The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

Rumor has it that tomorrow brings Muslim ban executive orders...

President Donald Trump is expected to sign executive orders starting on Wednesday that include a temporary ban on most refugees and a suspension of visas for citizens of Syria and six other Middle Eastern and African countries, according to several congressional aides and immigration experts briefed on the matter.

Trump, who tweeted on Tuesday night that a "big day" was planned on national security on Wednesday, is expected to order a multi-month ban on allowing refugees into the United States except for religious minorities escaping persecution, until more aggressive vetting is in place.

Another order will block visas being issued to anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, said the aides and experts, who asked not to be identified.

In his tweet late on Tuesday, Trump said: "Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!"

The border security measures likely include directing the construction of a border wall with Mexico and other actions to reduce the number of illegal immigrants living inside the United States.

The sources have said the first of the orders will be signed on Wednesday. With Trump considering measures to tighten border security, he could turn his attention to the refugee issue later this week.

Stephen Legomsky, who was chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration, said the president had the authority to limit refugee admissions and the issuance of visas to specific countries if the administration determined it was in the public?s interest.

?From a legal standpoint, it would be exactly within his legal rights,? said Legomsky, a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. ?But from a policy standpoint, it would be terrible idea because there is such an urgent humanitarian need right now for refugees.?

The Republican president, who took office last Friday, was expected to sign the first of the orders at the Department of Homeland Security, whose responsibilities include immigration and border security.

On the campaign trail, Trump initially proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, which he said would protect Americans from jihadist attacks.

Both Trump and his nominee for attorney general, U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, have since said they would focus the restrictions on countries whose migrants could pose a threat, rather than placing a ban on people who follow a specific religion.

Many Trump supporters decried former President Barack Obama's decision to increase the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States over fears that those fleeing the country's civil war would carry out attacks.

LEGAL CHALLENGES POSSIBLE

Detractors could launch legal challenges to the moves if all the countries subject to the ban are Muslim-majority nations, said immigration expert Hiroshi Motomura at UCLA School of Law. Legal arguments could claim the executive orders discriminate against a particular religion, which would be unconstitutional, he said.

"His comments during the campaign and a number of people on his team focused very much on religion as the target," Motomura said.

To block entry from the designated countries, Trump is likely to instruct the State Department to stop issuing visas to people from those nations, according to sources familiar with the visa process. He could also instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection to stop any current visa holders from those countries from entering the United States.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Tuesday that the State and Homeland Security Departments would work on the vetting process once Trump's nominee to head the State Department, Rex Tillerson, is installed.

Other measures may include directing all agencies to finish work on a biometric identification system for non-citizens entering and exiting the United States and a crackdown on immigrants fraudulently receiving government benefits, according to the congressional aides and immigration experts.

To restrict illegal immigration, Trump has promised to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and to deport illegal migrants living inside the United States.

Trump is also expected to take part in a ceremony installing his new secretary of homeland security, retired Marine General John Kelly, on Wednesday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-exclusive-idUSKBN1582XQ

Not even a week into his first term...

Edit: And another case of memory-holing...

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama's climate change initiatives.

The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA's communications team to remove the website's climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.

"If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear," one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.

The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

A Trump administration official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The order comes as Trump's administration has moved to curb the flow of information from several government agencies who oversee environmental issues since last week, in actions that appeared designed to tighten control and discourage dissenting views.

The moves have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change doubter, could seek to sideline scientific research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, as well as the career staffers at the agencies that conduct much of this research.

Myron Ebell, who helped guide the EPA's transition after Trump was elected in November until he was sworn in last week, said the move was not surprising.

"My guess is the web pages will be taken down, but the links and information will be available," he said.

The page includes links to the EPA's inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which contains emissions data from individual industrial facilities as well as the multiagency Climate Change Indicators report, which describes trends related to the causes and effects of climate change.

