In his inaugural address, President Trump greeted four previous presidents behind him on the podium (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) and thanked the Obamas for their “gracious [and] magnificent” help throughout the transition. What followed was a rather strained proclamation of unprecedented change. “Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people. For too long, a small group in the nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of the country.…January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became rulers of the country again.” This was a rather stern reproof of his four predecessors sitting nearby, who had occupied the White House for twenty-eight years. It was not calculated to attract the accolades of the Congress, most of the members of which were also present and were among the accused. According to Hillary Clinton’s memoir, which purported to explain why it had been Trump and not her addressing the crowd gathered on the National Mall, George W. Bush offered this blunt assessment of Trump’s speech: “That was some weird shit.”1
Returning to a more uncontroversial version of Trumpian Truthful Hyperbole, he said, to the country: “You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.” He was referring to “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and drugs and gangs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential….We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.” This was essentially a campaign speech although the campaign had ended ten weeks before and the campaign before him now was to get the legislation to enact his proposals through a Congress that was only marginally different from the one that had co-authored the Dark Age of recent years he was, with a dosage of his notorious hyperbole, describing.
But, the president of just five minutes promised: “America will start winning again, winning like never before. We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work—rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.…We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement and, most importantly, we are protected by God.” This was taking a lot on himself, but “A new national pride will stir our souls, lift our sights, and heal our divisions. It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers never forget: that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same glorious American flag. And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same mighty Creator. So to all Americans in every city, near and far, small and large from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again. Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.” He closed with, “Together, we will make America strong again; we will make America wealthy again; we will make America proud again; we will make America safe again; and yes, together, we will make America great again. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.”
He could not possibly deliver quickly on such promises. The response of his own party’s congressional delegation was bound to be muted and ambivalent, which would make any such jolting change as he pledged especially difficult. He had not swept into office like Roosevelt in 1933 with an almost unlimited mandate for change from a desperate country, or even like Reagan in 1981 with a clear enough mandate to reduce taxes and increase defense spending. Trump had never been too precise about how he was going to address the evils he denounced, apart from stopping illegal immigration with stricter border controls, including a wall, deporting some illegal immigrants already in the country, renegotiating trade deals that generated large trade deficits for the United States and eliminated American manufacturing jobs, and taking a tougher line with North Korea and Iran.
The key to advancing his goals now was not continuing to lash the remnants of the political establishment, who were digging in. The Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans (who might well have included House Speaker Ryan and Senate leader McConnell), the national media, and the entire entertainment industry were still at war with Trump. The inauguration of the new president had not had a halcyon effect on American public and media opinion about him.
Speaking at CIA headquarters the next day, he betrayed the absurd hyper-sensitivity that sometimes accompanies Trump’s rhinoceros-hide. He objected to public estimates that there were only 250,000 people at his inauguration and parade. (Given that 96 percent of the District of Columbia had voted against him, and that it was well-publicized that mobs of vandals would be protesting his inauguration, it was miraculous that he had any such large gathering of supporters.) But the president took it upon himself to tell the CIA personnel (who cannot possibly have had the slightest interest and must have been nonplussed that the subject was raised) that it was 1.5 million people who attended his inauguration. He had his press secretary, Sean Spicer, labor through his first press conference making and defending the proposition that the inauguration crowd the day before was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe.” Technically, this gave the president an escape hatch, as no one had any idea how many people around the world or even across the United States had witnessed it, but that had not been the source of the controversy, which was Trump’s opponents scoffing at the physical turnout. This was what Kellyanne Conway had in mind the following day when she referred to “alternate facts.” Estimates of the Trump crowd went as high as six hundred thousand—it was in any case a formidable turnout, but substantially less than Obama’s at his first inauguration.
There had been some disorderly behavior around the parade the day before, but this was the merest foretaste of the large demonstration that took place in Washington and in other cities and countries while the president was addressing the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a cry of anguish and vengeance from a vintage coalition of the Left: Planned Parenthood, the Natural Resources Defense Council, AFL-CIO, Amnesty International, National Center for Lesbian Rights, National Organization for Women, MoveOn.org, Human Rights Watch, the American Indian Movement, Greenpeace, and many others. Anti-abortion organizations that were otherwise supporters of the women’s movement were at first admitted and then expelled from the coalition. Among the speakers to the four hundred fifty thousand or so marchers in Washington were the inevitable Gloria Steinem, Scarlett Johansson, the venerable Communist Angela Davis, Michael Moore, Cecile Richards, Ashley Judd, and Democratic senators Tammy Duckworth and Kamala Harris. There were 408 marches in the United States and 198 in eighty-four other countries, all ignited by Trump’s election and coming to the aid of every conceivable leftist cause, with particular emphasis on hostility to white males. Among those who participated in these marches in various places were Gillian Anderson, Alec Baldwin, Drew Barrymore, Beyoncé, Cher, Jessica Chastain, Jamie Lee Curtis, Miley Cyrus, Fran Drescher, Jane Fonda, Ariana Grande, Chelsea Handler, Blake Lively, Madonna, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, Chris Rock, Barbra Streisand, Charlize Theron, and Emma Watson.
An additional feature of the marches were the Pussyhats—hundreds of thousands of pink knitted tuques with pointy ears like cats, to remind everyone of Trump’s unfortunate comment from eleven years before. It was the usual unfocused, broad coalition of whiners and faddists interspersed with extremists and heavy-laden with Hollywood figures satisfied that their celebrity entitled them to contend for direction of the country, even one day after the inauguration of the person who won the election. The speeches, in Washington and as far afield as Perth, Australia, took their cue from Bruce Springsteen, who declared, “We are the new American Resistance.” There was no violence, but it was a monumental tableau of the idiocy and pretention of America’s over-indulged entertainment industry and the gullible naiveté of many foreign analogues. The conservative movement in the United States fairly vocally accused the marchers of being infested with Islamists and other anti-Semites, and of verging on anarchism in places. Various commentators said the marchers had a questionable right professing to represent democracy while protesting the installation of a democratically elected leader of the United States. President Trump wisely ignored the entire orgy of raging exhibitionism.
He was too busy perhaps working. He was a ball of fire from the opening bell of his inauguration and left no doubt of his intention to move as quickly as he could to advance the policies he had promised. In his first ten days in office, he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he promised throughout the campaign, claiming it would import unemployment to the United States. He ended the previous administration’s policy of giving $600 million annually to assist abortions in foreign countries. He had a useful and cordial meeting with American labor leaders, who generally approved his pro-industrial employment policies, and many of whose workers had voted for Trump. He approved the Keystone XL and Dakota pipelines. He started strengthening security along the Mexican border, using unspent funds in the homeland security department, and blocked federal grants to sanctuary cities (which declared they would not enforce American laws against illegal migrants; this issue was shortly mired in the court system). He had a successful meeting with the new British prime minister, Theresa May, and said, “A strong and independent Britain is a blessing to the world.”
More controversially, he claimed widespread voter fraud, with many jurisdictions allegedly permitting illegal migrants to vote. The charge could not really be judged as many states refused to cooperate in examining voter returns. Many in the media criticized Trump on the grounds that it was ridiculous for the winner of an election to charge voter fraud and demand an investigation (as if the president of the United States could not have an objective interest in fair elections) or on the grounds that investigations of voter fraud were implicitly racist, a covert way to purge Hispanic voters from the rolls (which was ludicrous).
On January 28, Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning the admission to the United States of travelers from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. They were all, apart from Iran, countries in some state of civil war. There were immediate disputes about the order’s legality and the Democrats went judge-shopping among the West Coast left-wing benches to find a federal judge who would purport to block the imposition of the executive order. The previous administration’s deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, declined to execute the president’s order and was fired.
A Washington state judge did find fault with the order, and the Democrats undoubtedly hoped Trump would just ignore the ruling (as President Andrew Jackson had when he said of Chief Justice Marshall, “He has made his decision; now let him enforce it”). This would have enabled them to torque up talk of impeachment, which was already being bandied about by the Democrats, focusing now on Trump’s alleged sinister relations with Russia, and dark claims that he had colluded with the Russian regime to sandbag the Clinton campaign through WikiLeaks and cyber-hacking and as yet unspecified skullduggery. Trump abided by the judge’s order, and instead imposed his policy when travelers reached the United States (rather than forbidding them to come from their originating countries), and waited for the Supreme Court to rule on the dispute.
He nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the high court left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia a year before. Gorsuch would be confirmed, shoring up the thin conservative majority at the Supreme Court, and thus saving conservative America from one of its worst nightmares—the possibility of a liberal court that would give a blank check to liberal judges, the bureaucracy, and Democratic presidents to override the legislative branch and effect any “progressive” measures they wished.
Riots and demonstrations erupted in many parts of the country, and a few places overseas, to protest Trump’s travel and immigration policies. There were sit-ins and traffic blockages at airports that greatly inconvenienced the traveling public. The theme was that Trump was a racist, and that he was reversing the openness of America to the world that was one of the foundations of the country. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, choking back crocodile tears, called Trump’s executive order “mean-spirited and un-American,” claiming solidarity with the Statue of Liberty, which, Schumer claimed, was also weeping over the temporary ban.
On January 31, Trump extended Obama’s LGBTQ workplace protection for employees of federal contractors. He issued a statement saying that he was “determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community…[and is] respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights, just as he was throughout the election.” He said he was “proud to have been the first ever GOP nominee to mention the LGBTQ community in his acceptance speech, pledging then to protect the community from violence and oppression.”
Polls indicated the majority of Americans supported his crackdown on travelers from terrorism-sponsoring or -infested countries, and his LGBTQ order sharply undercut the pussyhatted caterwauling of the women’s marchers. He was off to a predictably stormy, but not a bad, start.
In the first months of the new presidency, practically nothing was accepted as normal and unexceptionable, and as Schumer and his Democratic colleagues in the Senate were obstructing and delaying every Cabinet and senior departmental appointment that came before them, the Obama holdovers were making government as difficult as possible and leaking like waterfalls to the anti-Trump media, which was practically all of the media except for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News. Like almost every controversy involving Trump, the partial travel ban receded from the distracted consciousness of the country after a few weeks, as the hyenas in the media were unable to sustain the story and moved on to other subjects in their litany of what Trump dismissed (often rightly) as “fake news.”
On February 1, the contents of a rather heated telephone call with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were leaked, in which Trump became audibly irritated over Turnbull’s insistence that he honor Obama’s informal commitment to accept twelve hundred refugees from the Middle East who were being provisionally sheltered on the small Pacific island nation of Nauru. Australia was discouraging trans-Pacific people-smuggling by not admitting undocumented people and moving them off-shore where they could be assessed by immigration authorities. Turnbull’s deal with Obama was that in exchange, Australia would accept some Central Americans attempting illegal entry into the United States, and Turnbull emphasized to Trump that the United States did not have to accept any of the people on Nauru—immigration officials could screen them and reject them—but it would be up to the United States to maintain them where they were or move them elsewhere. The revelation of the transcript of the conversation, a disgraceful betrayal by disloyal White House insiders, made the two leaders appear to be engaged in a cynical game at the expense of the pathetic fugitives from the distressed Middle East. This wasn’t an entirely fair impression and like all these incidents, it passed quickly.
Also on February 1, hoodlums in ninja costume smashed parts of buildings and set fires on the Berkeley Campus of the University of California in protest at the proposed address of controversial gay free speech firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, invited by one of the campus clubs. Antifa, which took a lead role in this protest, and in violent opposition to Trump, was a ragtag group of militant anarchists, anti-capitalists, and neo-Marxists who purported to see fascism, by those with whom they disagreed, in the exercise of the first amendment rights to freedom of assembly and speech. It took an unconscionable time for leading Democrats to disavow this riff-raff.
More damaging was the Washington Post’s leak on February 9 that National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn had discussed with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak the possibility that the Trump administration might reduce the sanctions President Obama had imposed on Russia for its alleged interference in the United States elections. Flynn had denied this, and the Post story indicated that there was—as Trump would soon claim, to fierce objections but subsequent partial vindication—some official surveillance of his campaign or transition team prior to his inauguration. The Post story revealed that former deputy attorney general Sally Yates had warned that Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail, indicating questionable and quite possibly illegal official telephone intercepts on Trump campaign personnel, as well as illegal post-inauguration leaks of confidential information to the media.
