Nearly impossible to capture the Trump remarks at CIA in words. Here’s the video.
The first big initiative of the Trump administration will apparently be to contest the crowd-size estimates for his inauguration. Trump himself just went down that bizarre path at CIA headquarters, in front of the memorial to fallen CIA officers. And now we’re awaiting a White House press briefing, where photos of the crowd, blown up to poster size, have been set out as props:
Trump is spending a decent part of his informal speech to the staff of the CIA talking about how the press covered up how big his inaugural crowds were.
“We had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning and I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. I said wait a minute. I made a speech. I looked out. The field was … it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practical nobody standing there.”
One of the outside groups supporting Jeff Sessions nomination as attorney general is running a TV ad in DC titled “Champion” that calls him a “civil rights champion” and associates him in images with Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Lewis. It’s a remarkable re-write of Sessions’ life and career:
Secretary of state when he awoke yesterday morning, and now just walking the dog down Pennsylvania Avenue during the women’s march:
Yesterday’s saddest trombone
Click headline to see full image.
(Photo: Jeff Malet)
Trump’s apocalyptic inaugural address was pure Steve Bannon, and a White House official now confirms that it was written by Bannon and Stephen Miller. In another of those weird recent attempts to draw historic parallels between Trump and Andrew Jackson, Bannon is quoted as saying, “I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House. It’s got a deep, deep root of patriotism.”
But if you read Jackson’s first inaugural address, it is full of the modesty, humility, self-deprecation and traditional appeals to our better nature that are historically associated with presidential inaugural addresses. There is nothing in it on par with Trump’s “American carnage.”
In one of his first official acts as President, Donald Trump issued an executive order taking his first swing at Obamacare. The order, signed in the Oval Office this evening, directs the federal government “to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens” of the Affordable Care Act. But beyond its general emphasis on easing the burden and giving the states more flexibility, it doesn’t offer specific guidance or direction.
The full text of the executive order: