Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo — Page 101

TV’s Frink said:

Darth Id said:

TV’s Frink said:

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/

Well I’ll tell you what didn’t happen today:
I didn’t blind-click on some random link that was posted with no introductory, contextual or critical commentary by the poster.
That’s what the fuck didn’t happen.

Fine.

Day 20: Nevertheless, she persisted.
02/08/2017 Updated: 02/08/2017 02:32:50 PM PST
1/ Republicans vote to rebuke Elizabeth Warren for impugning Sessions’s character. In an extraordinarily rare move, Mitch McConnell interrupted Warren’s speech in a near-empty chamber, as debate on Jeff Sessions’s nomination, saying she had breached Senate rules by reading past statements against Sessions. (Washington Post)

Silencing Elizabeth Warren backfires on Senate GOP. Warren went straight from the Senate floor to a call-in appearance on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. Adding fuel to the backlash, supporters noted the apparent hypocrisy that Warren’s male colleagues were able to read from the letter uninterrupted. (CNN)
“Nevertheless, she persisted” becomes new battle cry after McConnell silences Elizabeth Warren. If the Republican senators had intended to minimize Warren’s message, the decision backfired — severely. (Washington Post)
Jeff Merkley reads Coretta Scott King’s letter about Jeff Sessions on Senate floor. Uninterrupted. (The Oregonian)
2/ Appeals Court panel appears skeptical of Trump’s travel ban. The appeals court judges seemed taken aback by the assertiveness of the administration’s position, which in places came close to saying the court was without power to make judgments about Trump’s actions. (New York Times)

Related:

Trump decries “disgraceful” opposition as appeals court weighs immigration order. Trump also repeated claims that politics plays a role in the challenges to the travel ban and questions about his authority to implement it. (Washington Post)
Gorsuch calls Trump’s tweets about the judiciary “demoralizing” and “disheartening” to the independence of the courts Gorsuch took exception to Trump calling a federal judge in Seattle a “so-called judge” after blocking the President’s travel ban. (CNN)
Homeland Security chief admits travel ban was rushed. People caught up in the confusion after the ban was imposed were denied access to lawyers, held in detention for hours without food, and in some instances coerced into signing away their entry visas. (New York Times)
3/ House Republicans voted to eliminate the only federal agency that makes sure voting machines can’t be hacked. In a little-noticed 6-3 vote, the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. (The Nation)

4/ Trump invites sheriff to “destroy” Texas state lawmaker who opposes asset forfeiture, a practice by which law enforcement can seize the cash and property of individuals suspected of committing a crime without a guilty verdict. Proponents of the practice argue that allows law enforcement to effectively combat terrorism and the drug trade, while opponents, including some conservatives, argue that it allows police to seize assets without due process. (Politico)

5/ Leaks suggest Trump’s own team is alarmed by his conduct: an impulsive, sometimes petty chief executive more concerned with the adulation of the nation than the details of his own policies ― and quick to assign blame when things do not go his way. (Huffington Post)

6/ Yemen withdraws permission for U.S. antiterror ground missions after the raid, in which just about everything went wrong, killed several civilians, including children. It was an early test of Trump’s national security decision-making. The White House continues to insist that the attack was a “success.” (New York Times)

7/ US military to rent space in Trump Tower. Military support for a president, including the military staff assigned to keeping the “nuclear football” nearby, requires close proximity to the commander in chief, which is why the Pentagon needs to rent a more expensive space closer to the penthouse where Trump resides when he’s in New York. The floors available to rent cost about $1.5 million a year. (CNN)

8/ Trump faults media while lying about murder rate. Trump has suggested that the national news media suppresses bad news about violence. He has implied that this is for ideological reasons. (CNN)

Related:

Trump says his critics “pull out the racist card” when they characterize him or his policies as anti-Muslim or anti-black. Trump also defended himself against criticism that he makes comments without factual evidence to support them, such as his unsubstantiated claim that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally. (Washington Post)
Conway clashes with CNN’s Jake Tapper on air. Tapper pressed Conway sharply on Trump’s false claim that the U.S. murder rate is “the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years.” Conway then tried to shift the conversation to the criticism she has received from media reports, while asserting that she’s “the most open press person in the White House. (Politico)
9/ Democrats to plot anti-Trump strategy in Congress and at the polls. Democrats are thinking about how to capture the fast-growing wave of resistance to the Trump administration, as seen at congressional town halls, congressional offices, and airports since Trump was sworn. Trump is polling poorly across the country but stronger in swing seats. (Washington Post)

10/ White House weighs terrorist designation for Muslim Brotherhood, targeting the oldest and perhaps most influential Islamist group in the Middle East. Officially designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization would roil American relations in the Middle East. (New York Times)

11/ Spicer: Nordstrom dropping Ivanka Trump’s line is “direct attack on Trump. Spicer told reporters during his daily press briefing that the decision – which Nordstrom said was a result of poor sales, not politics – was because of the clothing company’s displeasure with Trump’s executive orders and his policies. (Talking Points Memo)

Related:

Nordstrom’s shares up nearly 5 percent after clash with Trump. (Vox)
T.J. Maxx backs away from Ivanka Trump as President assails Nordstrom. T.J. Maxx and Marshalls stores sent a note to employees telling them to throw away signs for Ivanka Trump products. (New York Times)
12/ Republicans push carbon tax at White House. A carbon tax, long favored by economists as the most straightforward way to address climate change, could gain traction as part of a broad tax overhaul. (Bloomberg)

Day 19: Challenged.
02/07/2017 Updated: 02/07/2017 03:26:34 PM PST
1/ 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to hear challenge to Trump’s ban today. The issue in front of the court at the moment is whether the ban will remain suspended for now. The hour-long hearing, conducted by telephone among three West coast judges at 6 p.m. ET, will determine the immediate fate of the nationwide temporary restraining order against Trump’s travel ban. The three-judge panel is expected to rule this week. (CNN)

UPDATE:

Trump travel ban hearing liveblog. (Washington Post)
Related:

Trump: I’ll take “common sense” travel ban to the Supreme Court, if necessary. (Washington Post)
Justice Department urges appeals court to reinstate Trump’s travel ban, saying immediate action was needed to ensure the nation’s safety. (New York Times)
“If something happens”: Trump points his finger in case of a terrorist attack. President Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to preemptively shift blame for any future terrorist attack on U.S. soil from his administration to the federal judiciary, as well as to the media. (Washington Post)
Trump’s loose talk about Muslims gets weaponized in court against travel ban. The states of Washington and Minnesota, which sued to block Trump’s order, are citing the president’s inflammatory rhetoric as evidence that the government’s claims — that it’s not a ban and not aimed at Muslims — are shams. (Washington Post)

Trump’s real fear: The Courts. Over the past few days, he’s added an entire branch of the federal government to his enemies list. (New York Times)
2/ Betsy DeVos is confirmed as education secretary thanks to an unprecedented tie-breaking vote. The Senate voted 50-50 on Trump’s controversial pick to head the Department of Education, forcing VP Pence to cast a historic vote to break the tie. (BuzzFeed News)

UPDATE:

The senators who opposed DeVos represent 36 million more people than her supporters do. The 50 senators who opposed DeVos represent 179,381,386 people, while the 50 senators who supported her represent only 143,064,962 individuals. (Thinkg Progress)
Related:

Franken: DeVos “fundamentally incompetent” to lead Education Dept. “During her hearing, Ms. DeVos proved beyond a shadow of a doubt not only that her ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of the Department of Education, but that she is fundamentally incompetent to be its leader,” Franken said Monday from the Senate floor. (The Hill)
Live: Senate Vote on Betsy DeVos. She needs a majority of votes to be confirmed, though Vice President Mike Pence can vote if there is a tie. Here’s a full list of Senate confirmation votes. (New York Times)
3/ WH official: We’ll say “fake news” until media realizes attitude of attacking the President is wrong. Trump and his staff have repeatedly used the term “fake news” to discredit reporting on the administration, often offering no evidence to back up their disputes with those outlets’ stories. (CNN)

Related:

Trump claims media doesn’t cover terrorist attacks; archives say otherwise. Trump did not say why the media might not report on terrorist attacks but gave no examples of stories that went uncovered. (NBC News)
InfoWars is behind President Trump’s idea that the media is covering up terrorist attacks. Conservatives have long accused the media of obscuring the details and motivations of radical Islamic terrorists in an effort to downplay the role of religion. (Washington Post)
Librarians take up arms against fake news. Librarians have always helped people sort fact from fiction, reliable sources from deceptive ones. (Seattle Times)
Trump White House coaxes media into re-running terrorists’ greatest hits. (Washington Post)
4/ FBI axes FOIA requests by email, so dust off your fax machine. Starting next month, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act requests by email. In lieu of its popular email service, the FBI suggests sending a fax or snail mail, a procedural change that has more to do with obstructing the law than a dearth of resources. (TechCrunch)

