-By Warner Todd Huston
Donald Trump has now spent a full week in office as our 45th president. There have been a few ups, a few downs, maybe a misstep or two, but he has already started into fulfilling his long list of campaign promises. From the firing Obama appointees, the beginning the end for Obamacare, to building the wall on the southern border, Trump has set to his agenda with gusto. So, here are some of the things President Trump did in his first 7 days.
One of Trump’s first actions as our chief executive was to start the ball rolling for the elimination of Obamacare by signing an executive order to “minimize the economic burden” of some of Obamacare’s key provisions. He did this only a few hours after he took the oath of office. It is still a bit unclear exactly what his order will do, but according to many experts it will undermine the “mandate” that forces all Americans to buy insurance whether they want it (or can afford it) or not. If the mandate is canceled that would gut Obamacare (officially known as the Affordable Care Act) which only works because everyone is forced to participate. But even if Trump’s order doesn’t do as much as some hope to eliminate Obamacare, it signals his determination to continue dismantling the law. This is the first steps toward fulfilling an important campaign promise for the President.
Trump will likely do far more on Obamacare than signing this one order, but it was symbolic for how important he felt the issue was that it became one of his first actions. The ball for most of this, though, will be in the hands of the GOP led Congress and there are still many sides arguing about just how soon Obamacare will be ended and when or even if a replacement is had for the law.
Also on January 20, right after his inauguration, Trump signed paperwork to authorize defense secretary James Mattis, and homeland security John Kelly.
A successful first day in office was soon followed by the first “controversy” manufactured by the Old Media complex when the media began to “report” on misleading photos depicting Trump’s inauguration crowd and comparing it to Obama’s 2009 crowd (an unfair comparison by any measure).
The photos used were of the Obama crowd as he took the oath but Trump’s crowd before the final number of attendees were able to get through both the protesters and the heightened security. The media began to make all manner of unsupportable claims about Trump’s crowd vs Obama’s and it wasn’t long before Trump sent out his new press secretary, Sean Spicer, to call the media out for its misrepresentations.
The media was furious for being called on the carpet and began floating stories that “Trump lied” about the crowds. It is likely true that Trump’s audience on the ground in D.C. that day was fewer than that of Obama’s incredible showing in 2008 — after all, Obama WAS the first black man elected president. But when all the facts were gathered it turned out that while Trump likly had the biggest number of viewers in history when you add Internet and TV viewers together. Even the liberals at TechCrunch.com admitted as much.
In a second manufactured media “controversy,” when the President spoke at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, on January 21 he revisited the inauguration day crowd size discussion as he spoke in front of the wall displaying the stars that represent all the fallen CIA operatives since the agency’s founding. This, the media claimed, was disrespectful. Many also insisted that no president has ever disrespected the CIA while speaking in front of the wall of fallen officers. The New York Times, for instance, called it a “shocking affront” to the CIA.
Setting aside the hypocrisy of the Times and the rest of the left-wing media suddenly all concerned over the tender sensibilities of the CIA, it is simply untrue that no other president has dissed the CIA in front of the wall of fallen officers. In fact, Barack Obama did it only a few months after his first inauguration.
Speaking in the exact same spot Trump did, in April of 2009 Obama used some of his time to defend the release of documents that accused CIA operatives of being guilty of “torture.” So, Obama called our intelligence operatives monsters, to their faces and in front of the wall of fallen officers. That seems mighty insulting, doesn’t it? Naturally, as it rushed to attack Trump, the media didn’t seem to recall what Obama did.
There were already several other lies the media launched to damage Trump, including ABC’s deceptive editing of comments by former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. The edits made it seem as if Fleischer was attacking Trump Press Sec. Sean Spicer. After Fleischer pointed out the misleading edits ABC was forced to apologize for its fake news.
But back to our time line of Trump’s first actions. The following bullet points are some more of those actions:
- The President quickly put a halt to the outgoing Obama HUD secretary Julian Castro’s order that cuts were to be made to interest premiums on FHA mortgages.
- Team Trump totally revamped the White House website including eliminating Obama’s leftwing pronouncements on climate change, energy, and gay issues. He added pages titled, “America First Energy Plan,” “America First Foreign Policy,” “Bringing Back Jobs and Growth,” and “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community.”
