, “we ought to get on with our lives.”

Trump then falsely claimed that his intelligence briefing on Russian hacking had been delayed — and suggested that this was because the CIA needed more time to fabricate “intelligence.”

He then treated the claims of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with more credulity than those of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies.

The troubling thing about this behavior is not that the president-elect views the claims of the deep state with a critical eye, but rather that he appears to judge the veracity of their claims on the basis of whether or not he wants them to be true.

Trump rejected the CIA’s assessment of Russian hacking before he was ever presented with its case, out of a belief that the findings were the product of a “political witch hunt,” aimed at tarnishing the legitimacy of his electoral triumph.

“They got beaten very badly in the election. I won more counties in the election than Ronald Reagan. They are very embarrassed about it,” Trump told the Times on Friday, ostensibly explaining the motivation behind the intelligence community’s focus on Russian hacking. “To some extent, it’s a witch hunt. They just focus on this.”

As this 2014 tweet makes clear, Trump is no long-time, principled critic of the CIA.

Rather, he is a staunch opponent of any entity that publicizes information he does not want to hear. And now, he’s reportedly drafting plans to take his opposition beyond merely shooting his mouth off at the messenger.

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump and his advisers are drafting plans to “pare back” the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA.

“The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized,” one anonymous source close to the Trump transition told the paper. “They all need to be slimmed down.”

Just before Christmas, Trump went nuclear. Specifically, the president-elect appeared to upend a decades-old bipartisan consensus that less is more when it comes to nuclear weapons.

This tweet was widely interpreted as a declaration of Trump’s intent to pursue nuclear proliferation. But could that really have been what he meant? Why would Trump want to give the world’s other nuclear powers an excuse to proliferate when America already has enough weapons to wipe out humanity so many times over — and when arms races are so damn expensive. Surely, the words “nuclear capability” were meant to signify a modernization of our existing arsenal, like the one president Obama is already pursuing (which is, itself, an arguably reckless policy).

Shortly after Trump’s tweet, his communications director suggested that he had, in fact, been referring to modernization.

But one day letter, the president-elect had an early morning chat with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski — and declined the cable news host’s invitation to disavow his interest in a nuclear arms race.

“Let there be an arms race,” Trump told Brzezinski, “because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

Trump lacks many of the characteristics that one might want in a commander-in-chief. But punctuality isn’t one of them. In fact, the president-elect has taken the unprecedented step of showing up for his new job 11 weeks early.

Instead of abiding by the principle that there “can only be one president at a time” — which is to say, that president-elects should keep mum on foreign policy, so as to avoid sowing confusion among America’s allies and adversaries about who’s in charge — Trump has comported himself as though he were already ensconced in the Oval Office.

The president-elect has hosted a meeting with the prime minister of Japan; “cancelled” two of the U.S. military’s most expensive projects; attempted to dictate America’s actions at the United Nations; and, most ambitiously, spoken with the president of Taiwan by phone and then publicly questioned the wisdom of respecting the One China policy — an action that threatens to transform America’s relationship with the world’s second-greatest power and which was taken without the consultation of the Obama White House or State Department.

And yet, despite all these signals that Trump is ready to take things from here, Barack Obama has carried on as though he were still the president of the United States. Obama has even had the audacity to use the power of his office to advance policies that Trump doesn’t like, including sanctions on Russia and pardons of nonviolent drug offenders.

The president-elect publicized his displeasure with this state of affairs at the end of last month.

Then, when Vladimir Putin announced that he would withhold retaliatory sanctions against the United States — until he got a sense of where the Trump administration would like to take U.S.-Russia relations — the president-elect praised the autocrat’s wisdom.

Continued to use Twitter as a tool for souring diplomatic relations with the world’s second-greatest power.

Trump began 2017 the way he ended 2016 — antagonizing China for no good reason.

In the wake of that missive, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, (essentially) advised the president-elect to delete his account.

In a commentary titled, “An obsession with ‘Twitter foreign policy’ is undesirable,” the media organization wrote. “Everyone recognizes the common sense that foreign policy isn’t child’s play, and even less is it like doing business deals,” according to a translation by the New York Times.

“Twitter shouldn’t become an instrument of foreign policy,” the article continued, suggesting that Trump is wrong to believe that “issuing hard-line comments and taking up sensitive issues” over the platform will “add to his chips for negotiating with other countries.”

Trump isn’t wrong to suggest that China has helped prop up Kim Jong-un’s regime. As Time notes, China is North Korea’s only major ally and accounts for 90 percent of the rogue state’s trade.

But this fact illustrates why maintaining friendly relations with Beijing is so important — to make Kim Jong-un’s regime pay a higher price for its belligerence, Trump will need to secure the cooperation of its only major trading partner. And he will only be able to do that if he can establish a modicum of trust with the Chinese government.

It seems unlikely that tweeting out sarcastic insults of the Chinese government is a sound means of achieving that end.

More broadly, Trump’s decision to use Twitter as his primary tool for both public and diplomatic relations is a security threat in its own right. As BuzzFeed News notes, a hacker who gained access to Trump’s account would gain the power to manipulate the stock market or instigate a geopolitical crisis with the press of a button.

Named a billionaire investor — with an enormous, personal financial interest in deregulating certain sectors of the economy — as his special adviser on regulatory reform.

Carl Icahn is a billionaire financier with ungodly sums of money invested in energy, auto supplies, and mining.

Now, he is also the man tasked with “reforming” the regulatory agencies that oversee his investments.

In late December, Trump named Icahn his special adviser on regulatory reform — but unlike his predecessors in that position, Icahn’s gig will be “informal,” and he will not be classified as a government employee.

This arrangement will allow Icahn to retain his investments in companies that are affected by his regulatory decisions. It will also allow him to avoid disclosing any tax returns or undergoing vetting by Congress.

Icahn is already pressuring the Federal Trade Commission to ease clean fuel standards, and has played a role in selecting the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“It is one more example of what King Trump is doing, circumventing the rules,” Richard Painter, the former chief ethics counsel to President George W. Bush, said of Icahn’s hiring, in an interview with New York. “This is an end-run around criminal statutes.”





“Week” 4 (December 9 through December 21)

Declared the American intelligence community to be inherently untrustworthy, after it produced information that he did not like.

A little over a week ago, the Washington Post revealed that many in the CIA believe Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the intention of aiding Donald Trump’s candidacy.

This information did not please Donald Trump.

Which is understandable: No winning politician wants his or her victory to be attributed, even partially, to the actions of a hostile foreign government. What’s more, with liberals already eager to delegitimize his presidency on the basis of his popular-vote loss, Trump had some cause for defensiveness.