Five days later (February 20), Flynn resigned, acknowledging that he had had some telephone discussions with the Russian ambassador, that the issue of the sanctions had arisen, and that in the “fast pace” of events, he had inadvertently misinformed the vice president–elect, who had accordingly assured the media that there had been no such discussions. In his statement, Flynn said that he had apologized to the president and vice president, and that his apology had been accepted. This turn of events was a legitimate embarrassment for the administration and was enthusiastically amplified by the political and media opposition to lend credence to the vague but constant allegations of a dishonest, possibly treasonous, and, implicitly, eminently impeachable relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. General H. R. McMaster, a respected military intellectual, replaced Flynn at the National Security Council on February 20. The Flynn story would not go away soon or easily.
Another instant media addiction that lingers still, though Trump has taken precautions to reduce his vulnerability to it, has been the practice of seizing on the least ambiguity in Trump’s remarks to misrepresent his comments as indicative of his ignorance or bigotry. His notorious imprecision with some facts as well as his infamous “truthful hyperbole,” opened the door to this problem, and the media rushed through it.
On February 2, he said that he was very proud that there was now a museum on the National Mall in Washington for African American history (the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture). “While listing prominent African Americans featured in the museum’s exhibits, including Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks, Trump said of famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass that he is ‘someone who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.’”2 CNN, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the full gamut of other leftist anti-Trump outlets gratuitously seized upon this as evidence that Trump had no idea who Douglass was. His knowledge of Douglass’s career may not be extensive, but no such inference was justified, and the media’s overzealous treatment of the story was compounded by its implication that such ignorance was further proof that Trump was a racist (a demonstrably false conclusion).
Similarly, when Trump said to the press during the visit to Washington of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 15 that he was looking at both one-state and two-state solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the anti-Trump media raised the alarm, for no reason whatever, that he had abandoned the two-state option. On February 18, Trump spoke at one of his heavily attended rallies, in Florida, and listed places in Europe struggling to assimilate a large influx in refugees. In addition to mentioning Germany, Belgium, and France, he said, “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden…they took in large numbers [of refugees]; they’re having problems like they never thought possible.” Nothing noteworthy had happened in Sweden the night before and Swedes and Trump’s domestic opponents became very exercised that he had invented a terrorist attack in Sweden. He eventually clarified that he misspoke and was referring to having seen a Fox News report the night before that represented Sweden as “the rape capital of Europe,” because of the recent admission of three hundred fifty thousand Middle Eastern migrants. In their typical rush to rebuff the president, his opponents overplayed their hand, essentially painting Sweden as a perfect example of refugee integration. Two days later riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant-populated suburb of Stockholm. Trump avoided comment.
When Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe arrived on February 10, the media fussed about the extended hand-shake they had (nineteen seconds; it is common practice to extend a handshake for a photo op). Constant camera shutters can be heard in the video during the handshake so it’s reasonable to assume Trump was just posing.
That meeting, and the visit of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau three days later, as well as the Netanyahu meeting, were all very satisfactory. Trump and Trudeau set up a Canada–United States Council for Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders, a little-noticed debunking of the canard about Trump’s supposed misogyny.
With their customary priggishness and snobbery, the British, a wide swath of their opinion still irritated at being so thoroughly surpassed by the Americans in world influence, became spontaneously annoyed when their new prime minister, Theresa May, invited President Trump to make a state visit to the United Kingdom later in 2017. A petition signed by 1.8 million Britons asked that the visit be reduced to a simple intergovernmental visit, so as not to embarrass the queen. This was nonsense, as the president of the United States is a chief of state and cannot be, and would not consent to be treated as unworthy of meeting the British monarch. In the prevailing circumstances, as Britain began to negotiate its exit from the European Union, it was in no position to slap America in the face, though, unfortunately, Trump’s domestic opponents were so pathological in their hatred for him that they would relish the office of president being dragged through the international mud as long as it looked bad for Trump. The issue was debated in Parliament on February 20, with the speaker of the House of Commons having pandered with silly and unjust remarks about Trump the notorious racist and misogynist, but the government dismissed the argument as contrary to the British national interest. The atmosphere was further soured by the endless and cheeky comments of the vain and belligerent leftist Muslim mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Boris Johnson, Britain’s redoubtable foreign minister, later said, in one of the finest uses of Twitter: “We will not allow US-UK relations to be endangered by some pompous, puffed-up popinjay in City Hall.” It was agreed by May and Trump several months later at the G20 meeting in Hamburg that the president’s visit would be deferred to 2018.