The Trump administration's recently appointed team to guide the post-Obama transition has drawn heavily from the energy industry lobby and pro-drilling think tanks, according to a list of the newly introduced 10-member team.

Trump appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a longtime foe of the EPA who has led 14 lawsuits against it, as the agency's administrator. The Senate environment committee held a tense seven-hour confirmation hearing for Pruitt last week. No vote on his nomination has been scheduled yet.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-epa-climatechange-idUSKBN15906G
 
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FFS where are the mother fucking checks and balances on this bullshit!?
 
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...ant-stop-blabbing-about-how-hes-a-madman.html
I wonder how tight a ship he thought he could keep running, you cant sweep anything under the rug anymore, not in this day and age.

I think they simply fight bullshit with even more bullshit. You get so many stories about Trump in a such a short time that it just saturates your brain. And at some point you just aren't that shocked anymore, or you simply don't care all that much.

Not saying that it's either good or bad, but at least he *is* doing something. I expect politicians to instantly forget about *everything* that they promised before the election, or to take their sweet time in actually doing the stuff they promised they would do. Again, I'm not saying that Trump's actions are good or bad, I'm just saying he at least takes actions compared to a lot of European politicians that couldn't decide what they wanted for breakfast for four years straight.
 
This assumes that (any action) > (no action). To say "at least he is doing something" doesn't mean anything if the actions he is taking are counterproductive or harmful. This isn't modern performance art where you can assign whatever meaning to nonsense you want.
 
I think they simply fight bullshit with even more bullshit. You get so many stories about Trump in a such a short time that it just saturates your brain. And at some point you just aren't that shocked anymore, or you simply don't care all that much.

To me it looks more like he studied Joseph Goebbels: "In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily."
 
Regarding the non-release of Trump's tax returns:
From here
The counselor to the president also addressed the first We the People petition to hit the new WhiteHouse.gov site, which calls for President Trump to released his tax returns. As of Sunday, over 200,000 people have signed the petition.

Asked by Stephanopoulos for a response from the White House, Conway replied, "The White House response is that he?s not going to release his tax returns."

"We litigated this all through the election. People didn?t care. They voted for him, and let me make this very clear: most Americans are, are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like," she said.
:? That's one way to spin 200k signees vs. 320m Americans...
 
Doesn't sound like he wants to ban Muslims specifically, seeing as there's no mention of, say, Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, but rather than he wants to stop immigration from a few specific countries that are known for being terrorist breeding grounds.

You mean like how 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and the other 4 were from the UAE, Egypt, and Lebanon?

The countries listed as order candidates are or until recently were in open conflict (except Iran, presumably that's just a GOP fuck-you), but the thing is if you look through a list of terrorist attacks since 9/11 and look at the perpetrators, few were from the listed countries.
 
Donald Trump says millions voted illegally. That's dreadful. We must have another election now

President Donald Trump welcomed a group of congressional leaders to the White House on Monday night and stated that he only lost the popular vote in November to Hillary Clinton because hordes of undocumented residents had voted when they shouldn?t have. (Not for him, he evidently assumed.) Between three and five million cast ballots illegally, he contended.

This is serious. The claim he is making is a grave one. Five million people voted illegally? There must be another election. America, after all, likes to hold itself up as the beacon of democracy. If its most recent presidential vote was flawed to so grave a degree, clearly that is the only proper course.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...result-hillary-clinton-election-a7544571.html

Valid point. He can claim people voted illegally, but why claim they all voted Hillary? Trump won several states by a few thousand people, maybe they were 'illegal voters'?

Or maybe he should shut the fuck up already and start doing something.
 
No, I mean like how the named countries are recognized as state sponsors of terrorism. Or perhaps you'd like me to post the Global Terrorism Index list?

Don't bother, I'll do it for you, and note along the way that the order doesn't include some countries (like Afghanistan and Egypt) that rank higher than those on the order. Nor are all the countries on the order recognized as state sponsors of terrorism. The US currently recognizes only three (and before you ask, I looked; the others named on the order no longer listed were removed by Bush, HW and W).

