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Week 1 in the Trump White House: So that happened.

In case the blackening of the skies, shaking of the earth, and disembodied screams of the damned didn’t clue you in, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States one week ago today. (Just kidding; as Trump himself will tell you, there were no blackened skies because the rain stopped and the sun came out the moment he started speaking.)

He set the tone for his presidency with a 16-minute Kubrickian nightmare of an inaugural speech that described a post-apocalyptic dystopian hellscape we’ve apparently been living in, thanks to the greed of establishment politicians and Mr. Potters like the ones currently filling his cabinet. Featuring a tone courtesy of Bane from The Dark Knight Rises and messaging courtesy of Nazi Germany, Trump introduced phrases like “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” and “American carnage” into the annals of presidential address. He also called for “total allegiance to the United States of America” (for us, not him) and “loyalty to our country” (again, us, not him), which already has a bit of an Orwellian ring to it without his repeated shoutouts to “America first,” also a popular refrain of Nazi aspirants in the ’30s, ’40s, and today.

(Trump was proud to say that he wrote the speech himself, until it became apparent that people were weirded out by it, at which point Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller took credit, so Trump lied, but NBD, this is the world we live in now.)

Trump supporters who decried criticism of Trump and insisted that we just need to give him a chance! should be happy to know that we did, because it’s not like we had a choice, like seriously, what does that even mean. Many of his choices were reactive and petty — threatening women’s health around the globe because the Women’s March hurt his feelings, banning the Interior Department from Twitter after a National Park Service employee retweeted an unflattering photo showing the low turnout for the inauguration. (Nothing in the world is an ouchier ego-jab at the moment than that sub-Obama, sub-Women’s March turnout.) Many other choices were simply consistent with the ignorant, immature, egocentric, sexist, racist, xenophobic manchild he’s always shown himself to be. Here’s how he decided to spend his first week in office:

– Stopped a cut to FHA mortgage insurance fees
– Started to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (with no replacement in sight, of course)
– Removed positions on civil rights, LGBT rights, disability rights, and climate change from the White House website
– Replaced those positions with ones that would punish protesters, strip environmental protections, and squeeze a good half-dozen of his most odious policies under the umbrella of “standing up for law enforcement”
– Plagiarized a cake
– Stood in front of the CIA Memorial Wall and lied about his attacks on the intelligence community
– Brought a cheering section to that CIA visit to make himself appear popular and well-received
– Advocated taking Iraq’s oil during the U.S. occupation, in violation of the Geneva Conventions
– Called the media “the most dishonest people on earth”
– Cut funding for 17 organizations in his proposed budget, including the CPB, the NEA, the NEH, COPS, the Office of Violence Against Women, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department — saving 0.016 percent of the total budget
– Attacked the press with accusations of unfair treatment because of their accurate reporting of attendance figures at his inauguration
– Had his press secretary present “alternative facts” to the press, including well-debunked claims about the inaugural audience, employment figures, and millions of fraudulent voters
– Withdrew from the TPP
– Placed a freeze on non-military federal hiring (including the vastly understaffed VA)
– Reinstated the global gag rule, cutting funding to any foreign NGO that so much as mentions abortion
– Declared his inauguration day a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion”
– Placed gag orders on the EPA, the FDA, and HHS
– Mandated that any EPA scientific studies or data must be reviewed by political staff before it’s released to the public
– Instructed the EPA to remove the climate-change page from their website
– Threatened to “send in the Feds” if Chicago doesn’t decrease gun violence
– Ordered immediate construction of the border wall (without provisions to cover costs)
– Ordered an increase of 15,000 new personnel for ICE and Border Patrol
– Stripped federal grant funding to sanctuary cities
– Approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines
– Called for a “major investigation” into voter fraud based solely on his own unsupported claims
– Began referring to undocumented immigrants — heretofore known as “people” — as “removable aliens”

Currently poised to roll down the pike are a reopening of CIA “black site” prisons, reversal of policies prohibiting torture, drastic cuts to U.N. funding, entry restrictions for people from quote-“terror prone”-unquote countries, expiration of Obama’s DREAMer program, an Office for Victims of Crime Committed by Removable Aliens, a moratorium and review of all multilateral treaties, and suspension of the U.S. refugee program, and his first Supreme Court nominee. But we don’t get to criticize those yet. We have to give Trump a chance.


3 thoughts on Week 1 in the Trump White House: So that happened.

  1. Carpet country, with voting rates of 75-85% for Trump, is due for an unpleasant surprise when Homeland Security runs our Latinx residents out. Whitey may get the jobs back, but local businesses will suffer and drop staffing ’cause our local Caucasian ground monkeys spend all their money on meth and opiates, not homes and consumer goods.

    This goon so obviously ran so he could loot Treasury (with real estate fraudster Mnuchin’s help) to subsidize his artful but otherwise unprofitable deals. Post-impeachment, perhaps those empty hotels and casinos could be converted to low-income housing?

  2. One week. One freakin’ week. It’s been a living nightmare and I don’t even live there. I am so scared for you all, and to a lesser extent, us up here.

    And from a north-of-the-49th parallel, I could not be more disappointed in PM Trudeau and the federal government’s radio silence… other than getting moderately excited about the Keystone XL pipeline being on the table again.

  3. I want to second everything Andie said. I feel for all of you, and for that matter, the world. And yes we have our own worries up here. I’m a bit disappointed in Trudeau too. But I’m glad he took a stance in publicly declaring that Muslims from around the world will continued to be welcome in Canada.

    On the downside, it looks like we may soon have our own homegrown Trump equivalent – Kevin O’Leary. People are already saying, oh no it could never happen here. We’re a much more tolerant and progressive country than the U.S… yada, yada.

    I’d love to believe that arrogant shitstain could never become PM. I also believed that Canadians would never give Stephen Harper a majority. I was wrong.

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