Trump’s Cabinet secretaries generally performed admirably, but his lively and chaotic White House staff sometimes seemed composed mostly of members of a “floating crap game,” as veteran journalist and fair-minded commentator Brit Hume noted. Nevertheless, if the new administration’s progress was sometimes forward, sometimes sidewise, it took its dynamic lead from the top. Trump was nothing if not hardworking on both domestic issues and foreign affairs.
After Iran tested a long-range ballistic missile on February 3, Trump warned the country’s Islamist regime that it was “playing with fire” and imposed new sanctions on it. Trump hosted German chancellor Angela Merkel on March 17, and they made progress on Germany (representing NATO’s second greatest economy) raising its defense budget to better approximate its NATO commitments. There were problems on the climate side, however, as Merkel was obliged by domestic politics to pitch in with the greens.
Trump did what he could by executive authority alone. He rolled back Obama’s “transgender” bathroom guidelines, leaving such matters to the states, on February 22. On March 6, Trump issued a new travel ban order that was less vulnerable legally than the first, though the legal issues around even the first were largely fraudulent. The president controls immigration policy and it is no business of federal or other judges, but Democrats and pro-Islam activist groups cited comments Trump had made in his campaign about temporarily banning entry by Muslims, a suggestion he had drastically revised, and which should have been irrelevant, in any event, to adjudging the executive order. His opponents wanted the courts to ignore the president’s constitutional authority and instead impute to him a violation of religious liberty, which was nonsense, as foreign residents and citizens do not possess religious rights to enter the United States. An Obama law school classmate in Hawaii, whom Obama had appointed to the bench, purported to strike down the revised travel ban on March 16 as it progressed upwards in the court system. Trump eventually included non-Muslim countries (Venezuela and North Korea), and in late November 2017, the high court tentatively upheld Trump’s last formulation of his executive order, deferring a decision on the main issue to its normal place on the court calendar.
On February 27, 2017, the House Intelligence chairman, Republican Congressman Devin Nunes of California, revealed that Congress had no evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russians. On March 4, the president, as was his custom at this point, announced via Twitter that his communications had been tapped at the Trump Tower, and accused his critics, with their endless speculation about Russian “collusion,” of engaging in “McCarthyism.” The anti-Trump media responded with its customary wave of incredulous disdain. Trump stuck to his allegation and advised critics to await events. On March 22, Nunes affirmed that some transition-era communications of the Trump campaign had been intercepted, putting a rod partially on the backs of the more hysterical anti-Trump media, who had been doing a native rain dance of derision over the Trump tweet of March 4. On April 6, Nunes would temporarily retire from direction of the Russian probe by his committee because of complaints that he had shown the president before he had shown his own committee colleagues some of the findings of the committee’s investigation which confirmed Trump’s wire-tapping claims. This required until December 8 to resolve, when Nunes was completely cleared by the ethics committee. It had been another partisan red herring.
The Russian question became cloudier when Attorney General Sessions on March 2 acknowledged that he had spoken casually with Russian officials at large receptions and during the campaign by telephone, that these facts had escaped his memory at his confirmation hearings, and that he had been advised by counsel that the telephone contacts need not be reported for his application for a security clearance. The meetings appeared to have been mere exchanges of pleasantries, but the Washington Post claimed that it had evidence that Sessions had discussed sanctions and campaign matters with the Russian ambassador during the campaign. Sessions denied this forcefully, and as any such information as the Post claimed to have would have been procured illegally, it is of doubtful veracity, especially as Sessions had no authority to speak for Trump during the campaign, and especially not with a foreign ambassador.