5/ Hundreds of current, former EPA employees urge Senate to reject Trump’s nominee for the agency. The controversial nomination advanced out of a Senate committee last week after Republicans used their majority to suspend committee rules and approve Pruitt despite the absence of all Democrats, who boycotted the nomination vote partly because of his anti-regulatory bent. He could be approved by the full Senate as early as this week. (Washington Post)

6/ Trump’s White House tries to rehab its Hill outreach. The administration has been on a hiring spree to smooth congressional relations but some of the interactions are still rocky. (Politico)

7/ Melania Trump reveals plan to leverage presidency to ink “multi-million dollar” endorsement deals. The admission came in a defamation lawsuit the First Lady filed against the Daily Mail. (Think Progress)

8/ Europe must defend itself against a dangerous president. The United States president is becoming a danger to the world. It is time for Germany and Europe to prepare their political and economic defenses. (Der Spiegel)

9/ BuzzFeed vs. Trump. BuzzFeed News pushes further than its competitors, but can it handle the consequences? (Recode)

10/ Trump administration to approve final permit for Dakota Access pipeline. The deputy secretary of the Army will grant the final permit needed for completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, clearing the final bureaucratic hurdle standing in the way of the massive infrastructure project. (Washington Post)

11/ White House ramping up search for communications director after Spicer’s rocky start. Trump is disappointed in Spicer’s performance during the first two weeks of the administration. Spicer has served as both White House press secretary and communications director for the new administration. Those roles are typically filled by two staffers. (CNN)

Day 18: Stumbles Uninvited.
02/06/2017 Updated: 02/06/2017 01:45:31 PM PST
1/ Trump will not be allowed to address Parliament on UK state visit. Members of Parliament will not permit Trump to address Westminster Hall because of his racist and sexist attitudes. (The Independent)

2/ After 2 weeks of stumbles, Trump and staff rethink tactics. The backlash against a series of executive orders has Trump and his top staff reconsidering their improvisational approach to governing. Trump, who was not fully briefed on the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, has demanded that he be looped in earlier. (New York Times)

“We are moving big and we are moving fast,” Bannon said, when asked about the upheaval of the first two weeks. “We didn’t come here to do small things.”

But one thing has become apparent to both his allies and his opponents: When it comes to governing, speed does not always guarantee success.
Related:

The big lesson of Trump’s first 2 weeks: resistance works. Protests, phone calls, and mobilization are making a difference. (Vox)
3/ 97 companies file opposition to Trump’s immigration order. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and other tech companies filed an amicus brief voicing opposition to Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it is discriminatory and has a negative impact on business. (TechCrunch)

Related:

Opposition to Trump travel ban grows as key court decision looms. Ten former high-ranking diplomatic and national security officials, nearly 100 Silicon Valley tech companies, more than 280 law professors, and a host of civil liberties and other organizations have formally lent their support to the legal bid to block President Trump’s immigration order. (Washington Post)
Amicus Brief U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (PDF)
4/ Trump says “negative polls are fake news.” Trump turned to Twitter early Monday and began challenging polls that showed his travel order was not popular. (New York Times)

Related:

Trump is encouraging his 24 million Twitter followers to ignore accurate polls. A CNN/ORC’s poll found Trump had a 44% approval and 53% disapproval of his job performance. 53% of Americans oppose the travel ban, 47% in favor. (CNN)

5/ The massacre that wasn’t, and a turning point for fake news. The Bowling Green episode made such a splash because it played directly into concerns that the Trump administration would use untrue assertions to rally support for its agenda while denigrating as “dishonest” all the valid reporting pointing out the falsehoods. (New York Times)

Related:

Not the first time Kellyanne Conway referred to the “Bowling Green Massacre.” Conway used the same wording in a conversation with Cosmopolitan.com on Jan. 29. (Cosmopolitan)
Democrats confront lefty fake news. As opposition to President Trump consumes social media, Democrats are facing their own troubles with conspiracy theories and sketchy stories going viral. “It exists on the left and that’s a problem because it misinforms people.” (BuzzFeed New)
6/ Trump is now speculating that the media is covering up terrorist attacks. Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks and complicit in making terrorists successful. It’s part of a recent pattern of suggesting that others are standing in the way of his terrorism-fighting efforts, which includes disparaging a federal judge who halted his immigration executive order. (Washington Post)

7/ Kremlin says it wants apology from Fox News over Putin comments. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described Putin as “a killer” in the interview with Trump as he tried to press the U.S. president to explain more fully why he respected his Russian counterpart. (Reuters)

Related:

Trump’s continued defense of Putin confounds Republicans. Congressional Republicans have broken with Trump over dozens of controversial statements he has made during his campaign, his transition and now his presidency. But few issues appear to have confounded lawmakers as much as his consistent defense of Putin. Trump’s coziness is at odds with years of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy calling for a more aggressive stance toward Putin’s regime. (Washington Post)
8/ Senate Democrats plan to debate all night in hopes of stopping DeVos. The 24-hour marathon of speeches is expected to conclude at noon on Tuesday, when the Senate is expected to vote on DeVos’ confirmation. That vote is likely to be a 50-50 tie, with Vice President Mike Pence then taking a rare tiebreaker vote to ensure that DeVos is confirmed. The debate is not a filibuster. (Politico)

9/ Trump speaks of “strong support” for NATO in call with leaders. Trump pressed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s general secretary on how to encourage member nations to pay more for their defense while expressing “strong support” from the U.S. for the alliance (Bloomberg)

10/ Bracing for Trump’s revenge. Some conservatives unequivocally opposed his election. Now he’s the president, with all the levers of government at his disposal. (The Atlantic)

Related:

Does Trump actually want to succeed? How to run a White House that works, why the world is so scared right now—and how the new president could stop screwing up: Stop blowing up the U.S. relationship with Mexico, don’t expect them to pay for the wall, don’t act as “Israel’s lawyer,” don’t be an isolationist, support NATO and do a much better job of working with the other power centers of Washington—Congress and the Cabinet—before unveiling disruptive new policies like the temporary refugee ban. (Politico)
Day 17: Denied.
02/05/2017 Updated: 02/05/2017 12:07:24 PM PST
1/ Appeals court rejects request to immediately restore travel ban. A federal appeals court early Sunday rejected a request by the Justice Department to immediately restore President Trump’s immigration order. The ruling meant that refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations would, for now, continue to be able to enter the country. (NY Times)

tl;dr

A judge in a lower federal court had put a temporary stop to the travel ban. Because the appeals court declined to intervene immediately, affected travelers can enter until at least until Monday. The appeals court set a schedule asking challengers to the ban to file a response by roughly 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, and the Justice Department — representing the Trump administration — to reply to that by 6 p.m.

Trump administration had said it was improper for a lower court to engage in “second-guessing” of President Trump’s controversial immigration order and asked the appeals court to dissolve the judge’s order that stopped its implementation. (Washington Post)
Related:

Pence defends Trump’s criticism of judge who blocked travel ban. “The judge’s actions in this case,” Mr. Pence added, “making decisions about American foreign policy and national security, it’s just very frustrating to the president, to our whole administration, to millions of Americans who want to see judges that will uphold the law and recognize the authority the president of the United States has under the Constitution to manage who comes into this country.” (NY Times)
What happens if Trump decides to ignore a judge’s ruling. If Trump were to ever go down this road, the ultimate arbiter would be the other branch of government. He said Trump could be held in contempt of court, and it would then be up to the House of Representatives. the Trump administration has given no indication that they’ll actually ignore this particular court order. (Washington Post)
2/ Trump tells O’Reilly he “respects” Putin in Super Bowl interview. In a preview, Trump reveals his plans for dealing with Putin. O’Reilly asked Trump whether he “respects” the former KGB agent: “I do respect him, but I respect a lot of people,” Trump said, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to get along with him.” (Fox News)

Related:

Pelosi calls for probe of possible Russian blackmail of Trump. House and Senate panels are also investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, including possible contacts between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign. (Politico)
3/ McConnell rebukes Trump’s attack on the federal judge who temporarily halted his travel ban. The Senate Republican leader also distanced himself from the president on Russia, voter fraud and the travel ban. (Politico)

Related:

McConnell: No federal money for voter fraud prob. While McConnell says there is voter fraud, he doesn’t believe it’s as widespread as Trump claims or requires federal intervention. He says that cleaning up voter rolls is best left to the states. (The Hill)
4/ Sanders on Trump: “This guy is a fraud” and is working with Wall Street as he looks to roll back some banking regulations. Sanders criticized Trump for appointing “all of these billionaires” to his Cabinet, and singled out his major financial adviser, who comes from Goldman Sachs. (Politico)

