Donald Trump is the President of the United States. That's just disgusting to say. It doesn't even seem real. President Barack Obama, who was ushering in a new era in America, is gone. A relic to 1980's bad behavior is now the President. It's just dirty.
Dirty or not, it happened. It's not the only thing that happened this weekend though. Trump's Press Secretary, the over-matched Sean Spicer, used his first White House briefing to attack media reports that less than one-million people attended the inauguration, slam the press for reporting the obvious tensions between Trump and the intelligence community, and he didn't take any questions. It was possibly the worst start for a Press Secretary that I've ever seen.
How does Spicer's claims check out? Not well. He tried to blame the Secret Service for using magnetometers, which the Secret Service notes it didn't, as a reason that people didn't reach the Mall for the speech. He claimed 1.5 million people attended an event that the National Park Service claimed 900,000, roughly, attended. He called the media liars while he stood at the podium and blatantly lied about the picture above and below this paragraph.
The thing is, this isn't limited either. In the opening minutes of the Trump Administration, the Interior Department was banned from tweeting because they showed the side-by-side photos of President Obama's 2009 Inaugural and this 2017 Inaugural for Trump (which, by the way, was an inappropriate but true tweet for a government account). Then of course, there was Kellyanne Conway's clunker of a "Meet the Press" appearance on Sunday, which included the "revelation" that Donald Trump will never reveal his tax returns now that he is in office (because "nobody cares") and that Sean Spicer was not lying to the press on Saturday, he simply presented "alternative facts," which is a unique and creative way of saying he actually did lie. The days of telling the truth are over for this crew, if they ever existed to begin with.
No, that's not all. Trump was active out the gate. He signed an executive order that told federal agencies to "minimize" financial harm from the Affordable Care Act- a very vague and unclear order, but my guess is it will be used to end the IRS penalty for not buying care. His HUD ended a program to reduce insurance premiums on mortgages. Oh, and he had a rally at the CIA, in front of the wall honoring fallen agents, you know, just to let us know he won.
No, that's not all. After an inauguration speech that referred to ending "this American Carnage," at a time of relative progress for the country, Trump is now on the attack against Congressional Democrats. He is complaining that Senate Democrats are holding up the confirmation process of his nominees for the cabinet- this after the GOP-lead Senate ignored President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court for over 300 days. Quite obviously, the pot calling the kettle black is the new norm.
There are some things that happened though that weren't that bad. Secretaries Mattis and Kelly, at Defense and Homeland Security, were confirmed and sworn into office, and both *seem* to be very competent, decent people, from what we can tell. Trump did speak graciously about both President and Secretary Clinton at the inaugural luncheon on Friday. Trump even sent out a gracious tweet about the right to protest, in regards to the Women's March.
Those good things don't overshadow the bad though. We have a President who's angry about small crowd sizes for his inauguration. We have a Press Secretary flat out lying. We have a Counselor to the President re-naming lying as "alternative facts." Oh....
And Trump blew James Comey a kiss tonight. For real.
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