Thus, one could hardly blame the president-elect if he released a statement that mixed expressions of concern about Kremlin interference with a vigorous defense of the election’s legitimacy. 



Instead, he released a statement that said this:

These three sentences are gobsmacking for reasons both small and large. For one thing, there is no evidence that the intelligence analysts who wrote up the CIA’s findings on Russian interference were “the same people” who prepared the most inaccurate assessments of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. And anyway, Trump reportedly intends to give one of the Iraq War’s most unrepentant architects a high-ranking position in his administration.

For another, the president-elect’s claim about the size of his win is downright Orwellian — Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College was among the lowest in our history.

Most concerning, though, is the fact that Trump decided to publicly denigrate the authority of an entire intelligence agency, simply because it generated news he didn’t like. (If the president-elect has some other reason for doubting the CIA’s assessment, he has not provided it.)

This is chilling, even if one isn’t concerned by Trump’s friendliness toward Russia. One can reasonably argue that easing tensions with the nation that holds the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile will do more good than harm. But a president who responds to unpleasant information by shooting his mouth off at the messenger will almost certainly do more of the latter than the former.

And Trump’s decision to disbelieve the CIA’s assessment — sight unseen — was not a momentary impulse. Three days after the Post’s report, the president-elect suggested it wasn’t even possible for the CIA to know who had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email account.

Said he would continue skipping daily intelligence briefings when he becomes president because he’s smart enough to get by without them.

In his time as president-elect, Trump has refused to solicit briefings from the State Department before contacting foreign leaders, or to sit through daily national-security updates from America’s intelligence agencies. And last week, Trump declared his intention to continue shirking the latter duty as commander-in-chief.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump explained to Fox News Sunday. “There might be times where it might change. I mean, there will be some very fluid situations. I’ll be there not every day but more than that.”

Said he doesn’t know why he should be bound by the One China Policy.

Trump has spent much of the past month souring America’s diplomatic relationship with the second most powerful country in the world. First, he broke a decades-old taboo against speaking with the president of Taiwan. Then, he announced that he might not honor the “One China Policy,” which prohibits the U.S. from recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign country. Preventing Taiwan from achieving internationally recognized independence is a top priority of Chinese foreign policy — one that its military has prepared to go to war over.

But Trump told Fox News that, unless China is willing to cut him some unspecified “deal,” he may repudiate the principle on which decades of friendly U.S.-Sino relations has been premised.

“I fully understand the ‘one China’ policy,” Trump told the network. “But I don’t know why we have to be bound by a ‘one China’ policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”

In response to Trump’s provocations, China flew a nuclear-capable bomber over its disputed islands in the South China Sea.

Then, a Chinese naval vessel abducted an underwater U.S. drone. It returned the drone to American custody days later, after determining that it was not being used for espionage.

Trump used this minor dustup to further irritate Beijing.

A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry expressed indignation at Trump’s tweet. “We don’t like the word steal. That’s totally inaccurate.” The nation’s state-run newspaper later published an op-ed that promised if Trump “treats China after assuming office in the same way as in his tweets, China will not exercise restraint.”

Invited his adult sons — who are slated to run the Trump Organization next year — to a policy meeting with the leading lights of Silicon Valley.

Last Wednesday, Donald Trump was supposed to clarify how he intends to extricate himself from the myriad conflicts of interest his company presents. But he postponed that press conference until January. In its place, the president-elect tweeted his intention to cede managerial control of his company to his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.

Then, he invited both of those sons to a policy meeting with the leading lights of Silicon Valley. On the very day he had previously promised to detail his plans for evading corruption. Which, to be fair, was its own kind of clarifying.

Picked a man who once tried to call for the abolition of the Energy Department — but couldn’t remember the department’s name — as secretary of Energy.

At a Republican primary debate in 2011, Rick Perry announced that there were three federal agencies that he would abolish as president, — “Commerce, Education and the — what’s the third one there?”

“Let’s see. — Okay. So Commerce, Education, and the,” the former governor of Texas continued. “The third agency of government I would — I would do away with the Education, the — Commerce and — let’s see — I can’t. The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.”

Perry later revealed that the “third one” was the department of Energy. Last week, Trump named Perry as his designated pick for head of that department.

Named his bankruptcy lawyer — who thinks liberal Jews are “worse” than Nazi collaborators — as his pick for ambassador to Israel.

David Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer who believes the two-state solution is an “illusion,” Barack Obama is anti-Semitic, Israel has a legal right to expand settlements in the occupied West Bank — or else to annex the territory in its entirety — and that liberal American Jews who disagree with him are “far worse than kapos.”

And he will be America’s ambassador to Israel next year, if Donald Trump gets his way.









“Week” 3 (November 30 through December 9)



Provoked heightened diplomatic tensions with two nuclear-armed states.

Before last Friday, the leaders of the United States and Taiwan had not spoken since 1979. This was because China does not recognize Taiwan as an independent state, but rather, a breakaway province. Preventing the island from achieving internationally recognized independence is one of the top priorities of Chinese foreign policy — one that its military has prepared to go to war over.

Thus, America’s friendly diplomatic relationship with the world’s second greatest power is premised on our respect for the “One China” policy.

Seven days ago, Donald Trump chose to disrespect that policy, when, unbeknownst to the Obama White House, the president-elect held a ten-minute phone conversation with Taiwan’s president — and leader of the nations pro-independence political party — Tsai Ing-wen.

The call prompted an immediate diplomatic protest from China, followed by reassurances from the sitting president that no official change in policy had been intended.

Initially, the call appeared to testify to the hazards posed by Trump’s willful ignorance. The president-elect has reportedly refused to sit through daily intelligence briefings and neglected to consult the State Department before meeting with foreign leaders. And, after his precedent-shattering call was met with widespread criticism, he advertised his inability to comprehend the concept of diplomatic fictions.

Alternatively, there was some speculation that Trump had chosen to roll the dice on 37 years of peaceful U.S.-Sino relations for the sake of developing a new hotel in Taipei.

And then, the Washington Post revealed that the call to Taiwan was the result of a wholly different — but no less alarming — cause: Former Republican senator Bob Dole, along with other hawks in Trump’s inner circle, had persuaded the president-elect to make the call as an intentional provocation of the Chinese government.

Whatever comfort came with learning that Trump perhaps hadn’t jeopardized our relationship with a nuclear superpower out of carelessness or greed, was erased by the knowledge that the alternative explanation was one of calculated belligerence.

While Trump campaigned on a kind of neo-isolationism, the president-elect is surrounded by advisers who believe that the United States is at war with Islam and that China must be made to understand our strength.

