President Donald Trump: What we can expect from the Trump administration

[Editor’s note: Nixon biographer John A. Farrell wrote this comparison of the two presidents in February — well before the firing of FBI Director James Comey. It is reposted here with only light edits.]

We’re barely into the Trump administration and we’ve had war on the press, electronic eavesdropping, a sacked attorney general, humongous demonstrations, fury over a Democratic National Committee break-in, Cold War­­–style skirmishes, and scandalous intrigues akin to Watergate.

Over the past several years, the US Department of Justice played a key role in exposing abuses from local police departments, exposing everything from unjustified shootings to a broader pattern of racism in a police force. But on Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions confirmed that all of that work will come to an end — saying that the Justice Department will “pull back” on civil rights lawsuits and investigations against police.

Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department took on more civil rights investigations of local police departments than Obama’s two predecessors — including President Bill Clinton, who signed the law in the 1990s allowing these types of investigations by the Justice Department. By the last count, the Obama Justice Department has investigated nearly two dozen police departments, from Baltimore to Ferguson, Missouri to Chicago — uncovering a wide range of abusive, even racist, police practices.

During the campaign, President Donald Trump regularly blasted America’s allies for taking advantage of Washington. He invoked the failure of many NATO members to meet their defense-spending targets and suggested that the United States should allow South Korea and Japan to go nuclear rather than continue to rely on American security guarantees. He generally argued that our allies gain a competitive economic advantage by shifting their defense burdens onto the United States.

In his “American Carnage” inaugural address, Trump continued this theme: “For many decades,” he said, “we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry — subsidized the armies of other countries, while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.” This week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reiterated this basic stance, telling NATO members they would need to meet their budget targets or “see America moderate its commitment to this alliance.”

In North Carolina, a husband left his house to start a car, only to be handcuffed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. In Los Angeles, a man was arrested at the Walmart where he worked. In Garden City, Kansas, whole apartments of people were fingerprinted and taken into custody.

They’re three of the more than 680 people that ICE agents around the country — from the Midwest to the Southeast, California to New York — have arrested in the past week. Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, in a statement Monday, calls it “a series of targeted enforcement operations,” and maintains it’s no different from what ICE has done “for many years.” Critics call it a series of nationwide raids — and claim it’s the first step toward President Donald Trump fulfilling his promise to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants.

If there was ever any doubt on where President Donald Trump will take the country on issues like civil rights, criminal justice, and immigration, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’s nomination for attorney general — confirmed by the Senate, mostly along party lines, on Wednesday — should put all of those doubts to an end.

On all of these issues, Sessions has been extremely conservative. He’s opposed reforms to reduce mass incarceration, proposed stringent crackdowns on immigration, and he even has a history of racist remarks that ended his hopes of a federal judgeship. And that’s not even getting to other issues, from voting rights to discrimination against LGBTQ people, where Sessions has been equally conservative.

These are disorienting times for American democracy. Key features of a democratic nation — that the candidate who wins the majority has the right to rule, that elections are free from outside influence, and that political actions reflect the views of the majority of citizens — are all in question.

The newly elected president has historically low approval levels, as does the newly convened Republican-led Congress. And key features of their political agenda — repealing the Affordable Care Act, reducing taxes for the rich, restricting access to abortion, inaction on climate change, opposing minimum wage increases — are all opposed by majorities of the American public.

This month, Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to President Donald Trump, was asked whether the administration would refuse to enforce the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate — the requirement that people get health insurance or pay a penalty. “He may,” she said, instantly sending a shiver of fear down the spines of health reform’s supporters. Without the mandate, insurance markets in many states will teeter; some will probably collapse.

Would it be legal for Trump to decline to enforce the mandate?

Annotations by David A. Martin, the Warner-Booker professor of law emeritus at the University of Virginia. He served as principal deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security from January 2009 to December 2010, as general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Clinton, and as special assistant in the human rights bureau at the State Department under President Carter.