Related:

From “drain the swamp” to Government Sachs. Although Trump campaigned as an economic populist, his brand of populism was simply old-school Reaganomics—giveaways to the rich and pro-corporate deregulation—rebranded with a nationalist and protectionist twist. After the election, Trump stocked his Cabinet with Wall Street billionaires and mega-millionaires—Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, Cohn—who had benefitted personally from the lax regulatory regime that was in place before 2010. (The New Yorker)
5/ “We’ll do better”: Trump’s White House tries to gain a sense of order amid missteps. The big thinker remains chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who has used chaos as a tool for implementing transformative policy but who aides said is now trying to adapt to working within Priebus’s structure. (Washington Post)

6/ White House pulls back from bid to reopen C.I.A. “Black Site” prisons, where the C.I.A. once tortured terrorism suspects. The White House circulated among National Security Council staff members a revised version of the draft order on detainees that deleted language contemplating a revival of the C.I.A. prisons. (NY Times)

7/ New FCC chair blocked 9 companies from providing affordable Internet to the poor. The program, known as Lifeline, provides registered households with a $9.25-a-month credit, which can then be used to buy home Internet service. As many as 13 million Americans may be eligible for Lifeline that do not have broadband service at home, the FCC has found. (Chicago Tribune)

8/ Trump’s F.D.A. pick could undo decades of drug safeguards. (NY Times)

9/ Trump posted a false news report to his Facebook page and got thousands of shares.The report claimed that Kuwait had also issued a visa ban on several Muslim-majority countries after President Trump’s immigration order. They didn’t. (BuzzFeed News)

Related:

Trump’s lies are not the problem. It’s the millions who swallow them who really matter. As the alt-right continues to set the agenda in global politics at a frightening pace, has the world reverted to a 20th-century era of totalitarianism? (The Guardian)
10/ Trump is right: Silicon Valley is using H-1B visas to pay low wages to immigrants. This drafted executive order could actually mean higher wages for both foreign workers and Americans working in Silicon Valley. (Huffington Post)

11/ “The Senate is coming apart.” The Senate is barely functioning. And the future looks even bleaker. Things have gotten so bad in the chamber lately that Chuck Schumer even voted against Mitch McConnell’s wife. (Politico)

Day 16: Suspended.
02/04/2017 Updated: 02/04/2017 11:05:32 AM PST
1/ Homeland Security suspends travel ban, and will resume standard inspections of travelers as it did prior to the signing of the travel ban. The White House announced the Justice Department would file an emergency motion to stop the halt, but it had yet to do so as of Saturday afternoon. Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he was prepared to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. (CNN)

tl;dr:

On Friday night, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily halted the enforcement of President Trump’s executive order on immigration. By Saturday, federal officials had announced they would be complying with the ruling, and airlines said they would resume boarding travelers covered under the ban. (NPR)
Related:

Borders reopen to banned visa holders. (NY Times)
U.S. authorities end enforcement of travel ban after judge puts Trump executive order on hold. The State Department had “provisionally revoked” 60,000 visas since the Jan. 27 order. It has started re-accepting those visas from people in the countries affected. (LA Times)
Trump lashes out at federal judge over ruling on travel ban.(Seattle Times)

Trump called the decision “big trouble” and said it would be overturned. (BuzzFeed News)
2/ USDA abruptly purges animal welfare information from its website about the treatment of animals at thousands of research laboratories, zoos, dog breeding operations and other facilities. The removed documents are now accessible only via Freedom of Information Act Requests. Those can take years to be approved. (Washington Post)

3/ Trust records show Trump is still closely tied to his empire. Trump’s situation is unprecedented because it involves a wealthy president acting to avoid an appearance of conflict of interest. (NY Times)

Related:

Newly released documents show that Trump himself is the sole beneficiary of the trust and that it is legally controlled by his oldest son and a longtime employee. (Washington Post)

Early signs suggest Trump’s actions are taking a toll on the Trump brand. Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus dropped Ivanka Trump’s jewelry line. (NY Times)

4/ Trump’s pick for Army Secretary drops out. Vincent Viola concluded that he would not be able to successfully navigate the confirmation process citing his inability to get around strict Defense Department rules concerning his family businesses. (Military Times)

5/ Pence says Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will be seated on the high court “one way or the other.” Trump urged the Senate’s Republican leader to scrap longstanding rules and “go nuclear” if Democrats block Gorsuch. (Associated Press)

6/ Tech companies fight Trump immigration order in court. Amazon and Expedia stepped up their opposition to the order with filings that were part of a lawsuit in federal court against the Trump administration, arguing that the order will hurt their businesses. (NY Times)

Related:

The ACLU filed a class action lawsuit that uses Trump’s tweets against him – pointing out specific instances where the president has described the action as a “ban” on Muslims. Plaintiffs argue that a de facto Muslim ban is unconstitutional—the First Amendment specifically prohibits “establishment of religion,” including the government favoring one religion over another. (Ars Technica)
7/ BuzzFeed sued over unverified Trump dossier. McClatchy says XBT Holdings, a tech firm with Russian ties named in the document, is suing BuzzFeed, editor in chief Ben Smith and former British spy Christopher Steele over the January 10 publication of what the suit calls “libelous, unverified and untrue allegations.” (The Hill)

8/ New Yorkers hold mock vigil at Bowling Green for ‘massacre’ victims as Kellyanne Conway ripped for bogus claim. The group decided to take to the streets to poke fun at presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway’s false claim that Iraqi refugees committed an atrocity that never happened called the “Bowling Green massacre.” (NY Daily News)

Related:

Conway says she misspoke on Iraqi terrorists, calls some critics “haters.” Conway admits she made a mistake in talking about a Kentucky massacre that never took place. But that’s not all she has to say about it. (Fox News)
If That Wasn’t Enough:
Trump’s rallying cry: fear itself - Washington Post
It Was Never Populism. It’s Nationalism - Talking Points Memo
Fear and Loathing in Trump’s America - The New Yorker
Donald Trump, Legal Experts Fear, ‘Is How Authoritarianism Starts’ - NY Times
Trump’s God-Awful Phone and Twitter Security Isn’t as Scary as His Cybersecurity Policies - Slate
Day 15: The massacre.
02/03/2017 Updated: 02/03/2017 03:55:14 PM PST
1/ Kellyanne Conway cites non-existent “massacre” defending ban. There’s no such thing as the Bowling Green massacre. (CNN)

UPDATE:

Federal judge in Seattle halts Trump’s immigration order. The temporary restraining order is granted on a nationwide basis. (Seattle Times)
Government reveals over 100,000 visas revoked due to travel ban. (Washington Post)
U.S. segregating Muslims as part of travel ban. Lawsuits being filed contend that the Department of Homeland Security is subjecting refugees, immigrants and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries to flagrant religious and racial discrimination. They also claim that customs officials refuse to provide information in a timely fashion on the numbers and identities of detainees being held, and are aggressively blocking detainees’ access to legal advice. (Newsweek)
Related:

Kellyanne Conway cites “Bowling Green massacre” that never happened to defend travel ban. Kellyanne Conway has taken “alternative facts” to a new level. During a Thursday interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the counselor to the president defended President Trump’s travel ban related to seven majority-Muslim countries. At one point, Conway made a reference to two Iraqi refugees whom she described as the masterminds behind “the Bowling Green massacre.” (Washington Post)
Conway admits “Bowling Green massacre” error. “Honest mistakes abound,” she wrote on Twitter. (NY Times)
Facebook users are marking themselves “Safe” from Kellyanne Conway’s made-up terror attack. The fabricated attack—which she told Hardball’s Chris Matthews was carried out by two Iraqi refugees—“didn’t get covered,” implying the press were complicit in covering up a massacre that never took place. (Gizmodo)
2/ Trump will order a sweeping review of the Dodd-Frank Act rules enacted in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Trump also will halt regulations that requires advisers on retirement accounts to work in the best interests of their clients. (Bloomberg)

Related:

Trump has mounted an all-out assault on financial regulation, announcing an array of steps to tear down safeguards enacted to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis and turning to the Wall Street titans he had demonized during his campaign for advice. The actions constitute a broad effort to loosen regulations on banks and other major financial companies. (NY Times)
3/ Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner worked to sink LGBT executive order. The couple favored putting out a clear statement from the president, promising to uphold the 2014 Obama executive order and stopping the momentum for the turnaround in its tracks. Members of the religious right with ties to the Trump administration say they have been led to believe that some changes will still be coming. (Politico)

4/ The jobless rate ticked up to 4.8 percent. Employers added 227,000 to payrolls, but pay gains were scant despite increases in minimum-wage laws. Trump said that this latest report showed there was a “great spirit in the country right now.” (NY Times)