Trump’s Taiwan call suggests that these crackpot adventurers may actually get to steer the ship of State.

Which isn’t to say that Trump’s bumbling ignorance won’t create it’s own set of diplomatic crises: Last week, the president-elect also appeared to wing a phone call with the prime minister of Pakistan, in which he offered to mediate its dispute with India over Kashmir while calling the Pakistanis “one of the most intelligent people” — sentiments that caused a fair amount of anxiety inside of India.

Few conflicts in the world pose a greater risk of nuclear escalation than that between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. By all appearances, Trump chose to weigh in on that conflict without soliciting instruction from diplomatic authorities.

Defended the propriety of mass murder as an anti-drug policy.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has likened his campaign to rid his nation of drug users to Adolph Hitler’s attempt to rid the planet of Jews: Earlier this year, Duterte noted that the press had portrayed him as the “cousin of Hitler,” then explained that he took little offense at the analogy — after all, whatever else you might think of the Führer, the man was very good at exterminating the impure.

“There are 3 million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. I’d be happy to slaughter them,” Duterte said.

Since taking office last summer, Duterte has presided over the extrajudicial killings — by police and vigilantes — of more than 3,000 alleged “drug addicts.”

In doing so, he has (reportedly) won the admiration of America’s president-elect.

“He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way,” Mr. Duterte said last week, adding that Trump had invited him to visit the White House next year.

Of course, you can’t believe everything an authoritarian mass murderer says. But Trump did not deny Duterte’s account — and given the opportunity to condemn the Philippine president’s campaign of terror, in an interview with Time, the president-elect chose to defend it, instead:

On Monday, those of us who would like to keep this whole “human civilization” thing going for a few more centuries were provided a ray of hope: President-elect Donald Trump met with inconvenient-truth-teller Al Gore. The meeting came days after Politico reported that Ivanka Trump planned to make climate change one of her “signature issues.”

Thus, for a moment, it seemed like the president-elect might have decided that he’d rather not do everything in his power to accelerate the onset of ecological catastrophe.

But then, on Wednesday, Trump named Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency (or, as it may soon be known, the Environmental Destruction Agency).

Pruitt is one of the nation’s leading opponents of the current EPA’s climate-change policies, helping to coordinate a 28-state lawsuit against new limitations on the amount of carbon that power plants can emit.

But his opposition to environmental protection extends beyond climate denial: While most conservatives dismiss the significance of global warming, many still believe it makes sense for the government to keep poison out of the air and water.

Not Pruitt. He has unsuccessfully sued the EPA over regulations on smog pollution, and over a rule that safeguards wetlands and streams that helps filter contamination from drinking water.

The man is so in the pocket of the energy industry, he once took a letter decrying fracking regulations — sent to him by the oil company Devon Energy — copied the text of the letter onto Oklahoma government stationery, and mailed it off to the EPA.

Now, he won’t need to write letters or bring lawsuits to express his contempt for any policy that puts the public interest above the energy’s industry short-term profits — he’ll be able to undermine those policies directly.

What’s more, in the wake of Pruitt’s appointment, Trump’s meeting with Gore is recast in its own sinister light: The president-elect’s meeting the climate-change champion may have been a deliberate bid to sow confusion about the nature of his actual policy on the environment. And it may have worked.

Attacked a local labor leader for calling attention to his lies.

Last week, Donald Trump convinced Carrier to move only one of its Indiana plants to Mexico, in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks (and/or a tacit promise to make sure nothing unfortunate happens to its parent company’s federal contracts).

The president-elect then traveled to the factory he’d ostensibly rescued and announced that “over 1,100 workers” would be keeping their jobs thanks to his tireless efforts.

This was news to Chuck Jones, president of the union that represents those workers, United Steelworkers 1999. Trump had locked the union out of negotiations with Carrier, and so Jones had not been able to examine the terms of the agreement. Thus, he urged his workers to keep their optimism on the cautious side, but to no avail. As he would later write, “Our members got their hopes up. They thought their jobs had been saved.”

In fact, when Jones finally met with the management of Carrier, he discovered that only 730 factory jobs had been saved.

Jones told the Washington Post that he’d hoped Trump would be upfront about the terms of the deal, but instead the president-elect had “lied his ass off.” He then reiterated that sentiment in an interview with CNN.

Trump replied by attacking Jones by name, accusing the local labor leader — whose efforts on behalf of his union had turned their plight into a national news story — of being personally responsible for the offshoring of jobs.

After a campaign spent lambasting the treachery of unpatriotic CEOs and globalist elites, Trump now blamed the decline of American manufacturing on the laziness of uppity workers.

These tweets are scary not merely for what they portend about the Trump administration’s labor policies (more on that in a minute) but also because they signal the president-elect’s enthusiasm for using his bully pulpit to stigmatize individual private citizens who dare to draw attention to his lies.

In the wake of Trump’s attack, Jones was inundated with implicit threats on his life and lives of his children.

Meanwhile, Trump’s promises about the Carrier deal have proven even less impressive than they initially appeared. To make its commitment to the Indiana factory concrete and verifiable, Carrier pledged to invest $16 million into the facility. But on Thursday, CNN Money learned that the company will spend the bulk of that money on automation, with the aim of radically reducing the size of its workforce in the short-term future.

Handed the Labor Department to a serial violator of labor law.

On Thursday, Donald Trump named Andy Puzder as his choice for Labor Secretary, a move roughly analogous to naming Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as head of counterterrorism.

Puzder is the CEO of the fast-food company that owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardees chains — restaurants that have been serial violators of the Fair Labor Standards Act. According to data compiled by Bloomberg BNA, 60 percent of all Labor Department investigations into Puzder’s signature eateries turned up instances of wage theft or other forms of worker mistreatment. While on the high side, that figure isn’t that far out of step with industry standards: Nearly half of enforcement cases brought by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour division in 2015 targeted the restaurant industry.

Companies like Puzder’s have tried to dodge responsibility for these abuses, by arguing that parent companies can’t be held liable for the actions of franchisees. But in 2015, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that workers had a right to bargain with parent companies over working conditions.

Puzder will now have discretion over how to enforce that ruling (or, at least, he will until Trump gets the opportunity to appoint new members of the NLRB, and the ruling gets reversed).

Puzder has also been a vocal critic of large increases in the minimum wage and the Obama administration’s decision to expand access to guaranteed overtime pay.

He also likes to advertise his burgers via soft-core pornography.

As Labor Secretary, Puzder will oversee the Women’s Bureau, an agency tasked with representing the needs of working women.