EXECUTIVE ORDER ENHANCING PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE INTERIOR OF THE UNITED STATES

For liberals alarmed by Donald Trump’s election, there is something heartening about the revelation that the new president has no idea what he’s doing. His rollout of new travel restrictions aimed at offering a constitutionally, economically, and diplomatically viable alternative to his campaign pledge of a total ban on Muslim entry to the country has been shambolic. It has spurred judicial and political mobilization against a sloppy and ill-conceived policy, which will likely end up with Trump accomplishing much less harm than he could have with a more measured approach.

All in all, Trump’s stumbles raise the prospect of what Dylan Matthews calls the “Carter Scenario,” in which a president who is simply bad at presidenting manages to not get very much done and blow the opportunity for a newly empowered legislative majority to enact historic change.

Annotations by David A. Martin, the Warner-Booker Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He served as principal deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security from January 2009 to December 2010, general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, and as special assistant in the human rights bureau at the State Department under President Jimmy Carter.

This executive order is clearly designed to direct — or more often signal, with details yet to come — fulfillment of some of candidate Trump’s broad statements or promises in the immigration arena, notably including promises like “extreme vetting” and a “Muslim ban.” Later in his campaign, the rhetoric shifted somewhat. Instead of a religion-based ban, for example, Donald Trump and his surrogates spoke more of blocking migration from countries with “terrorist involvement”; a ban focused on countries is probably less problematic than a ban based on religion, as a matter of both politics and law.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to bring back torture, including both waterboarding and techniques that were “a hell of a lot worse.” And on Wednesday, a draft executive order leaked that, if issued, could clear the way for the CIA to brutally interrogate terror suspects in secret prisons around the globe.

The executive order, first reported by the New York Times’s Charlie Savage and published in full by the Washington Post, would revoke the Obama administration’s ban on offshore “black site” facilities as well as the current ban on interrogation techniques that aren’t in the US Army Field Manual, including waterboarding. It also argues that it is in “the interests of the United States” to maintain the controversial US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — a prison that President Obama tried and failed to close.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders that constitute the biggest change to federal immigration policy in a single day in recent memory.

Trump signed an order that directs the Department of Homeland Security to begin construction on a wall between the US and Mexico — while cracking down on people who cross the border now, many of whom are children and families seeking asylum from Central America. A second order, also signed Wednesday, began to loosen restrictions on whom immigration agents can apprehend and deport within the United States — allowing immigration agents to adopt a broader definition of “criminal” to deport more people faster.

Donald Trump is reportedly close to making what will be one of the biggest decisions of his entire presidency: choosing a replacement for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Trump is now saying he will announce a pick next week.

After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell successfully obstructed President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for nearly a year, the Court is still short a member, a vacancy that Trump and his allies in the Senate are eager to fill quickly. In May, Trump released a list of 11 possible choices for the slot, before adding 10 more in September. As an effort to signal his reliability to conservatives, he promised he would make his choice only from the names on these lists.

Since the moment President Donald Trump finished his oath of office on Friday, some ethics experts argue he’s been violating the Constitution.

The breach stems from the massive conflicts of interest between his presidency and his business empire. Trump has a huge stake in a real estate holding underwritten with a loan from the Chinese government. He has tens of millions of dollars riding on building projects in Saudi Arabia. Foreign diplomats have already admitted to spending money at his hotels to curry favor with the president.

The Trump administration is currently preparing to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency in the months ahead — rolling back Obama-era rules and cutting budgets. In the meantime, President Trump’s team is freezing EPA activity for a period.

Both ProPublica and the Huffington Post report that Trump’s team has ordered a temporary freeze on all EPA grants to states and local communities until further notice [update: The EPA now says the freeze is expected to end on Friday]. The head of Trump’s EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, confirmed the freeze to Reuters.

When President Donald Trump and his surrogates said the media lied about how many people were at his inauguration, it was easy to tell our readers it was absurd. There were pictures that showed he was wrong — and virtually everyone who attended both events could attest to it.

But here’s the potential future scenario that worries me: The Bureau of Labor Statistics announces its monthly data showing unemployed rates — and Trump and his surrogates say it’s wrong.

