Here’s Every Action Trump Took In His Fifth Unpresidented Week As POTUS
In President Trump’s fifth week in office, the Trump-Russia plot thickened, Trump moved to quiet dissent, he echoed Bannon at CPAC, and his verbal attacks on the media turned to action.
Here is every action President Trump, and his administration, took during his fifth week as President of the United States:
Fifth Weekend (Feb 18–19)
President Trump’s weekend kicked off with some casual quieting of dissent.
- National Security Council aide Craig Deare was abruptly dismissed after reports surfaced claiming that he criticized President Trump, Bannon, and the growing disfunction in the White House
- This came after one of Ben Carson’s most loyal aides, Shermichael Singleton, was dismissed and escorted out of the Housing and Urban Development building on Thursday after an op-ed surfaced of Singleton criticizing Trump. A source said that Ben Carson had no idea the dismissal was coming and was “baffled” and “speechless” by the move
Trump also made a military move.
- The US sent an aircraft carrier into the South China Sea for the first time under the Trump Administration
Trump took to Twitter to attack the media over their reporting of the White House’s dysfunction.
Don’t believe the main stream (fake news) media.The White House is running VERY WELL. I inherited a MESS and am in the process of fixing it.
On Saturday night, President Trump held a rally in Melbourne, FL and proceeded to create some fake news of his own. He made up a terrorist “incident” in Sweden.
Trump, discussing terror, seamlessly mentions incident “last night in Sweden”. There was NO “incident” in Sweden last night. https://t.co/XtcC4PRiNU
(He later tried to “clarify” statement with a tweet saying he was referring to the Tucker Carson’s segment on immigration and crime in Sweden, but he certainly didn’t make that clear in his speech)
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos got into a Twitter beef on Saturday after a school she said seemed to be in “receive mode,” passively waiting to receive instruction on what and how to teach, fired back:
This is what Sec. DeVos said about our teachers after her visit. Needless to say, we’re about to take her to school… @dcpublicschools
On Sunday, a story from The New York Times broke about how Trump’s associates (Michael Cowen and Russian-born Felix Sater among them) outlined a secret Ukraine-Russia peace deal as a way to lift sanctions on Russia…It was hand delivered to non-other than former national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Fifth Week (Feb 20–24)
Monday Feb 20
- President Trump started off Presidents Day in a very respectful and presidential manner
Give the public a break – The FAKE NEWS media is trying to say that large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully. NOT!
- Replacing Michael Flynn, President Trump names Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser
- This isn’t a Trump action, but must be noted: NBC News reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing a Psychological Dossier on President Trump and “among their preliminary conclusions is that the new American leader is a risk-taker who can be naïve”
Tuesday Feb 21
- The Department of Homeland security laid out their plans and issued orders to deal with illegal immigration. According to USA TODAY, “the memos instruct all agents — including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — to identify, capture and quickly deport every undocumented immigrant they encounter”
- After Trump denounced anti-semitism, The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect called his statement “a pathetic asterisk of condescension”
- The Washington Post reported how Trump spent his first month in office: Golf: 25 hours. Tweeting: 13 hours. Intelligence briefings: 6 hours
Wednesday Feb 22
- President Trump withdrew Obama-era rules that protected the rights of transgender students to use bathrooms that coincide with their gender identity
- President Trump is reportedly gutting arts programs like the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities (which funds NPR and PBS), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to save just 0.0625% of the federal budget
- Bloomberg reported that “President Donald Trump’s plan to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants is likely to trigger waves of lawsuits that may soon dwarf the legal fight over the administration’s temporary ban on travelers from seven Muslim majority countries”
- Police began arresting protestors at the Dakota Access Pipeline on Wednesday, and by Thursday, they were all removed
- “Thousands of emails show that the E.P.A. chief worked to battle environmental regulation as attorney general of Oklahoma. Scott Pruitt, now head of the Environmental Protection Agency, closely coordinated with major oil and gas producers, electric utilities, and political groups to roll back environmental regulations” — The New York Times
Thursday Feb 23
- CNN reported that “the FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign”
- “In a CNN interview, Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Artemenko said he discussed his left-field proposal for Ukraine in January with US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who offered to deliver the plan to the Trump administration”
- President Trump called the recent immigration raids a “military operation”
- According to The Washington Post, “Trump has largely benched the State Department from its long-standing role as the preeminent voice of U.S. foreign policy, curtailing public engagement and official travel and relegating Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to a mostly offstage role. Tillerson has also been notably absent from White House meetings with foreign leaders”
- President Trump said he wants to greatly increase the US’ nuclear arsenal
- The Trump administration said they plan to enforce federal marijuana laws, putting states on notice
Friday Feb 24
- President Trump started his morning off bashing the FBI:
The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security “leakers” that have permeated our government for a long time. They can’t even……
find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW
- Trump administration sought to enlist intelligence officials and key lawmakers to counter news stories about ties to Russia. — The Washington Post
- Trump spoke at CPAC. The New York Times put it best:
Stephen K. Bannon brought the battle plan. President Trump brought the fight. A day after his secretive chief strategist laid out a hard-edged new definition of conservatism animated by attacks on “the administrative state,” globalism and the “corporatist media,” Mr. Trump delivered a visceral gut punch of a speech that executed almost all of the tactics that define the forever-war philosophy of the Trump-Bannon West Wing
- The Justice Department will once again use private prisons to house federal inmates, reversing an Obama-era directive to stop using the facilities, which officials had then deemed less safe and less effective than those run by the government — The Washington Post
President Trump moved his assault on the Fourth Estate beyond rhetoric. WTF Happened Today, summarizes:
“The New York Times, CNN and Politico were prohibited from attending a White House briefing by Trump’s press secretary. Spicer allowed reporters from only a handpicked group of news organizations: Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Fox News also attended. “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement. “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”
Rather than addressing it directly on Twitter, Trump sent out another tweet bashing the media.
FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!
Then on Saturday, President Trump said he’d so something that no president has done in 36 years.
I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!
This week was yet another wild one. Trump attempted to get government agencies to discredit the reports about the investigations into his associates’ Russia ties, he fired people for disagreeing with him, and he moved beyond talk when it comes to attacking the media. And that’s the point I want to close out on.
President Trump’s blatant disrespect for the press is getting out of hand. It displays his lack of American values and his disregard for First Amendment rights.
I could write a novel on why the press is important to maintain an effective democracy, but I’ll let Senator John McCain close out this week’s Unpresidented:
“We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital. If you want to preserve — I’m very serious now — if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”