Requested security clearance for a conspiracy theorist who claims that the Clintons operate a Satanic child-sex ring out of a popular D.C. pizzeria.

Michael Flynn is an Islamophobic retired general and intelligence expert, who occasionally promotes unhinged conspiracy theories. He will be the top national security adviser to our next president.

Michael G. Flynn Jr. is the Islamophobic chief of staff of his father’s consulting firm, who constantly promotes unhinged conspiracy theories — including one about how the Democratic Establishment keeps child sex slaves imprisoned at a popular Washington pizzeria.

This week, a delusional — albeit morally courageous — man showed up at that pizzeria with a firearm, prepared to liberate those poor children. Also this week, CNN learned that Trump’s transition team had sought to supply Flynn Jr. with a security clearance.

Flynn Jr. has since been removed from Trump’s transition team. But his father, who (apparently) felt his son deserved access to state secrets, is still slated to become one of the most powerful men in the world next January.

Baselessly accused a private company of ripping off the government, shortly after the CEO of that company criticized his trade policies.

On Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune published an article that mentioned Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s recent criticism of Donald Trump’s trade policies.

Twenty minutes later, the president-elect baselessly accused Boeing of ripping off the government to the tune of $4 billion, and announced his intention to cancel one of its major federal contracts.

It’s unclear whether the first development informed the second one. But it’s difficult not to infer a connection, given Trump’s penchant for attacking all who criticize him, and the fact that there is factual basis for his tweet’s claim. (The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the entire Air Force One program will cost $3.2 billion between 2010 and 2020. However, Boeing has not even been awarded a contract to assemble the planes, only multimillion-dollar deals to design certain aspects of the aircrafts. If costs are “out of control,” Boeing has little to do with it — and there is no $4 billion contract to be canceled).



On Friday, Boeing pledged $1 million to president Trump’s inauguration.







“Week” 2 (November 19 through 28)

Questioned the legitimacy of the election he just won.

Trump spent much of his campaign sowing doubts about the legitimacy of American elections, going so far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton was conspiring with international bankers and undocumented immigrants to steal the presidency through large-scale voter fraud.

One of the few ostensible benefits of Trump’s surprise victory was that the leader of the Republican Party would, presumably, stop sowing doubts about the integrity of our democracy. But Trump shattered that half-full glass on Sunday.

In response to the Clinton campaign’s decision to cooperate with the Wisconsin recount effort spearheaded by Jill Stein, Trump tweeted:

Here, the president-elect condemns his opponents for refusing to accept the results of November’s election … by declaring his own refusal to accept the results of that election; and suggests that the vote totals don’t need to be audited, by claiming that that the vote totals are off by more than two million.

But the problem with these remarks is much larger than unintentional irony. If Trump can’t acknowledge a (functionally irrelevant) popular-vote loss, how might he respond to an election result that actually challenged his grip on power?

Or, more immediately, how might he and his party go about ensuring that “illegal voting” (a.k.a. “nonwhite voting”) has less of an impact in 2020? Trump’s tweets could foreshadow a coming push for nationwide voter suppression — if it doesn’t foreshadow something much scarier than that.

Appointed Ben Carson secretary of Housing and Urban Development — despite the fact that Carson has no relevant experience and recently declared himself unqualified for any cabinet position.

Ben Carson is a retired neurosurgeon who has more experience hawking “cancer-curing” vitamins than managing a bureaucracy. Carson’s personal assistant alluded to this fact earlier this month, when he explained that Carson did not want a cabinet position because he believed that his lack of government expertise “could cripple the presidency.”

And then Donald Trump named Ben Carson as his pick for HUD secretary.

Beyond Carson’s lack of managerial experience, he has absolutely no experience in housing or urban policy. He does, however, believe that efforts to enforce the Fair Housing Act — which both prohibits discrimination in the housing market and requires municipalities to actively combat such discrimination — are “communist.”

He also believes that that there is a broad scientific consensus that aliens built the pyramids — but that this consensus is wrong, because the biblical Joseph built the pyramids with help from God, as a means of storing grain.

Carson’s appointment suggests that Trump’s preference for empowering incompetent loyalists over qualified professionals knows no bounds. Although, if Trump sees HUD primarily as a tool for enriching well-connected real-estate developers, Carson’s combination of loyalty and grifting experience may make him uniquely “qualified” for the position.

Allowed his D.C. hotel to actively court the patronage of foreign diplomats.

The president-elect owns a company with myriad overseas investments, creditors, and partnerships — and a lot of permit requests pending before foreign governments. The number of conflicts of interest this situation creates is uncountable. And Trump knows that if he continues to ignore these conflicts — and simply shapes American foreign policy around his own business interests — there’s little we can do to hold him accountable.

“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” Trump explained last week in an interview with the New York Times. And he’s correct, to a point: The president is exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws. Some legal scholars believe that the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Trump from profiting off the gifts or payments of foreign governments. But absent the cooperation of congressional Republicans, it will likely be difficult to press that issue.

Meanwhile, Trump is already leveraging his claim on the White House for everything it’s worth. Earlier this month, the Trump International Hotel D.C. provided 100 foreign diplomats with Trump-brand champagne and a request for their patronage. Several diplomats told the Washington Post that they intended to make Trump’s hotel their delegations’ home away from home, so as to “build ties with the new administration.”

Invited the manager of his blind trust onto a phone call with the president of Argentina.

During the campaign, Trump promised that he would distance himself from his business interests by placing his assets into what he refered to as a “blind trust,” but is actually an entity that would allow him perfect knowledge of the assets he holds — and that would be managed by his children, who are now members of his transition team.

Since winning the White House, Trump has refused to accept the (wholly inadequate) constraints this vow would place on his actions. The president-elect has already invited his daughter Ivanka — the manager of his blind trust – to a closed-door meeting with the Japanese prime minister, and onto a phone call with the president of Argentina.

The day after that phone call, the Trump Organization received the Argentine government’s approval to move forward on its high-rise development in Buenos Aires.

Met with Indian business partners who have publicly declared their intention to capitalize on his status as president-elect.

Trump took time away from his transition to meet with the developers of Trump Towers Pune, a pair of 23-story buildings in the west of India.

“We will see a tremendous jump in valuation in terms of the second tower,” one consultant who worked on the project told the New York Times. “To say, ‘I have a Trump flat or residence’ — it’s president-elect branded. It’s that recall value. If they didn’t know Trump before, they definitely know him now.”

Tried to coerce Britain into appointing a right-wing extremist as its ambassador to the United States.

After filling his own administration with racist incompetents whose primary qualification for high office is their loyalty to Donald Trump, the president-elect publicly requested that U.K. prime minister Theresa May do the same.