- He canceled a hearing by the Department of Justice where Obama hoped to eliminate the voter ID laws in Texas.
- Got the go ahead from the Office of Legal Counsel to hire his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a White House advisor.
- Told the National Park Service and the EPA to stop tweeting about global warming until he could get his own people in place in those departments.
- Announced and set in motion plans to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
- Told the media he is preparing to offer a Supreme Court nominee.
- Announced a major investigation into voter fraud during the 2016 election.
- Signed orders to proceed with the building of the Keystone XL and Dakota oil pipelines.
- Trump also froze the Obama’s transfer of $221 million he was trying to send to the Palestinians.
Trump also took four other important steps to fulfill campaign promises.
On Monday, January 23, Trump returned to supporting the “Mexico City Policy,” a pro-life policy that prevents the federal government from sending federal dollars overseas if that money would end up being used to fund abortions in those countries. The Mexico City Policy was one of Obama’s earliest actions, too, only he canceled the policy so that U.S. funds could be spent on abortions in foreign countries.
Only a few days later, the House of Representatives voted to make the Hyde Amendment permanent. Currently the amendment is tacked onto spending bills to prevent U.S. tax dollars from gong to fund abortion but it is a measure that has to be added each time a new spending bill is passed. The new House vote wold make it permanent and automatic instead of being a provision that has to be renewed each time.
In an additional move on the pro-life front, Vice President Mike Pence will become the first sitting VP ever to address the March For Life which is scheduled for Friday. Pence was a staunch pro-life governor of Indiana and Trump’s approval of the Pence approval at the pro-life march is yet another sign that Trump will be a very pro-life president. This should calm the fears of many Christian voters who didn’t believe Trump’s pro-life rhetoric during the campaign, too.
Also on Monday, Trump signed an order pledging to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, another action he promised he’d take once elected. Trump called the order a “Great thing for the American worker, what we just did.”
Of course, Trump’s order doesn’t immediately affect TPP because it had yet to be approved by Congress. What it does mean, though, is that the trade deal no longer has the baking of the White House as it did under Obama. That makes the likelihood of its passage in Congress very, very unlikely.
In still another Monday action, Trump announced a hiring freeze for all federal departments except law enforcement and the military. Trump touted the move as a budget cutting measure.
“Some people are working two, three jobs just to get by. And to see money get wasted in Washington on a job that is duplicative is insulting to the hard work that they do to pay their taxes,” Press Sec Spicer said of the freeze on Monday.
On Tuesday the President announced another freeze, but this time it was a freezing of implementation of the last stacks of Obama regulations that had not yet been implemented. The administration sent out a blizzard of emails and notices that the official publication of Obama’s thousands and thousands of regulations were being suspended until the White House could review them all. It’s as good as a death knell or them.
The freeze of Obama’s last avalanche of regulations is only the first step in the rolling back of regulations that Obama already implemented, of course. Trump has promised — and it looks like he is going to deliver — a major campaign to eliminate Obama’s destructive regulatory state.
Up to Thursday Trump had yet to make any moves on the immigration front and the lack of action was worrying many supporters, especially since doing something about Muslim immigration and illegal immigration was a major part of his campaign for the White House.
Still, on Wednesday, Trump had already began to move on immigration by signing an order affirming that the wall on the southern border would be built. At a signing at the headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump told the American people that his administration was dedicated to building the wall.
Still, up to that point he had yet to make any other, stronger, or more consequential moves on immigration. That ended on Thursday when drafts of the order he is set to sign was seen to order a tightening of the vetting process for Muslim immigrants. The order will also put an immediate halt to the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States. The signing of these measures is scheduled for Friday.
There were quite a few other smaller moves made by the new Trump administration, including the firing of senior staff at the State Department to get rid of Obama’s career leftist foreign service officers. But the list above is quite momentous, indeed, and shows the direction Donald Trump will take as President of the United States.
Clearly he is set to become the “fixer in chief” as he sets about to repair the damage done by Barack Obama. If Trump does even half of what he has set out to do, he will make Obama truly a “coma in history.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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