Related:

Trump said unemployment rate wasn’t real. if the president wants to set a different measure of the job market for his administration to focus on and improve, it would be best if he could let us know what it is now, so that we can really assess whether things get better or worse during his presidency. (NY Times)

Opinion: Trump is preparing to gut Wall Street oversight. This gives Democrats a huge opportunity. It presents a new and very specific way for them to press the case against Trump for more transparency around his own holdings and the unprecedented welter of conflicts-of-interest — and possibilities for corruption — they may be creating. (Washington Post)

5/ Hill Republicans revolt over Trump’s plans to build border wall. A growing number of congressional Republicans are objecting to the cost and viability of a proposal that was a rallying cry for the billionaire businessman during his insurgent campaign. (CNN)

6/ Senate advances DeVos’s nomination, setting her up for final vote. Senators voted 52-48 to advance DeVos’s nomination. No Democrats voted yes. Pence is expected to have to break a 50-50 tie, the first time a vice president will cast the deciding vote on a Cabinet nomination. (The Hill)

Related:

How DeVos became Trump’s least popular cabinet pick. Nine out of 10 students in this country attend public school. So DeVos’ rhetoric about replacing “failed” public schools with charter schools and voucher programs may have rubbed many people — even Trump supporters — the wrong way. (NPR)
7/ Trump missing top lieutenants across federal government. The work at some agencies has slowed because of the lack of deputies. Trump has so far failed to nominate deputies and other top officials to run the day-to-day operations at most federal agencies, creating a vacuum across the government that has businesses, lobbyists and lawmakers in limbo as they wait to see how Trump’s agenda will be carried out. (Politico)

8/ The Trump administration is showing white nationalists it won’t fight them at all. The Trump administration is reportedly planning to rebrand a government effort to combat violent extremism into one that focuses only on terrorists acting in the name of Islam and take advantage of yet another opportunity to ratify white nationalism and white supremacy. (Washington Post)

9/ More companies back away from Donald Trump under pressure from customers. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick quit Trump’s 15-member council of business leaders yesterday. Nordstrom announced last night that it will stop selling Ivanka Trump’s name-branded line of clothing and shoes. (Washington Post)

10/ Trump’s Mar-a-Lago getaway could cost taxpayers more than $3 million. Trump regularly hassled Obama for his travel. Now Trump is about to get a taste of his own medicine. (Politico)

Related:

Eric Trump’s trip to Uruguay cost taxpayers $97,830 in hotel bills. (Washington Post)
11/

Day 14: Braggadocious.
02/02/2017 Updated: 02/04/2017 11:07:35 AM PST
1/ Trump badgered, bragged and abruptly ended phone call with Australian leader. Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refu­gee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win. Trump called it “this was the worst call by far.” (Washington Post)

Related:

Trump had heated exchange with Australian PM, talked ‘tough hombres’ with Mexican leader. The disagreement came as the two leaders discussed a deal, reached under the Obama administration, for the US to accept refugees from Australia who are living on islands in detention centers off the mainland due to strict government policies. (CNN)
2/ Trump tells Israel to hold off on building new settlements, saying new settlements “may not help” achieve Middle East peace. (NY Times)

Related:

The statement marks a more nuanced position in what has been Trump’s consistently pro-Israel stance. (Washington Post)
3/ Tehran shrugs off pressures from “inexperienced” U.S. president. Trump and Iran traded sharp statements Thursday, with Trump amplifying warnings over Tehran’s missile tests. (Washington Post)

UPDATE:

U.S. expected to impose fresh sanctions on Iranian entities, following Tehran’s recent ballistic missile test. Trump said earlier on Thursday that “nothing is off the table” in dealing with Iran following the missile launch. (Reuters)
Spicer falsely accuses Iran of attacking U.S. Navy vessel, calling it an act of war. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn said he was “officially putting Iran on notice” following the country’s ballistic missile test and an attack on a Saudi naval vessel – Iran did not attack a U.S. Navy vessel. (The Intercept)
4/ House rolls back rule restricting gun sales to severely mentally ill. Republicans are using the Congressional Review Act to roll back all manner of regulations. Rep. Kevin Brady said the Social Security Administration “overstepped its mission.” The vote was 235-180. (CNN)

5/ Scott Pruitt, Trump’s E.P.A. pick, is approved by Senate committee. Senate Republicans pressed forward with the confirmation of Trump’s controversial nominee, suspending the Environment and Public Works Committee’s rules to approve the cabinet pick despite a Democratic boycott. The 11-0 vote sends the nomination to the full Senate, where Mr. Pruitt is most likely to be approved next week. (NY Times)

6/ Democrats plot protest for Trump’s speech to Congress. Democrats are planning to make Trump’s first speech to Congress as uncomfortable as possible by inviting guests they say will suffer under new White House policies. Trump will likely face a crowd including ethnic minorities, LGBT people, undocumented immigrants, the disabled and others when he addresses a joint session on Feb. 28. (The Hill)

7/ Trump vows to “totally destroy” law restricting political speech by tax-exempt churches, a potentially huge victory for the religious right and a gesture to his political base. Repealing the law would require approval by Congress. (NY Times)

Related:

Trump at national prayer breakfast: “Pray for Arnold… for those ratings”. Trump veered off script at the start of the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday when he asked a room full of lawmakers, foreign dignitaries and religious leaders to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger so that ratings of his show – NBC’s “The Apprentice” – would go up. (CNN)

Schwarzenegger to Trump: “Why Don’t We Switch Jobs?” (NY Times)

Leaked draft of Trump’s religious freedom order reveals sweeping plans to legalize discrimination. If signed, the order would create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity. (The Nation)

8/ An anti-Trump resistance movement is growing within the government. The bureaucracy is fighting back. While dissent among federal workers isn’t unique to the Trump era, the scope of the resistance is unprecedented. (Vanity Fair)

Related:

Distrust in Trump’s White House spurs leaks, confusion. “Trying to nail down who the leakers are is like trying to count the cockroaches under the couch.” (Politico)
9/ Still no executive order on voter fraud, as Trump moves on. A full week has passed since President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order opening a Justice Department investigation into his unsubstantiated claim that millions of people voted illegally in November. The Oval Office signing was abruptly canceled and never rescheduled. The White House hasn’t talked about it since. (CNN)

10/ The G.O.P. campaign to repeal Obamacare hits a wall. Republicans are struggling to come up with a replacement and a key senator has declared that the effort is more a repair job than a demolition. (NY Times)

11/ Shouting match over Russia erupts at House hearing over Russian interference in the presidential election. Th fight exposed bitter frustration amongst Democrats that Republicans have kept the issue locked in a single committee. (The Hill)

News of Lesser Importance:
Gallup Poll: About half of Americans say Trump moving too fast. When Gallup asked the same question in early 2009, 63% said Obama’s pace was about right, with 22% saying it was too fast. (Gallup)

Jon Stewart on Donald Trump: if we survive, he’ll have accidentally proven America’s greatness. “No one action will be adequate. All actions will be necessary,” Stewart said. (Vox)

Is Steve Bannon the second most powerful man in the world? (Time)

America’s leading authoritarian intellectual is working for Trump. (New York Magazine)

Obama’s White House worked for months on a plan to seize Raqqa. Trump’s team took a quick look and decided not to pull the trigger. (Washington Post)

Why Congress just killed a rule restricting coal companies from dumping waste in streams. (Vox)

Ivanka Trump promised to resign from the family business, but hasn’t filed paperwork (ProPublica)

Day 13: Supreme.
02/01/2017 Updated: 02/01/2017 07:07:57 PM PST
1/ Trump Picks Neil Gorsuch, A Scalia Clone, For The Supreme Court. Ideologically, Gorsuch would almost certainly represent a reliably conservative vote and voice. Gorsuch would be the most conservative justice save for the silent stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas and would sit somewhere just to the right of the ideological space occupied by Scalia. (FiveThirtyEight)

UPDATE: What Gorsuch means for the Supreme Court. 13 top legal scholars weigh in. (Politico)
Related:

Where Gorsuch would fit on the Supreme Court. Should he be confirmed, the court will return to a familiar dynamic, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy holding the decisive vote in many closely divided cases. (NY Times)

Who Is Neil Gorsuch? Like Justice Antonin Scalia, Gorsuch has cultivated a reputation as a memorable and clear author of legal opinions. (NPR)

Why Liberals should back Gorsuch. One basic criterion should be paramount: Is the nominee someone who will stand up for the rule of law and say no to a president or Congress that strays beyond the Constitution and laws? (NY Times)

Why Democrats should oppose Gorsuch. The presumption should be that Gorsuch does not deserve confirmation, because the process that led to his nomination was illegitimate. (NY Times)