Nigel Farage is a member of UKIP and an arch-critic of May’s Tory government. (Imagine if May publicly announced that “many people” wanted to see Harry Reid as America’s ambassador to Britain.)

But using Twitter to sour America’s relations with foreign governments appears to be a core part of Trump’s approach to diplomacy.

Berated the media at a closed-door meeting for publishing unflattering photos of his double chin.

Trump spent much of his campaign demonizing journalists as biased liars and/or the paid propagandists of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. The mogul’s attempts to delegitimize the Fourth Estate have not let up since Election Day. In addition to making himself less accessible to press scrutiny than any president-elect in recent memory, Trump has also declared America’s most-read newspaper to be a “failing institution,” and invited the nation’s leading journalists to an off-the-record meeting — so as to berate them in person.

At that meeting, Trump complained about everything from the tenor of CNN’s campaign coverage to NBC’s habit of publishing photos in which the president-elect appears to have a double chin.

It’s hard to imagine a worse way for a political figure to dispel concerns about his authoritarian tendencies than to attempt to dictate which images of himself can be publicly disseminated.

Criticized the cast of a Broadway musical for asking the vice-president to work on behalf of all Americans.

Mike Pence went to a performance of Hamilton on Broadway. A lot of liberals — and LGBT individuals — go to Broadway shows. And Pence believes in gay-conversion therapy, but not in same-sex marriage. So he was booed.

After the show, a cast member told Pence from the stage, “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights … We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

Pence took this in stride. Trump was furious that his safe space had been violated.

The president-elect decided that the case against his defunct “university” was strong enough for him to accept a $25 million settlement.

Admitted that his charity was guilty of self-dealing.

After months of accusing Hillary Clinton of philanthropic corruption, the Donald J. Trump Foundation informed the IRS that it had violated the prohibition on “self-dealing,” which bars the heads of nonprofits from using their charity’s funds to aid themselves. Previous reporting by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold revealed that the president-elect had used his foundation’s money to pay out legal settlements, acquire Tim Tebow memorabilia, and purchase large portraits of himself.









“Week” 1 (November 9 through 18)



Derided protestors as paid professionals whose acts of free speech are fundamentally “unfair.”

American presidents generally try not to discredit their detractors via patently false right-wing conspiracy theories — a point that someone on Trump’s staff apparently relayed to him, as the president-elect’s Twitter account declared its “love” of the protestors’ “passion” nine hours later.

Invited the manager of his “blind trust” to a meeting with the prime minister of Japan.

Even before his election, Trump had already made a mockery of good government norms, by refusing to extricate himself from the myriad conflicts of interest his company presents. Instead, the president-elect promised to place his assets into what he refers to as a “blind trust,” but is actually an entity that would allow him perfect knowledge of the assets he holds — and that would be managed by his children, who are also members of his transition team.

This week, Trump revealed that those children will also, apparently, take part in diplomatic meetings with the leaders of foreign countries.

Assembled a team of racists to lead his White House.

First, Trump tapped the allegedly anti-Semitic mastermind of an “alt-right” website as his chief White House strategist. Then, the president-elect tapped a retired general who believes that “fear of Muslims is rational” as his national security adviser. Finally, he named a man that a Republican Senate deemed too racist to serve as a federal judge in 1986 — one who thinks the Voting Rights Act is “intrusive,” and (allegedly) told an African-American federal prosecutor that he should “be careful what you say around white folks” — as the head of the Justice Department.

Took credit for the fact that Ford will not be relocating a plant to Mexico (which they never had any intention of relocating to Mexico).

In truth, Ford opted to keep the Lincoln SUV production line in Kentucky, after considering moving it to Mexico — but in either event, the plant would have remained open, and no jobs would have been lost. 



But fake news outlets — and some not-so-rigorous “real” ones — celebrated Trump’s “victory,” anyway.

Trump has made a years-long habit of denigrating any media institution that accurately reports information he doesn’t like. But the stakes of this behavior are drastically higher now that he leads the world’s most powerful country.



Presidents-elect typically feel compelled to allow a pool of reporters to travel with them to public events, as a gesture to the public’s right to have a watchful eye on its leader. Trump feels no such compulsion.

Floated the idea of hiring his son-in-law to a White House position, in possible defiance of laws against nepotism and norms against conflicts of interest.

Public officials are barred from hiring family members to agencies that they have authority over. They also, generally, avoid hiring the significant others of the heads of their blind trusts.

Took calls from foreign leaders on unsecured phone lines, without consulting the State Department.

Trump spent the 2016 campaign savaging Hillary Clinton for her reckless violation of the State Department’s protocols for transmitting information. He has spent the past week taking calls from foreign leaders — on the unprotected phone lines of Trump Tower — without first soliciting pertinent briefings, in defiance of longstanding practice.



Referred to his White House transition as though it were the next season of The Apprentice.</s>Washington (CNN) The executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday afternoon at the Environmental Protection Agency is an unambiguous move by the President to halt the United States' government's attempts to curb carbon dioxide emissions with the goal of encouraging American business.

But the executive order, while sweeping, does not do everything the Trump administration thinks. It is unlikely to bring a restoration of the coal industry, is certain to be caught up in court for years, and on its own, doesn't pull the US out of the Paris accords.

Here is a breakdown of what Trump's executive order accomplishes and what it doesn't:

What does Trump hope to achieve?

Donald Trump's executive order on climate change, his advisers say, is the President's attempt to put American jobs first.

"It is an issue that deserves attention," an official said Monday of climate change. "But I think the President has been very clear that he is not going to pursue climate change policies that put the US economy at risk. It is very simple."

Trump has long been a critic of climate change policies, even going so far to call climate change a "hoax" perpetrated by the Chinese.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer would not say Tuesday whether Trump still believes climate change is a hoax.

"He does not believe, as I mentioned at the outset, that there is a binary choice between job creation, economic growth and caring about the environment," Spicer said. "That's what we should be focusing on."

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who sued the EPA routinely as Oklahoma attorney general, argued incorrectly earlier this month that carbon dioxide isn't the "primary contributor" to climate change, a comment that goes against most scientific research.

What is he actually reversing?

Trump's executive order takes a hammer to the moves President Barack Obama took to combat climate change.

It directs EPA to review Obama's Clean Power Plan, rescind the moratorium on coal mining on US federal lands and urge federal agencies to "identify all regulations, all rules, all policies ... that serve as obstacles and impediments to American energy independence," the official said.

It also goes directly after Obama's record, repealing at least six Obama-era executive orders aimed at addressing global warming, including a series of orders that instructed the federal government to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

Can Trump actually do all this?