Nor does the order name all the countries in the region that the State department identified as terrorist safe havens, skipping Egypt, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among others.

Just seems like a poorly thought-out policy to try and fulfill a campaign promise to "deal with ISIS" without actually doing anything significant.



Editing in a completely different topic because double posting is goofy.

Here we go, the insecure manchild just won't accept he isn't popular:

Fox News said:
President Trump announced Wednesday that he will be asking for a ?major investigation? into alleged nationwide voter fraud -- a day after his press secretary was grilled on Trump?s claims that 3 million to 5 million people had voted illegally in November.

Trump announced the move on Twitter, and said the probe will focus on ?those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time).?

Trump?s announcement comes a day after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was forced to defend claims Trump had made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Monday that 3 million to 5 million people had illegally voted in the election.

The president took bipartisan criticism for the comments a day later, with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., saying he had seen "no evidence" of Trump's claim.

...

While cases of voter registration fraud are not uncommon, cases of actual recorded voter fraud are rare and sporadic. There is little evidence to suggest that as many as 5 million voted illegally. In his press briefing Tuesday, Spicer cited a 2008 Pew Research Study and supposed findings that 14 percent of voters were not citizens.

There is no such study. Spicer may be referring to a disputed 2014 Washington Post ?Monkey Cage? report which came to a similar conclusion. That study found that 14 percent of non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 indicated that they were registered to vote, and extrapolated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2010.

...

Meanwhile, a 2012 Pew study found evidence of widespread outdated voter registration forms, but did not make any conclusions in terms of actual voter fraud. The author of that study, David Becker, tweeted Wednesday that ?voting integrity [is] better in this election than ever before. Zero evidence of fraud.?

In his tweets, Trump promised that, depending on the results, voting procedures may be ?strengthened.?

Another article:

CNN said:
On Tuesday, Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer vigorously defended Trump's statement about illegal voters, though neither Trump nor his surrogates could provide evidence that any substantial illegal voting had occurred or influence the popular vote.

...

Ohio's secretary of state responded to Trump's Tweet on Wednesday, saying his office already investigated claims of voter fraud.
"We conducted a review 4 years ago in Ohio & already have a statewide review of 2016 election underway. Easy to vote, hard to cheat #Ohio," Jon Husted, a Republican, tweeted.

...

Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes in November, but won the Electoral College and thus the presidency. Trump, however, has seemingly been fixated on the popular vote, mentioning voter fraud in regards to his popular vote loss a number of times since November.

Spicer did not say specifically which studies the President was using to support his claim of 3 to 5 million illegally cast votes, but a 2014 study by Jesse Richman and David Earnest found more than 14% of non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 "indicated that they were registered to vote." Only US citizens can vote in federal elections.

However, Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, told CNN on Tuesday that his study that is apparently being cited by the White House was misinterpreted and did not support the administration's claims.

...

Trump himself -- through his lawyers -- have also argued that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2016 election. In a court filing objecting to Green Party candidate Jill Stein's Michigan recount petition, lawyers for the president wrote, "All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake."
 
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Where the fuck was that sentiment when Obama ruled by executive order and executive action (whatever that one is)?

A majority of Obama's EO/EAs weren't driven by ego or issues without supporting evidence. Also, a number of them were executed when the Legislature was collectively acting like a toddler whenever he tried to be bipartisan.
 
OK, I'm trying to give Trump as much of a chance as anyone, but saying you just won an election with rampant fraud is...certainly a strange way to go about things.
 
Trump has a mental illness...

Don't try to find an ingenious and very intelligent motive behind what he does. Sometimes he just does idiotic things, and you just can't accept he's done that because he has a mental illness, not because he's a mastermind of any sort.

The moment you realise that a man with an evident mental illness has been elected POTUS you understand how badly f**ked up things can get.
 
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