2/ Trump to McConnell: Go nuclear if necessary. But McConnell, a well-known institutionalist, has been noncommittal about whether he would invoke the so-called “nuclear option” to force Gorsuch through the upper chamber. (The Hill)

Related:

Make Republicans nuke the filibuster to confirm Gorsuch. Once Mitch McConnell blockaded Barack Obama’s last Supreme Court nomination, and then Donald Trump carried the Electoral College, the chance that Republicans would fill the vacancy rose to 100 percent. McConnell already indicated that he does not respect Democrats’ right to filibuster, and that he would eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations if one is used. It is McConnell, his extraordinary blockade tactic, who has functionally changed the rules of the game. He should be forced to do it in name. (New York Magazine)
3/ Rex Tillerson is confirmed as Secretary of State amid record opposition. The votes against Mr. Tillerson’s confirmation were the most in Senate history (NY Times)

4/ Sessions approved by Senate committee. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Sessions 11-9 along party lines. His nomination now goes to the floor, where he is widely expected to be confirmed given the GOP’s 52-seat majority. (The Hill)

5/ Republicans suspend committee rules, advance Mnuchin, Price nominations after confronting a boycott from Democrats. Senate Committee rules normally require at least one Democratic senator present to have a vote. But when Democrats refused to show, the committee’s chairman suspended those rules. (CNN)

6/ Two Republican senators says they aren’t committed to voting for Betsy DeVos on Senate floor. Democrats say they have 48 votes against DeVos on the floor but need 51 — and they have been looking for Republican votes against her. (Washington Post)

UPDATES:

Two GOP senators to vote no on Betsy DeVos. The first two Republicans to break with Trump on his Cabinet picks. (The Hill)
DeVos nomination stands at 50-50. It could come down to Vice President Mike Pence, in what would be a history-making confirmation vote. (Politico)
7/ Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump. Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. (Washington Post)

Related:

State Dept. dissent cable on Trump’s ban goes viral at U.S. embassies, attracting around 1,000 signatures – far more than any dissent cable in recent years. The letter, which harshly took apart the executive order, said the visa ban would “alienate allies” and “hurt America economically.” (NY Times)

Trump transition email shows initial effort to oust all inspectors general. (Washington Post)

8/ White House ices out CNN. Trump administration refuses to put officials on air on the network the president called “fake news.” (Politico)

Related:

Fatigued by the news? Experts suggest how to adjust your media diet. Or, just read WTF Just Happened, Today? instead. (NY Times)

Covering Trump the Reuters way. In a message to staff, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote about covering President Trump the Reuters way. (Reuters)

9/ Bannon thinks there will be war with China in the next few years. Comments on his radio show are re-surfacing as the “special counsellor” assumes unprecedented power in the White House. (The Independent)

UPDATES:

Trump administration “officially putting Iran on notice.” National security adviser, Michael Flynn, issued a statement in reaction to an Iranian missile test and an attack on a Saudi warship by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. “It’s either an empty threat or a clear statement of intent to go to war with Iran.” (The Guardian)
Trump to focus counter-extremism program solely on Islam. (Reuters)
Trump to Mexico: Take care of “bad hombres” or US might. Trump threatened in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart to send U.S. troops to stop “bad hombres down there” unless the Mexican military does more to control them itself. (Associated Press)
News of Lesser Importance:
Bannon explained his worldview well before it became official U.S. policy: countries should protect their citizens and their essence by reducing immigration, legal and illegal, and pulling back from multinational agreements. (Washington Post)

President Trump campaigned as a Washington outsider. But his first Supreme Court nominee has deep roots in the city and the establishment Trump criticized. (NY Times)

How Democrats missed a chance to reshape the Supreme Court for a generation. If it weren’t for 77,744 voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court would have had, for the first time in nearly 50 years, a majority of Democratic-appointed justices. (Vox)

Trump has a message for poor immigrants: Get Out. The ban targeting seven Muslim-majority countries was just the beginning. (The Atlantic)

Tweets to Shake Your Head At:

Day 12: Controversy.
01/31/2017 Updated: 01/31/2017 02:32:07 PM PST
1/ Hill staffers secretly worked on Trump’s immigration order. Several House Judiciary Committee aides helped craft the controversial directive without telling Republican leaders. The news of their involvement helps unlock the mystery of whether the White House consulted Capitol Hill about the executive order, and confirms that the small group of staffers were among the only people on the Hill who knew of the looming controversial policy. (Politico)

UPDATE: San Francisco sues Trump over executive orders it claims are unconstitutional. (LA Times)

Draft executive order points to more immigration restrictions, focusing on protecting U.S. jobs. The Trump administration is considering a plan to weed out would-be immigrants who are likely to require public assistance, as well as to deport — when possible — immigrants already living in the United States who depend on taxpayer help. (Washington Post)
Trump’s travel ban polarizes America. A Jan. 30-31 Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll found that 49 percent of American adults said they either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with Trump’s order, while 41 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” disagreed and another 10 percent said they don’t know. (Reuters)
Related:

Under fire, Trump weighs new changes to refugee ban. The Department of Homeland Security may issue “implementation guidance” that would allow for softening, and even policy changes, to the travel restrictions on migrants. The White House insists that any further guidance wouldn’t constitute a walk-back. (Axios)

White House aides who wrote Trump’s travel ban see it as just the start. (LA Times)

Paul Ryan urges Republicans to back travel ban despite anger over its rollout. (The Guardian)

2/ Obama’s protections for L.G.B.T. workers will remain. The White House said Trump would leave in place a 2014 order that created new protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, pledging to protect the community from violence and oppression. It uses stronger language than any Republican president has before in favor of equal legal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. (NY Times)

3/ DeVos questionnaire appears to include passages from uncited sources. In written responses to questions from senators, DeVos used several sentences and phrases from other sources without attribution. (Washington Post)

4/ Democrats boycott confirmation hearings for Price and Mnuchin, forcing Republicans to reschedule both votes. (Washington Post)

UPDATE: Dems delay Sessions vote. Democrats have fiercely criticized Trump’s executive order and Yates’s firing, and said that any vote for Sessions is a vote to let Trump stifle dissent in his Justice Department. (The Hill)
Related:

Senate Democrats renewed an assault on Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, questioning his independence after the president fired the acting attorney general for refusing to enforce his executive order on immigration. (Bloomberg)
5/ Trump bringing Supreme Court favorites to Washington. Trump is announcing his choice at 8 p.m. EST tonight. (CNN)

Related:

People think Trump is treating his Supreme Court nomination like a reality show. Because he is. (BuzzFeed News)

Democrats shouldn’t go scorched-earth on Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. (Washington Post)

News of Lesser Importance:
How to build an autocracy. The preconditions are present in the U.S. today. Here’s the playbook Donald Trump could use to set the country down a path toward illiberalism. (The Atlantic)

Trump ignored all of Obama’s advice and now he’s in a world of trouble. There’s no need for Obama to hold his tongue anymore. (New Republic)

The tale of a Trump falsehood: How his voter fraud claim spread like a virus. The blow by blow on Trump’s claim that 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants illegally voted in the election. (Washington Post)

The incompetence displayed by Trump’s immigration orders will be terrifying in a crisis. All presidents eventually face a crisis that is not of their own creation. And it will be in the interest of Donald Trump to respond in a calm, well-informed, and effective manner. (Vox)

Can Jared and Ivanka ourun Trump’s Scandals? Less than a fortnight into his new post, Kushner appears unable to control his father-in-law—and is “furious” that his efforts are being undermined. (Vanity Fair)

Fox News’ Sean Hannity: The media ‘doesn’t understand’ Donald Trump. By highlighting pundits and polls that dismissed Trump’s chances of winning the Presidency, Hannity argues, the “mainstream media” effectively delegitimized itself. (Politico)

“When you have The New York Times, a host on CNN, a guest on MSNBC, all calling the President of the United States a liar, if that is their coverage, they will never get their credibility back,” Hannity said. “They don’t understand Donald Trump, they don’t understand the phenomenon, they don’t understand what happened in this election, the level of elitism is breathtaking to me.”
Related:

Kellyanne Conway ramps up Trump’s war on the media. (Fortune)
President Bannon’s hugely destructive first week in office. The puppet master is leading the Trump administration down a road of carnage. (Foreign Policy)

Day 11: Dissent.
01/30/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 08:03:18 PM PST
1/ Acting Attorney General declares Justice Department won’t defend Trump’s immigration order. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Trump’s pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whose views align much more closely with the president’s. (Washington Post)

UPDATE:

Trump fires acting attorney general, after she defiantly refused to defend his immigration executive order. (NY Times)
White House said the attorney general had “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” (Washington Post)
2/ Bannon seizes security role usually held for generals. The move puts Bannon on the same level as the national security adviser. (NY Times)

UPDATE:

Bannon is making sure there’s no White House paper trail. The Trump administration’s chief strategist has already taken control of both policy and process on national security. (Foreign Policy)
How Bannon Took Charge Of The Trump Administration (BuzzFeed News)
3/ Obama rejects comparison between Trump’s immigration policy and his own, saying he fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion, and encourages protests. (Washington Post)

4/ Democrats prepare bill to overturn Trump immigration order. The bill would declare the order “null and void” and bar federal agencies from using any funds to enforce it. The measure faces long odds given that Republicans control Congress and the White House. (Politico)

Related: Senate Dems will filibuster Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. It will be only the second time in modern history that the Senate has mounted a filibuster against a nominee. (Politico)
5/ US Diplomats consider filing “dissent” over immigration ban. Dozens of Foreign Service officers and other career diplomats stationed around the world are so concerned that they are contemplating taking the rare step of sending a formal objection to senior State Department officials in Washington. (ABC News)

Here’s the draft of the memo.