It's unclear. Many of these moves will certainly end up in court.

Experts said Tuesday that getting rid of the Clean Power Plan, the 2014 plan that put a limit to the amount of carbon dioxide produced by a range of power plants, will be far harder than just signing a document.

"The executive order does not make the Clean Power (Plan) go away," said Richard Revesz, Director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law. "This is the first move of a long chess game that will take years to unfold, and future moves will be far more challenging."

Revesz added that the executive order "has no legal significance at all" because it will be part of a process that has "many significant hurdles built in.

"The executive order will be challenged legally because it undermines the Supreme Court's Massachusetts vs. EPA decision, which ruled that the government has a duty to limit climate pollution under the Clean Air Act assuming an endangerment finding, which was issued in 2009, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012, and served as the basis of the carbon pollution limits for new and existing power plants," the National Wildlife Federation said on Tuesday.

The Clean Power Plan went to court after Obama unveiled it in 2015. Opponents argue that the EPA went too far under the law to push the rule, while advocates say the agency has the authority to regulate carbon emissions.

The Supreme Court delayed implantation of the rule in February 2016. Since then, a panel of the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments on the merits of the rule, but has yet to weigh in.

What happens with the Paris Climate agreement?

That is to be determined.

A White House official told reporters that he would not comment -- good or bad -- on Paris because the Trump administration is still determining whether to withdraw from the landmark climate deal that was struck in 2016.

Trump promised throughout the 2016 campaign that he would pull out of the Paris deal, but the fact he has yet to do some is left some environmental advocates hopeful that he may remain in the agreement.

Even so, if the changes Trump is proposing go through, it will be difficult for the United States to comply with the requirements outlined in the agreement.

With a mix of horror and resolve.

Most understand that Trump's order will go to court, and a number have questioned whether Trump will even be able to implement his order. But what Trump has made clear with the order is that he plans to do a 180-degree turn when it comes to climate change.

"On the heels of the three hottest years on record, President Trump is reversing the biggest steps our country has taken (toward) fighting climate change," League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski said in a statement. "Rolling back these public health protections shows Trump cares more about big polluters than the well-being of our communities."

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said Trump's executive order "will make things harder, not easier for Americans."

Can coal jobs really come back?

Trump made this a key promise during his 2016 campaign especially during primaries in states with a number of coal jobs, and in Ohio and Pennsylvania during the general election.

Robert Murray, founder and chief executive of Murray Energy, told CNN in January that he asked Trump during a meeting to "temper" his coal promises.

Murray said that coal employment "can't be brought back to where it was before the election of Barack Obama."

Trump's executive order would, however, move to make it easier to mine coal by rescinding the moratorium on coal mining on US federal lands and opening the door to fewer restrictions on carbon emissions produced by power plants.

Doesn't this come as worldwide temperatures are rising?

Yes. The World Meteorological Organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA found that 2016 was the warmest year on record, and the third consecutive year to rank hotter than all previous years.

This, climate scientists say, can only be explained by one thing: Man-made greenhouse gas emissions.</s>As President Donald Trump prepares to unveil an executive order to dismantle President Barack Obama’s climate change policies, Washington’s policy-making posts are filling with officials who have a record of openly denying the established science of human-caused climate change.

Trump, the ultimate decider, has demonstrated a cavalier approach to the peer-reviewed atmospheric data that makes up the core of climate science. He has called Obama’s climate change regulations “stupid”. But in other forums, he has denied making some of those statements and shifted his position.

What he has said: He said of climate change at a 2015 rally in South Carolina: “A lot of it’s a hoax. It’s a hoax.”

But in an interview with the New York Times shortly after the election, he seemed to moderate: “I have an open mind to it.”

Pence, the president’s influential No 2, has appeared to question climate science, although his aim was less to question the existence of climate change as to stand up for the coal-fired power plants that provide his home state, Indiana, with most of its electricity.

What he has said: “It’s just a few years ago, we were talking about global warming, which is – we haven’t seen a lot of warming lately. I remember back in the ’70s when we were talking about the coming ice age. And, look, you know, we have – we’ve had a tough winter. And in the Midwest, we’re – we’re made of hardy stock. We’ve seen these kind of winters before. And we’ll shoulder through them. We’ll leave the scientific debates for the future.” – MSNBC interview, 2014.

In an interview with CNN in September, Pence, like his boss, modulated that view. “There’s no question that the activities that take place in this country and in countries around the world have some impact on the environment and some impact on climate. But Donald Trump and I say let’s follow the science, but for heaven’s sakes let’s not go rushing into the kind of restrictions on our economy that are putting Americans out of work and, frankly, are driving jobs out of this country.”

Trump’s influential senior strategist is the former chief executive at Breitbart News, which regularly publishes articles with headlines like “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence From Climate Alarmists” and “Climate Change: The Greatest-Ever Conspiracy Against the Taxpayer.” Bannon is said to be pushing Trump to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris agreement, which committed nearly every country to take action on carbon dioxide pollution.

What he has said: The national debt is “not a manufactured crisis like global warming or the health care crisis. This is a – this is an existential crisis.” – Fox News, 2010.

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency will lead the complex legal efforts to dismantle the Obama-era EPA climate change regulations.

What he has said: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” – Pruitt on carbon dioxide and the environment on CNBC’s Squawk Box, March 9th.

Kreutzer, a top EPA aide to Pruitt, spent years at the conservative Heritage Foundation, where he was a vociferous critic of climate science. Kreutzer is pressing a hard-line stance against climate policies, such as legally challenging court-ordered regulation of carbon dioxide pollution.

What he has said: On a panel in January about carbon dioxide emissions, fellow panellists suggested that increased carbon dioxide emissions could be beneficial to the planet. The crowd’s laughter prompted Kreutzer to snap, “You’re laughing because you’re ignorant.”

“A common claim among proponents of action on climate change is that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming science. One commonly cited statistic is that 97 per cent of climatologists agree on global warming. The 97 per cent statistic is nothing more than a false talking point; no overwhelming consensus exists among climatologists on the magnitude of future warming or on the urgency to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” – The State of Climate Science: No Justification for Extreme Policies, 2016 Heritage Foundation report, with Kreutzer as lead author.

The author of a 2012 book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, and a senior member of the senate committees on the environment and armed services, Inhofe is a crucial voice in the debate over climate change. Trump and Pruitt have mined Inhofe’s former staff members to serve as energy and environment policy advisers.

What he has said: “The claim that global warming is caused by man-made emissions is simply untrue and not based on sound science.” – Inhofe, circa 2003.

