Lying about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, dissing masses of women who turned out to protest, claiming that illegal voting by immigrants cost him the popular victory, declaring a media blackout for federal officials, reviving two reviled oil pipelines, filling his cabinet with rich white guys, laying the first brick in the Mexican border wall, going after undocumented immigrants who have become our coworkers and neighbors. Oh, and canceling a multi-nation trade deal to make room for his own personal art of the deal.
President Donald J. Trump has had a busy first week.
During the first 100 days of Trump’s administration, we will weigh in each week with nuggets of opinion on some of the highlights (or lowlights) of the week. We’d love to hear what you have to say, too. Email us at opinion@gazettenet.com and we’ll share your views in print and online. (Short letters are best; that way, we can get more of them in.)
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Anyone who watched the Jan. 20 inauguration on TV couldn’t help but notice that while the crowd was dense around the Capitol steps where Trump took his oath, there was plenty of elbow room farther down the National Mall. The internet soon lit up with side-by-side images of the (packed) Mall during President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and the (half-empty) Mall during Trump’s debut.
As if to reinforce his image as narcissist-in-chief, Trump obsessed over reports that his crowd was anything less than yuuuuuuuge. At a meeting with CIA officials that should been devoted to mending fences with intelligence professionals, Trump boasted, “I looked out, the field was — it looked like a million, million and a half people.” That would have put it close to the 1.8 million estimated at Obama’s first.
Trump’s new press secretary, Sean Spicer, scolded reporters for questioning such claims and said Trump’s inaugural audience in person and on TV had been the biggest in history. After those claims were disproven, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway said Spicer was offering not “falsehood” but “alternative facts.”
Here are some undisputed facts: 1.1 million people rode the Washington subway on the day of Obama’s first inauguration, and 782,000 on the second. The ridership on Trump’s day: 571,000. On TV, Nielsen estimates that 30.6 million people tuned in for Trump, higher than the 20.6 million for Obama’s second inaugural. But Obama’s first set the standard: 37.8 million viewers.
There was no doubt that hundreds of thousands of women turned out (along with men and children) to protest Trump the day after his inauguration, from Northampton to Washington to Antarctica. Trump’s response? “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” Trump tweeted. “Why didn’t these people vote?”
Sad!
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At Trump’s first meeting with congressional leaders (you know, the people he accused of forsaking their constituents and whose cooperation he needs to advance his agenda), he recycled a debunked claim that voter fraud by undocumented immigrants had cost him the popular vote against Hillary Clinton.
Trump told lawmakers that as many as five million unauthorized immigrants voted for Clinton, echoing a Nov. 27 tweet in which he said, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
PolitiFact, the nonpartisan political fact-checking website, gave Trump its lowest rating — “Pants on Fire” — for that claim, saying there has been zero evidence of such voter fraud. ProPublica, another nonpartisan news outlet, reported: “We had 1,000 people monitoring the vote on Election Day. We saw no evidence the election was ‘rigged’” and “no evidence that undocumented immigrants voted illegally.”
Even Republicans shied away from Trump’s claim. James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, said: “I don’t know what (Trump) was talking about on that one.”
Confused!
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When he wasn’t telling whoppers, Trump got busy reversing as many of President Obama’s policies as possible. Surrounded by an all-male group of advisers, he signed an executive order cutting funds for family-planning services for women overseas. And speaking of those guys, his “drain the swamp” cabinet is set to have more white men in top positions than any since Ronald Reagan, a group of multimillionaires who will now be expected to help deliver Trump’s promise to ordinary Americans that “you will never be ignored again.”
After claiming that he had won awards for environmental stewardship (didn’t happen), Trump promptly announced plans to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects rejected by Obama as environmental threats. What do federal environmental officials think of the reversal? Hard to say: Trump slapped a media gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Trump signed an order to begin building a border wall with Mexico and announced plans to round up some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States and possibly close our borders to suffering refugees. “America first,” compassion second, it appears.
We know, we know. Can’t we say anything nice? We’re not sure yet, but at least we’ll get to see whether Trump can deliver on his promise to negotiate truly great deals. After pulling the United States out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, the businessman who wrote “The Art of the Deal” will have a chance to make one-on-one trade packages with other nations, perhaps including ones where his family business has investments.
Nice!