Related: The State Department’s Dissent Channel is a mechanism for employees to confidentially express policy disagreement, created in 1971 as a response to concerns within the Department over the government’s handling of the Vietnam War. (Lawfare)
6/ Trump’s hard-line actions have an intellectual godfather: Jeff Sessions. The senator lobbied for a “shock and awe” period of executive action that would rattle Congress, impress Trump’s base and catch his critics unaware. Trump opted for a slightly slower pace, because he wanted to maximize news coverage by spreading out his directives over several weeks. (Washington Post)

Related: How Trump’s rush to enact an immigration ban unleashed global chaos. The confusion that erupted is the story of a White House that rushed to enact with little regard for basic governing. The secretary of homeland security was on a White House conference call getting his first full briefing on policy as Trump signed the sweeping executive order to shut the borders. (NY Times)

Related: From order to disorder: How Trump’s immigration directive exposed GOP rifts. (Washington Post)

7/ Kellyanne Conway defends Trump’s criticism of GOP Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, saying Republicans need to back his leadership. Conway also asserted that Trump had accomplished an impressive amount in the short time since he took office, calling his achievements “breathtaking.” (ABC News)

Related: McCain, Graham broke the GOP silence on Capitol Hill, issuing a scathing condemnation of Trump’s ban on travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries. (CNN)
8/ Trump signs executive order requiring that for every one new regulation, two must be revoked. (Politico)

9/ Tracking congress in the age of Trump. How often every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president. (FiveThirtyEight)

Day 10: Embarrassment.
01/29/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:55 PM PST
1/ Trump’s first defeat. The immigration order creates an international mess and a political embarrassment. The hastily crafted order was temporarily and partially blocked by a U.S. District Court Judge. (Politico)

UPDATE: Trump doubles down on his executive order barring refugees and some legal immigrants from entering the United States, even as one of his top aides walked back one major element of the order, signaling a growing sense of confusion and fissures within the 10-day-old administration. (Politico)

Bannon’s longtime suspicion of successful immigrants is the key to this weekend’s chaos. (Vox)
2/ Despite growing dissent, Trump gives no sign of backing down from travel ban even as lawmakers from both parties spoke out against the action and federal judges ruled against parts of it. Judicial rulings in several cities across the country overnight immediately blocked enforcement of the ban to various degrees, but the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement early Sunday indicating it would continue to implement President Trump’s action. (Washington Post)

UPDATE: 271 Republicans in Congress have taken no position on Trump’s refugee ban. (Vox)

Trump approval rating: 42% (Gallup)
3/ A clarifying moment in American history. There should be nothing surprising about what the Donald Trump has done in his first week, but he had underestimated the resilience of Americans and their institutions. (The Atlantic)

4/ Donald Trump, the refugee ban, and the triumph of cruelty. The reasons for Trump’s ban on refugees could not be more feeble, and could not be more petty. It serves no actual security purpose. You have a better chance of getting killed by a train, or by your own clothes catching on fire, than by an immigrant terrorist attack. The odds of a refugee killing you in a terrorist strike are about 1 in 3.6 billion. That’s about four hundred times less likely than being hit by lightning twice. If you look back at significant terrorist attacks in the US like San Bernardino or the Pulse nightclub shooting or 9/11, exactly none of them would have been prevented by this policy. (Vox)

5/ Trump puts Bannon on security council, dropping joint chiefs. The reshuffling of the National Security Council downgrades the military chiefs and gives a regular seat to his chief strategist Steve Bannon. The director of national intelligence and the joint chiefs will attend when discussions pertain to their areas. (BBC)

Trump chief-of-staff Reince Priebus will also have a seat in the meetings. (The Guardian)

UPDATE: McCain blasts Bannon placement on National Security Council,calling the move “radical” because it minimizes the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Politico)
6/ Trump signs two more executive actions. The first bans administration officials who leave government from lobbying those federal agencies for five years, fulfilling a campaign pledge. The second is a memorandum giving military leaders 30 days to construct and present a “comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS,” stating that “there can be no accommodation or negotiation” with the group. (The Hill)

7/ Trump’s state department purge sparks worries of ‘know-nothing approach’ to foreign policy. The sudden dismissal of several senior officials has left a gaping hole at the heart of US diplomacy: “The machinery is still there, but no one’s in the cockpit.” (The Guardian)

8/ Trump continued his longstanding assault on media outlets. This time labeling the NY Times as “fake news,” and said that it and the Washington Post’s coverage of Trump has been “so false and angry.” It is unclear as to what prompted Trump’s criticism. (Politico)

9/ The White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Jews or anti-Semitism because “others were killed too.” (CNN)

From Earlier:

Trump’s First Week: Misfires, Crossed Wires and a Satisfied Smile. No president in modern times, if ever, has started with such a flurry of initiatives on so many fronts in such short order. (NY Times)

The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly – and perhaps only – by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction. (Lawfare)

Day 9: Unreal.
01/28/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:56 PM PST
1/ Trump’s order blocks immigrants at airports, stoking fear around the globe. The executive order suspended entry of all refugees to the United States for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The Department of Homeland Security said that the executive order also barred green card holders from those countries from re-entering the United States. White House officials said that green card holders from the seven affected countries who are outside the United States would need a case-by-case waiver to return to the United States. (NY Times)

UPDATE: A federal judge in Brooklyn came to the aid of scores of refugees who were trapped at airports across the United States.

The judge’s ruling blocked part of the president’s actions, preventing the government from deporting some arrivals who found themselves ensnared by the presidential order. But it stopped short of letting them into the country or issuing a broader ruling on the constitutionality of Trump’s actions.
Meanwhile…

I bet, Paul Ryan.

Right.

2/ A federal judge issued a stay against Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban”. The ruling – a stunning defeat for Trump at the end of his first week in office – protects from deportation refugees or visa holders who were detained at American airports since the signing of so-called “Muslim ban.” It also protects those in transit when the emergency ruling was filed. (Mother Jones)

3/ Trudeau says Canada will take refugees banned by U.S. He also intends to talk to Trump about the success of Canada’s refugee policy. (PBS)

4/ Inside the confusion of the Trump executive order and travel ban. Administration officials weren’t immediately sure which countries’ citizens would be barred from entering the United States. The Department of Homeland Security was left making a legal analysis on the order after Trump signed it. A Border Patrol agent, confronted with arriving refugees, referred questions only to the President himself, according to court filings. (CNN)

5/ Facing intense criticism, some Republicans are speaking out against Trump’s refugee ban. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell aren’t among them. (Washington Post)

6/ The silence from Silicon Valley had been deafening. After weeks of deafening silence and quiet acquiescence, top tech leaders finally began to react strongly to policies of the new administration, spurred by a capricious immigration ban on some Muslim countries ordered by Trump. (Recode)

7/ ‘Up Is Down’: Trump’s unreality show echoes his business past. Trump’s falsehoods have long been viewed as a reflexive extension of his vanity, or as his method of compensating for deep-seated insecurities. But throughout his business career, Trump’s most noteworthy deceptions often did double duty, serving not just his ego but also important strategic goals. Mr. Trump’s habitually inflated claims about his wealth, for example, fed his self-proclaimed image of a business genius even as they attracted lucrative licensing deals built around the Trump brand. (NY Times)

8/ How hyper-targeted pyschometric data helped Trump win election. Granular personality data might have been the key to the candidate’s unexpected victory where online quizzes were correlated with public Facebook Likes. (The Outline)

Day 8: Banned.
01/27/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:57 PM PST
1/ Trump executive order suspends admission of all refugees for 120 days while a new system is put in place to tighten vetting for those from predominantly Muslim countries and give preference to religious minorities. Trump said that the goal is to screen out “radical Islamic terrorists” and that priority for admission would be given to Christians. (Washington Post)