It was a very clumsy performance by Sessions and he announced his recusal on the whole Russian matter, leaving the president with no attorney general or deputy attorney general (as he had fired Sally Yates for refusing to carry out his immigration order) immediately involved in the Russian investigation. Trump had nominated Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general, but the Senate had not yet confirmed him (though it eventually did by a vote of ninety-four to six). In the meantime, he had a very politically meddlesome and suspect FBI director, James Comey, whose loyalty Trump had good reason to doubt. Trump was very litigious and legally experienced and he saw at once the problems of the position Sessions had created for him. He would tell the New York Times on July 19: “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.” Trump told the Times nothing but the truth when he said of Sessions’ conduct: “It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president.”
At this point there was the predictable overreaction to Trump’s comments, with publicity-addicted posturers in the Congress even sponsoring legislation to protect the attorney general from being fired, as if it were not the express right of the president to fire whomever he wishes in the executive branch. In any event, Trump did not intend to fire Sessions, which would obviously have been unwise at this point, and Sessions soldiered on, giving a passable performance on June 13 when he appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and poured cold water on the Russian issue. The Russian collusion argument never had the appearance of anything but a desperately seized canard to harass and defame Trump and distract the new administration from putting its program through, while consoling a sulky Hillary Clinton over her defeat—and that remains the case at time of writing.
Meanwhile, Trump spoke well and was generously received when he addressed Congress for the first time on February 28. He stole the Democrats’ clothes in many policy areas and went to considerable and somewhat eloquent lengths to destroy any suggestion that he was anything but a passionate opponent of racial or sex discrimination. The well-applauded appearance of his dazzlingly attractive wife and daughters and daughters-in-law in the gallery enabled the Trump family, in this unique setting, to appear unfazed and somewhat above the controversy that had swirled around them for many months.
On March 14, one of Trump’s most rabid detractors, MSNBC’s raucously opinionated Rachel Maddow, triumphantly announced that she had a copy of part of Trump’s 1995 tax return. Democrats had been demanding sight of his returns, which Trump refused while they were still being audited and in dispute, and various media personnel had publicly asked for the leakage of them (incitement to criminal behavior, but this was now fairly routine among Trump’s enemies). Maddow breathlessly plunged into her revelation on air without analyzing it very much and it showed that, contrary to New York Times and other claims that Trump had paid no taxes for decades, he had in fact in 1995 paid federal income tax of $38 million. The Democratic assertions for months, such as by Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, that his tax returns would validate the Russian charges, went mercifully quiet.
The press was also uncharacteristically quiet about one of the greatest achievements of the administration, which gained steam throughout his first months in office, as Trump began a massive rollback of red tape and regulations, which had an immediate and salutary effect on the health and well-being of American business. On March 28, 2017, Trump repealed Obama’s global warming emissions reduction policies, as he considered these punitive to American business and consumers. This move was one that the media could not ignore, but could not praise either.
When Trump did, finally, win plaudits, it was for taking military action against Syria, something approved of by many Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans. On April 4, the embattled Russo-Iranian puppet-president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, again used sarin gas on Syrian civilians, a specialty of his late father, and the sort of incident that violated Barack Obama’s infamous “red line” and caused him to huff and puff and abdicate his role of commander-in-chief to Congress and then back down ignominiously, deferring to Russia. Trump ordered the firing of fifty-nine cruise missiles from an American warship against a Syrian airfield and gas storage complex two days later, after giving a brief warning to Russia which had personnel in the target area. The cruise missile attack took place while Trump was having dinner with Chinese president Xi Jinping at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. The Chinese leader was quite unruffled, as China has no dog in the Middle East hunt, and the visit seemed to go well. On April 13, Trump approved a military recommendation to drop a ten-ton bomb on an underground ISIS complex in Afghanistan, which destroyed the target and killed at least ninety-two ISIS terrorists.
All polls showed that approval of the president’s performance, though lukewarm at about 40 percent, was twice that of Congress and three times that of the media. His dominance of social media (more than forty million followers of his Twitter accounts) and the talk radio world allowed Trump to offer his own alternative to the narrative of the New York Times. Rush Limbaugh, who is intelligently pro-Trump, has more than twice as many listeners as the New York Times has readers, and Rush, unlike the Times, focuses almost exclusively on politics.
Three months into his presidency, Trump had already arrayed himself for battle against the establishment and achieved significant victories. But the struggle for mastery in Washington was just beginning.