“Obama has built a culture of radical alarmists, and they’ll be back. You and I and the American people have won a great victory, but the war goes on. Stay vigilant.” – Video address this month to the Heartland Institute, a group devoted to discrediting climate change.

The chairman of the House science committee has subpoenaed scientists and questioned their work on many topics, but particularly on human-caused climate change.

What he has said: “Climate change is caused by a combination of factors, including natural cycles, solar variability and human activity. Scientists still disagree about how much each of these factors contributes to overall climate change. What climate alarmists say is sometimes untrue and often exaggerated. We should rely on good science, not science fiction, when we evaluate climate change.” – Op-ed article in USA Today, 2015.

Now the secretary of energy, Perry drew attention during his tenure as the governor of Texas and as a presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016 for mocking climate science. But during his senate confirmation hearing to head an agency that oversees much of the government-funded research into climate change, Perry reversed those views.

What he has said: “It’s all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight. Al Gore is a prophet all right, a false prophet of a secular carbon cult, and now even moderate Democrats aren’t buying it.” – Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington, a 2010 book written by Perry.

But at his confirmation hearing in January, Perry reversed that view: “I believe the climate is changing. I believe some of it is naturally occurring, but some of it is also caused by man-made activity. The question is: How do we address it in a thoughtful way that doesn’t compromise economic growth, the affordability of energy or American jobs?”</s>WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will sign a sweeping executive order Tuesday at the Environmental Protection Agency, which looks to curb the federal government’s enforcement of climate regulations by putting American jobs above addressing climate change.

The order represents a clear difference between how Trump and former President Barack Obama view the role the United States plays in combating climate change, and dramatically alters the government’s approach to rising sea levels and temperatures — two impacts of climate change.

A White House official briefed on the plan said Monday the administration believes the government can both “serve the environment and increase energy independence at the same time” by urging the EPA for focus on what the administration believes is its core mission: Clean air and clean water.

More important than regulating climate change, the official said, is protecting American jobs.

“It is an issue that deserves attention,” the official said of climate change. “But I think the President has been very clear that he is not going to pursue climate change policies that put the US economy at risk. It is very simple.”

Tuesday’s order will initiate a review of the Clean Power Plant initiative, rescind the moratorium on coal mining on US federal lands and urge federal agencies to “identify all regulations, all rules, all policies … that serve as obstacles and impediments to American energy independence,” the official said.

Specifically, the order will rescind at least six Obama-era executive orders aimed at curbing climate change and regulating carbon emissions, including Obama’s November 2013 executive order instructing the federal government to prepare for the impact of climate change and the September 2016 presidential memorandum that outlined the “growing threat to national security” that climate change poses.

“The previous administration devalued workers by their policies,” the official said. “We are saying we can do both. We can protect the environment and provide people with work.”

The White House official went on to argue that the best way to protect the environment is to have a strong economy, noting that countries like India and China do less to protect the environment.

“To the extent that the economy is strong and growing and you have prosperity, that is the best way to protect the environment,” the official said.

The executive order also represents the greatest fears climate change advocates had when Trump was elected in November 2016.

“These actions are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American,” Tom Steyer, the president of NexGen Climate, said in a statement. “Trump is deliberately destroying programs that create jobs and safeguards that protect our air and water, all for the sake of allowing corporate polluters to profit at our expense.”

Andrew Steer, CEO of the World Resources Institute, said that the executive order shows Trump is “failing a test of leadership to protect Americans’ health, the environment and economy.”

But as much as Democrats and climate advocates will decry it, Trump’s executive order follows the President’s past comments about climate change. Though Trump told The New York Times during the election that he has an “open mind” about confronting climate change, he also once called it a hoax.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump tweeted in November 2012.

“I will also cancel all wasteful climate change spending from Obama/Clinton,” Trump said in October 2016.

The changes, the official said, do not mean the Trump administration will not look to protect the environment any longer, the official said, but when pressed about the human impact on climate change and Trump’s beliefs, the official was reluctant to say whether all government officials in the Trump White House believe humans cause climate change.

“I think there are plenty of rules on the books already. We will continue to enforce that provide for clean air and clean water. And that is what we are going to do,” the official said. “The President has been very clear that he wants the EPA to stick to that basic core mission that Congress set out for it.”

The changes also reflect the view of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who routinely sued the organization he now leads during his time as the Attorney General of Oklahoma. In an interview with CNBC earlier this month, Pruitt argued incorrectly that carbon dioxide isn’t the “primary contributor” to climate change, a comment that goes against most scientific research.

This executive order is also an attempt by the Trump administration to make good on its promise to bring more coal jobs back. The official said that Obama’s regulations “were not helpful” to the coal industry and these reversals are the President honoring “a pledge he made to the coal industry.”

“We are going to put our coal miners back to work,” Trump said at a March 2017 event in Kentucky. “They have not been treated well, but they’re going to be treated well now.”</s>Environmentalists are terrified after President Trump shockingly signed executive orders to overturn climate change policies put into place by Barack Obama. The order means the government won’t be dedicated to combatting global warming, and people have a problem. Read their tweets!

President Donald Trump, 70, signed a sweeping executive order on March 28 at the Environmental Protection Agency that aims to limit the federal government’s involvement in fighting climate change. Instead, the Trump administration said that they’re putting creating American jobs first. Trump’s order directly overturns six climate change policies put into place by Former President Barack Obama, specifically a November 2013 executive order instructing the federal government to prepare the country for the impact of climate change, as well as a September 2016 memorandum that speaks to the “growing threat to national security” climate change poses.

Trump’s order calls for a review of the Clean Power Plan, allows coal mining on US federal lands and lets federal agencies “identify all regulations, all rules, all policies … that serve as obstacles and impediments to American energy independence.” Signing the order brings fears to the forefront about the Trump administration’s attitude toward climate change.

Trump has said multiple times that he doesn’t believe in climate change; in 2012 he tweeted “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”No, he really tweeted that! Environmentalists feared that his presidency would lead to destruction, and after the March 28 order, they expressed their concerns, and disbelief, on Twitter:

“These actions [by President Trump] are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American,” Tom Steyer, the president of NexGen Climate, said in a statement to CNN after the executive order was signed. “Trump is deliberately destroying programs that create jobs and safeguards that protect our air and water, all for the sake of allowing corporate polluters to profit at our expense.”

HollywoodLifers, are you shocked that Trump signed orders to repeal EPA protections? Tell us in the comments.</s>WASHINGTON, March 28 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations that his administration says is hobbling oil drillers and coal miners, a move environmental groups have vowed to take to court.

The decree's main target is former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan that required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015.