2/ The extreme vetting plan to establishes a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations. The order also stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and bars entry into the United States for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries linked to concerns about terrorism. Those countries are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. (NY Times)

3/ The order will block 500,000 legal U.S. residents from returning to American from trips abroad. The president has also used language that will affect those who are in the U.S. already on visas and green cards. (ProPublica)

4/ Trump’s immigration ban excludes countries with business ties. His proposed list doesn’t include Muslim-majority countries where his Trump Organization has done business or pursued potential deals. Properties include golf courses in the United Arab Emirates and two luxury towers operating in Turkey. (Bloomberg)

5/ Trump’s immigration ban is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin. (NY Times)

6/ Following Trump’s executive order green card, visa holders already blocked by airports. Within hours of the executive order limiting immigration from Muslim countries, green card and visa holders were already being blocked from getting on flights to the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security issued a directive at 4:30 p.m. ordering the Customs and Border Protection to enforce the executive order. People who were still in the air as of 10:30 p.m. likely face being blocked at the airport when their planes land, he said. (NY Daily News)

7/ A little-noticed move by Trump could make it easier to deport immigrants. The move stripped federal privacy protections from many immigrants, raising fears among advocacy groups that information people willingly submitted to the federal government during the Obama administration could now be used to help deport them. (Washington Post)

8/ Governing without a script. Trumps seems to be running his administration much like he ran his company and campaign, eager to weigh in on every issue and willing to make last-minute calls. (Wall Stree Journal)

9/ Trump blows up the U.S.-Mexico relationship. In one of his first instances of Twitter diplomacy as President, Trump wrote, “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.” Not surprisingly, Peña Nieto cancelled. (The New Yorker)

10/ The theater of access. Trump’s relationship with the media may be obsessive, but it’s also deeply transactional — the media has always been a tool in his pursuit of fame and power. (NY Times)

11/ The Bannon coup. White House and Hill GOP leaders are astonished by the unambiguous, far-reaching power of Steve Bannon and policy guru Stephen Miller over, well, just about everything.(Axios)

12/ Trump’s first seven days in office were historic, chaotic, astonishing and unsettling. With a flurry of provocative executive orders, surreal events, unapologetic falsehoods and did-he-really-say-that tweets, Trump continued to obliterate political norms, serving notice that the gaze of history won’t change who he is. He made so much news and did so many unorthodox things that it was hard to keep track of everything that was changing in Washington. The question, though, is what did all that sound and fury signify? (Politico)

13/ Republican lawmakers fret about how to repeal Obamacare. Republican lawmakers aired sharp concerns about their party’s quick push to repeal the Affordable Care Act inside a closed-door meeting Thursday, according to a recording of the session obtained by The Washington Post. (Washington Post)

14/ Pence vows “full evaluation of voting rolls” over claims of fraud. In a private meeting with congressional Republicans this week, the Trump administration would pursue a wide-ranging probe of voting rolls in the United States to examine whether millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election as President Trump has charged. (Washington Post)

15/ Can a president who disregards the truth uphold his oath of office? His job demands a basic level of respect for the concepts of law and meaning. (Washington Post)

16/ Trump backers like his first draft of a New America. Trump voters interviewed said they cared little if the president spouted off on Twitter because he was issuing the kind of executive actions many had long craved — freezing federal grant money for environmental research, banning foreign aid for groups that give abortion counseling and cutting off immigration from several Muslim-majority nations. (NY Times)

Day 7: Shut it.
01/26/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:57 PM PST
1/ Steve Bannon says media should “keep its mouth shut.” Trump’s chief strategist, laced into the American press during an interview, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration. (NY Times)

2/ One of the greatest threats Trump poses is that he corrupts and corrodes the absoluteness of truth, facts and science. It is no coincidence that the rise of Trump is concurrent with the rise of “fake news.” It is no coincidence that his rise comes during an age of severely damaged faith in institutions. Our president is a pathological liar. Say it. Write it. Never become inured to it. And dispense with the terms of art to describe it. A lie by any other name portends the same. (NY Times)

3/ Fake news is about to get even scarier than you ever dreamed. What we saw in the 2016 election is nothing compared to what we need to prepare for in 2020. If there’s one thing we learned from this election cycle, it is that there are a number of reasons that people create fake-news stories. And, it has become clear that most new consumers don’t want to know if what they are reading is real or fake; they just want to know that it helps support their worldview. (Vanity Fair)

4/ The State Department’s entire senior management team resigned. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned as part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era. (Washington Post)

5/ The Trump administration’s day one moves were copied from Mitt Romney’s would-be playbook. Literally. (Buzzfeed)

6/ Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his claims about inauguration crowd. (Washington Post)

7/ (The cost of) Trump’s wall keeps getting higher and higher. Republican Congressional leaders signaled plans to move forward with Trump’s planned border wall, estimated to cost between $12 billion and $15 billion. That’s well below many outside estimates of the construction cost (let alone maintenance), but is significantly higher than what Trump himself has said in the past. (Axios)

8/ Americans think Trump will be worst president since Nixon. Voters are so dim on Trump that they think, in the first week of his administration, that he will prove to be a worse President than everyone who’s held the office since Richard Nixon. (Public Policy Polling)

tl;dr The full (tweetstorm) that ends with this whopper:

Day 6: Declining trust.
01/25/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:58 PM PST
1/ Trump’s voter fraud example? A troubled tale about Bernhard Langer meant to illustrate rampant, unchecked voter fraud. (NY Times)

tl;dr Langer was standing in line at a polling place on Election Day. Ahead of and behind Langer were voters who “did not look as if they should be allowed to vote.” Langer left feeling frustrated. Here’s the problem: Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting.
2/ Declining trust in government is denting democracy. America, which has long defined itself as a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a “flawed democracy” according to the taxonomy used in the annual Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Although its score did not fall by much – from 8.05 in 2015 to 7.98 in 2016 – it was enough for it to slip just below the 8.00 threshold for a “full democracy”. (The Economist)

3/ Trump’s impulses now carry the force of the presidency. Impetuous and instinctive, convinced of broad, but hidden plots to undermine him, eager to fight and prone to what an aide called “alternative facts,” Trump has shown in just days in office that he is like few if any occupants of the White House before him. (NY Times)

4/ Those flashy executive actions could run aground. The White House failed to consult with many of the agencies and lawmakers who will be critical for their success. (Politico)

5/ Oh, and Donald Trump is building his wall on the Mexico border as undocumented crossing reaches a 40-year low. In taking his first step towards building a US-Mexico border wall, Trump begins an attack on a vanishing issue. (Quartz)

6/ Tweetstorm by Maggie Haberman of the NY Times. (Twitter)

Day 5: Command and control.
01/24/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:59 PM PST
1/ Trump believes millions voted illegally – but provides no proof. The claim has long been debunked. (CNN)

2/ Trump orders the construction of a Mexican border wall. It’s the first in a series of actions to curtail immigration and bolster national security. It includes slashing the number of refugees who can resettle in the United States and blocks Syrians and others from “terror prone” nations from entering temporarily. (NY Times)

3/ Federal works told to stop talking to Congress and the press. The freeze has startled aides on the Hill and people at those agencies, who worry that it could abruptly upend current operations and stifle work and discussions that routinely take place between branches of government. (Huffington Post)

4/ Trump has imposed a freeze on grants and contracts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (ProPublica) Trump also banned employees from giving social media updates and speaking with reporters. (The Hill)

5/ USDA scientists have been put on lockdown. “Starting immediately and until further notice” the department’s main research division “will not release any public-facing documents,” according to an internal memo. UPDATE: The order was rescinded by the department on Tuesday. (Buzzfeed)

6/ USDA disavows gag-order emailed to scientific research unit. An internal email sent to staff at its Agricultural Research Service unit this week calling for a suspension of “public-facing documents,” including news releases and photos, was flawed and that new guidance has been sent out to replace it. (Reuters)

7/ A National Park deleted tweets on climate change after Trump silenced federal scientists. The tweets were posted by a former employee and officials decided to delete them because the account had been “compromised,” a National Parks official said. (Buzzfeed)

8/ GOP Rep.: ‘Better to get your news directly from the president.” The chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee said that Donald Trump was a more credible news source than the entire press corps. (Talking Points Memo)

Spicer: The media “disposition should be” Trump is correct “unless we can prove otherwise”

“…at some point, the disposition should be he is going to do it unless we can prove otherwise. He has shown through every step of the way that he’s going to win. And so it just seems to me it’s just odd that if those are the odds, if you are looking at his track record, the track record is a proven track record of success and winning. And yet, the media’s default is on every scenario, whether it’s hasn’t nominees getting through or winning a primary or him accomplishing something, it’s immediately negative and a failure.” (Media Matters)
9/ Trump’s disregard for the truth threatens his ability to govern. In the first five days of his presidency, Trump has put the enormous power of the nation’s highest office behind spurious — and easily disproved — claims. (Washington Post)

10/ Trump dogged by insecurity over popular vote, media coverage. He might hold the most powerful office in the world, but he’s dogged by insecurity over his loss of the popular vote in the election and a persistent frustration that the legitimacy of his presidency is being challenged by Democrats and the media, aides and associates say. (Associated Press)

11/ For Trump, everything is a rating. Trump spent his first weekend in office at war with math. He said that his inauguration crowd — which photographs showed was dwarfed by Barack Obama’s estimated 1.8 million in 2009 — “looked like a million, a million and a half.” His staff members backed up that claim with what his adviser Kellyanne Conway memorably termed “alternative facts.” (NY Times)

12/ Trump 101: What he reads and watches.