There’s much in health care policy that divides Republicans. But there’s one major idea that unites them: block grants for Medicaid.

It’s in the budget proposal that House Budget Chair Rep. Tom Price, Trump’s pick to run Health and Human Services, released this year. It was in Trump’s own health care platform during the campaign. And it is what Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway was talking about on television news shows this weekend as the administration’s preferred path forward.

Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter don’t have a whole lot in common, personally. One is famously a born-again Christian who apologized for having “looked on a lot of women with lust,” who even critics concede is of unimpeachable character, and who has devoted much of his life to philanthropic pursuits including the eradication of an entire parasitic illness. The other is on his third marriage, publicly bragged about committing sexual assault, and ran a foundation that appears to be a massive tax scam with no public benefit.

But the early weeks of 2017 are suggesting that the two men’s presidencies might have more in common than you might imagine. On Obamacare especially, but also tax reform and US relations with Russia, Trump is showing himself to be out of step with congressional leaders of his own party, a sharp contrast with the close relationships between Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid; or George W. Bush, Trent Lott/Bill Frist, and Dennis Hastert.

President Donald Trump’s inaugural address envisions his presidency as a kind of national liberation, the moment when America is taken back from the rich, the corrupt, and the oppressors of generations and returned to the people. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have born the cost,” he declared.

But don’t read the text of his speech to understand what he’ll do as president. Instead, look to what went quietly live today on WhiteHouse.gov during the swearing-in ceremony. Gone were the press releases, issue statements, videos, blogs, speeches, and photos of the Obama years. In their place were six issue statements:

Donald Trump is president. In an even modestly long sweep, this remains a stunning development. If you’d bet $1,000 on it coming true, the day Trump announced his run for the White House, you’d be collecting $200,000 now.

You could bank even more if you could predict how Trump’s time in office will play out in Washington. Almost any scenario seems in play, including a heyday of conservative policy that overshadows even the Reagan years; a blizzard of bipartisan dealmaking unseen in a generation; or a quick descent into hyper-intense, one-party gridlock.

Donald Trump campaigned for president with a handful of big, simple ideas, including building a wall, renegotiating trade deals, and strengthening the military. His new White House website reflects that same sparse, policy-light philosophy. If you click on the “issues” tab, he has sections on just six issues:

It’s a striking contrast to Donald Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Like Trump, Obama had a website ready to go on his first day in office. But Obama’s site covered almost two dozen policy issues and dove into detail. Here’s what the “agenda” section of Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov looked like on January 20, 2009:

The Trump presidency is going to be very good for law enforcement officers — and likely not as good for people who criticize them.

The Trump administration’s support for rank-and-file law enforcement, both local police and federal immigration agents, is well known; they’re a key part of the coalition that put President Trump in office. And on the administration’s newly-unveiled White House site, they get pride of place:

As soon as Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the official White House website — WhiteHouse.gov — got a speedy makeover to reflect the change in administration, as had long been planned.

Gone is the Obama White House’s page on climate change, which is now archived here for posterity (along with virtually everything else from the Obama-era website). That page had talked about how global warming was a serious threat to future generations, optimistically touted America’s ability to tackle the problem, and listed dozens of actions the Obama administration has taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions:

When Donald Trump was sworn in Friday and replaced Barack Obama as president, there was a shift in addition to the obvious change in administrations.

With Trump as president, Mike Pence as vice president, Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan as House speaker, nearly all of the most powerful political roles in Washington are now filled by straight, white men.

By Inauguration Day, the shock and anguish many Democrats experienced immediately following November’s election had settled into a dense dread. All the quixotic attempts to reverse the results — the recounts, the search for “Hamilton Electors” — had failed, and the new Congress had been sworn in. All that was left was for Trump to take the oath of office.

Democrats have good reason for alarm. In anticipation of a united government, Republicans in Congress have already initiated the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Hard-right Cabinet nominees have been put forward. Privatization of education and Medicare, deregulation of the environment and the finance industry, and conservative court nominees are all on the docket.