The so-called "Energy Independence" order also reverses a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, undoes rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and reduces the weight of climate change and carbon emissions in policy and infrastructure permitting decisions.

"I am taking historic steps to lift restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations," Trump said at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, speaking on a stage lined with coal miners.

The wide-ranging order is the boldest yet in Trump´s broader push to cut environmental regulation to revive the drilling and mining industries, a promise he made repeatedly during the presidential campaign. But energy analysts and executives have questioned whether the moves will have a big effect on their industries, and environmentalists have called them reckless.

"I cannot tell you how many jobs the executive order is going to create but I can tell you that it provides confidence in this administration´s commitment to the coal industry," Kentucky Coal Association president Tyler White told Reuters.

Trump signed the order with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Vice President Mike Pence by his side.

U.S. presidents have aimed to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, which triggered soaring prices. But the United States still imports about 7.9 million barrels of crude oil a day, almost enough meet total oil demand in Japan and India combined.

While Trump's administration has said reducing environmental regulation will create jobs, some green groups have countered that rules supporting clean energy have done the same.

The number of jobs in the U.S. wind power industry rose 32 percent last year while solar power jobs rose by 25 percent, according to a Department of Energy study.

Environmental groups hurled scorn on Trump's order, arguing it is dangerous and goes against the broader global trend toward cleaner energy technologies.

"These actions are an assault on American values and they endanger the health, safety and prosperity of every American," said billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, the head of activist group NextGen Climate.

Green group Earthjustice was one of many organizations that said it will fight the order both in and out of court. "This order ignores the law and scientific reality," said its president, Trip Van Noppen.

An overwhelming majority of scientists believe that human use of oil and coal for energy is a main driver of climate change, causing a damaging rise in sea levels, droughts, and more frequent violent storms.

But Trump and several members of his administration have doubts about climate change, and Trump promised during his campaign to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, arguing it would hurt U.S. business.

Since being elected Trump has been mum on the Paris deal and the executive order does not address it.

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change who helped broker the Paris accord, lamented Trump's order.

"Trying to make fossil fuels remain competitive in the face of a booming clean renewable power sector, with the clean air and plentiful jobs it continues to generate, is going against the flow of economics," she said.

The order will direct the EPA to start a formal "review" process to undo the Clean Power Plan, which was introduced by Obama in 2014 but was never implemented in part because of legal challenges brought by Republican-controlled states.

The Clean Power Plan required states to collectively cut carbon emissions from power plants by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Some 85 percent of U.S. states are on track to meet the targets despite the fact the rule has not been implemented, according to Bill Becker, director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a group of state and local air pollution control agencies.

Trump´s order also lifts the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management's temporary ban on coal leasing on federal property put in place by Obama in 2016 as part of a review to study the program's impact on climate change and ensure royalty revenues were fair to taxpayers.

It also asks federal agencies to discount the cost of carbon in policy decisions and the weight of climate change considerations in infrastructure permitting, and reverses rules limiting methane leakage from oil and gas facilities. (Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner; writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Mary Milliken and Jeffrey Benkoe)</s>President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Tuesday taking steps to unravel the most contentious climate-change policies of his predecessor, the White House said.

The Trump administration will formally review President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which requires utilities to reduce power plant carbon-dioxide emissions 32% below 2005 levels by 2030, a senior White House official said Monday night.

Officials will also pull back August 2016 guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality on climate change and official estimates of the social cost of carbon, methane and nitrous oxide, and rescind a temporary ban on new coal leases on federal lands that Obama’s Interior Department issued in early 2016.

Certain other presidential memorandums issued by Obama on environmental matters would also be canceled, the official said. The moves are all but certain to trigger legal and political pushback from supporters of the Obama administration’s policies on the climate, who include Democrats and environmentalists.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.

White House opens door to Democrats in wake of health-bill failure.

The high-speed trading behind your Amazon purchase.</s>WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order intended to roll back most of President Barack Obama's climate-change legacy, celebrating the move as a way to promote energy independence and to restore thousands of lost coal-industry jobs.

Flanked by coal miners at a ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump signed a short document titled the "Energy Independence" executive order, directing the agency to start the legal process of withdrawing and rewriting the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of Obama's policies to fight global warming.

"C'mon fellas. You know what this is? You know what this says?" Trump said to the miners. "You're going back to work."

The order also takes aim at a suite of narrower but significant Obama-era climate and environmental policies, including lifting a short-term ban on new coal mining on public lands.

[PRESIDENT TRUMP: Timeline, appointments, executive orders + guide to actions in first 100 days]

The executive order does not address the United States' participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the landmark accord that committed nearly every country to take steps to reduce climate-altering pollution.

Trump advertised the moves as a way to decrease the nation's dependence on imported fuels and revive the flagging coal industry.

"We're ending the theft of American prosperity and reviving our beloved economy," Trump said. "The miners told me about the attacks on their jobs. I made them this promise. We will put our miners back to work."

Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday that the order will help the United States "be both pro-jobs and pro-environment."

Throughout his campaign, Trump highlighted his support of coal miners, holding multiple rallies in coal country and vowing to restore lost jobs to the flagging industry. At a rally last week in Kentucky, Trump vowed that his executive order would "save our wonderful coal miners from continuing to be put out of work."

While coal-mining jobs have dropped in the United States, they do not represent a significant portion of the U.S. economy. Coal companies employed about 65,971 miners in 2015, down from 87,755 in 2008, according to Energy Department statistics.

"These actions are vital to the American coal industry, to our survival, and to getting some of our coal families back to work," said Robert Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, one of the nation's largest coal-mining companies. Murray, a donor to Trump's presidential campaign, stood behind the president as he signed the order.

But Murray conceded that he did not expect Trump's order to return coal-mining numbers to their former strength. "I really don't know how far the coal industry can be brought back," he said.

Trump's directive also eliminates about a half-dozen of Obama's smaller executive orders and memorandums related to combating climate change.

For example, Trump's order requires White House economists to recalculate a budgeting metric known as the social cost of carbon, which under the Obama administration limited pollution by arguing that global warming outweighed economic benefits for industries. The order also eliminates a requirement that federal agencies consider the effect on climate change when analyzing all future environmental permits.

Combined, the measures might ensure that the United States' emissions of planet-warming pollution remain too high to meet the terms of the Paris climate accord.

The aim of the Paris deal is to reduce emissions enough to stave off a warming of the planet by more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, from preindustrial levels. That rise in temperature is the level at which, experts say, the earth will be irrevocably locked into a future of extreme droughts, flooding and shortages of food and water.
U.S. President Trump signs an executive order undoing former President Obama's climate change policies.