With an allergy to computers and phones, he works the papers. With a black Sharpie in hand, he marks up the Times or other printed stories. When he wants action or response, he scrawls the staffers’ names on that paper and either hands the clip to them in person, or has a staffer create a PDF of it — with handwritten commentary — and email it to them. An amazed senior adviser recently pulled out his phone to show us a string of the emailed PDFs, all demanding response. It was like something from the early 90s. Even when he gets worked up enough to tweet, Trump told us in our interview he will often simply dictate it, and let his staff hit “send” on Twitter. (Axios)
13/ “We the People” demand Trump release his tax returns. One of the features on the White House website that didn’t vanish when President Trump took the oath of office on Friday is the “We the People” page, which allows ordinary Americans to petition their government to address an issue of importance to them. The Obama White House, which created the feature, responded to petitions that received at least 100,000 signatures within 30 days. (NY Times)

Day 4: The Upside Down.
01/23/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:14:59 PM PST
1/ The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot. President Trump had just returned to the White House on Saturday from his final inauguration event, a tranquil interfaith prayer service, when the flashes of anger began to build. (Washington Post)

2/ Spicer: ‘Negative’ Trump coverage is ‘demoralizing’ The White House press secretary pushed back at what he said was negative coverage of the Trump White House, describing the media narrative as “demoralizing. It’s not just about a crowd size. There’s this constant theme to undercut the enormous support he has,” Spicer said of Trump. (The Hill)

3/ No White House leaks like this… unitl now. The Trump White House not only leaks like crazy. It casually leaks the most intimate and humiliating details about the President - hurt feelings, ego injury, childlike behavior, self-destructive rages over tweets, media failure to credit his own grandiosity. We have simply never seen this level of leaking, with this little respect for the President’s dignity or reputation, this early. (Talking Points Memo)

4/ Without evidence, Trump tells lawmakers 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote. Days after being sworn in, President Trump insisted to congressional leaders invited to a reception at the White House that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for millions of illegal votes, according to people familiar with the meeting. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, even while he clinched the presidency with an electoral college victory. (Washington Post)

5/ Why Trump’s staff is lying. One of the most striking features of the early Trump administration has been its political uses of lying. The big weekend story was the obviously false claim that Trump pulled in the largest inauguration crowds in American history. This raises the question of why a leader might find it advantageous to promote such lies from his subordinates. (Bloomber)

6/ The Right is building a new media “upside down” to tell Trump’s story. Armed with its own set of facts, the right has created a parallel media universe that’s risen all the way with Trump to the White House. (Buzzfeed)

7/ Trump pays a fence mending visit to the CIA after weeks of mocking U.S. intelligence officials. Trump told staffers that he’s now with them, “a thousand percent.” (NPR)

8/ An official said the visit “made relations with the intelligence community worse” and described the visit as “uncomfortable.” (CBS News)

9/ Trump names his Inauguration Day a ‘National Day of Patriotic Devotion’. (Washington Post)

Day 3: Alternative facts.
01/22/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:15:00 PM PST
1/ The Trump Administration started with a big lie over a small thing. It wasn’t about an affair with an intern or in an attempt to wage war. The Trump administration kicked off with a whopper about the media’s role in maliciously minimizing the crowd size for Trump’s inauguration in a dastardly attempt to make him look bad. (The Daily Best)

2/ Crowd scientists say Women’s March in Washington was three times the size of the audience at Trump’s inauguration (NY Times), and may have been the largest demonstration in US history. Marches held in more than 500 US cities were attended by at least 3.3 million people. (Vox)

3/ Kellyanne Conway said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the White House had put forth “alternative facts” to ones reported by the news media about the size of Mr. Trump’s inauguration crowd. (NY Times)

KELLYANNE CONWAY: Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What– You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains–

CHUCK TODD: Wait a minute– Alternative facts?

KELLYANNE CONWAY: –that there’s–

CHUCK TODD: Alternative facts? Four of the five facts he uttered, the one thing he got right–

KELLYANNE CONWAY: –hey, Chuck, why– Hey Chuck–

CHUCK TODD: –was Zeke Miller. Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true. Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.
4/ Alternative facts are a needless lie by the Trump Administration. If the president and his aides will tell easily disproven falsehoods about crowd sizes and speeches, what else will they be willing to dissemble about? (The Atlantic)

5/ The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it. The presidency is not a reality show, but President Trump on his first full day in office made clear that he’s still obsessed with being what he once proudly called “a ratings machine.” (Washington Post)

6/ The costs of Trump-branded reality: America’s credibility. When Trump swore the presidential oath, he assumed responsibility not only for the levers of government but also for one of the United States’ most valuable assets, battered though it may be: its credibility. (NY Times)

7/ Meanwhile, Trump’s top aides are troubled by his rocky first weekend in office, unfolded much the way things often did during his campaign: with angry Twitter messages, a familiar obsession with slights and a series of meandering and at times untrue statements, all eventually giving way to attempts at damage control. (NY Times)

8/ WikiLeaks calls out Trump for refusing to release tax returns. (Politico)

9/ Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments, a team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers say. (NY Times)

Day 2: War on media.
01/21/2017 Updated: 01/30/2017 07:15:01 PM PST
1/ Photos comparing Trump’s inauguration crowd to the Women’s March (CNN)

2/ White House press secretary Sean Spicer attacked media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, contradicting all available data. Aerial photos have indicated that former president Barack Obama’s first inauguration attracted a much larger crowd. Nielsen ratings show that Obama also had a bigger television audience. Spicer, at times almost yelling while reading a prepared statement, took no questions. (CNN)

3/ Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd. (NY Times)

4/ Trump says he has “running war” with media, criticizes the “dishonest media,” gets facts wrong, in CIA speech. (CNN)

5/ At CIA headquarters, Trump denies feud, lashed out at critics, boasted of his magazine covers, and exaggerated the size of the crowd at his inauguration. (Politico)

6/ Trump’s real war isn’t with the media. It’s with facts. He needs to delegitimize the media because he needs to delegitimize facts. (Vox)

Day 1: How it begins.
01/20/2017 Updated: 02/06/2017 12:06:51 PM PST
1/ Donald Trump has named only 29 of his 660 executive department appointments, the Partnership for Public Service said. (NY Times)

2/ Trump boasted his inauguration would have an “unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.” But aerial shots of the National Mall from Obama’s 2009 inauguration and today show that isn’t likely. (Vox)

3/ All references to climate change have been deleted from the White House website. The only mention of climate on Trump’s new website is under his “America First Energy Plan” page, in which he vows to destroy Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which is a government-wide plan to reduce carbon emissions and address climate change. (Motherboard)

4/ New poll shows Obamacare is more popular than Donald Trump. Fox News finds that 50% of voters feel favorably about the Affordable Care Act compared to Donald Trump, whom 42% view favorably. President Obama received an approval rating of 60%. (Vox)

5/ There’s no record Trump has resigned from his companies. To transfer control of his companies, the president has to submit filings in Florida, Delaware and New York. We spoke to officials in each of those states. (ProPublica)

Learn more about this project.

What The Fuck Just Happened Today? by Matt Kiser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

generalfrevious said:

Trump is immunized from impeachment for good

Don’t be daft. He’s gone on record as being opposed to forced immunizations for impeachment, it causes autism or so he says. You can’t impeach an autistic President.

OK seriously, everybody stop! We cannot give zero upon zero ratings. Let’s be reasonable here.

TV’s Frink said:

Stinky-Dinkins said:

OK seriously, everybody stop! We cannot give zero upon zero ratings.

Well if we’re trying to blow up the forum we can.

If we’re really gonna go through with this Frink like we always talked about, I need you to whirl your coat around and distract these fuckers. I’ll be using the distraction to shelter away my precious dirty bird. He hates me but you know how much I love him.

Digging these rational debates tonight, guys!