Welcome to This Week in Trump, Slate’s weekly look at Donald Trump’s presidency. Every week, we’ll catch you up on the events of the past seven days, point you to further reading, and keep an eye on the @RealDonaldTrump Twitter feed.
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What does Putin have on Trump?
A week before becoming leader of the free world, Donald Trump found himself denying that while in Russia he hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ show.” (“I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way,” the president-elect insisted.)
The episode began when CNN reported that intelligence agents had presented Trump with details on memos written by a former intelligence agent alleging that the Kremlin has compromising information on the next president. BuzzFeed (and, subsequently, Slate) posted the memos themselves. A new word entered the American political lexicon: kompromat. According to experts, it’s common practice for the Kremlin to blackmail political opponents with compromising material.
Trump vehemently denied the content of the memos and accused CNN and BuzzFeed of propagating “fake news.” (Putin agreed: “These bogus stories are clearly fake.”) But some pointed out that Trump seems to have changed his tune on Russia over the past few years.
The memo’s author was later identified as Christopher Steele, who came to believe “that a cabal within the [FBI] blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails,” according to the Independent.
Fighting with a civil rights icon
Trump spent the weekend of Martin Luther King Day sparring with civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis. The lawmaker, who marched alongside King and was brutally beaten by police, called Trump an illegitimate president and said he wouldn’t attend the inauguration. In response, Trump took to Twitter to say Lewis was “all talk, talk talk—no action” and should focus on “fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).”
Many Democrats—and even some Republicans—came to Lewis’ defense. (The Atlanta Journal Constitution took issue with Trump’s description of Lewis’ district.) More than 50 Democratic lawmakers are now skipping the inauguration. On Tuesday, Trump pointed out that Lewis had boycotted George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration too.
Trump’s Cabinet takes shape
The Senate began confirmation hearings on Trump’s top Cabinet nominees. Many expressed outright disagreement with their future boss’ most controversial campaign positions; some displayed strikingly little knowledge of those positions.
Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief tapped for secretary of state, surprised senators by lying outright about Exxon’s lobbying activities and refusing to condemn human rights violations around the world. His confirmation could be in jeopardy.
Attorney general candidate Jeff Sessions was asked about long-standing accusations of racial bigotry. (He called them “very painful.”) He also told senators that he wasn’t sure whether “a secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious.” And Ben Carson, the nominee for secretary of housing and urban development, refused to promise that no HUD money would go to Trump’s real estate empire.
Also taking the stand this week: Ryan Zinke (interior secretary), Betsy DeVos (education secretary), Nikki Haley (U.N. ambassador), Scott Pruitt (Environmental Protection Agency administrator), Tom Price (health and human services secretary), Wilbur Ross (commerce secretary), Rick Perry (energy secretary), and Steven Mnuchin (treasury secretary).
A conflicted president
Trump’s long-awaited news conference last week led with talk of Russian spies, but its real purpose was to outline the future mogul-president’s plan to avoid conflicts of interest. Observers were decidedly unimpressed. Experts, including the head of the Office of Government Ethics, say Trump will be one conflicted president. Trump’s sons will take care of his business empire and will hire an ethics consigliere, but the president will still be aware of how any policy decisions would affect his bottom line. When he becomes commander-in-chief, Trump “will still be entangled in this web of business and financial relationships. He’ll still be open to influence from foreign entities. He’ll still be a vector of unprecedented corruption in the White House,” notes Slate’s Jamelle Bouie.
Also this week
- Trump’s Cabinet is “shaping up to have a smaller percentage of women and nonwhites than the first cabinets of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush.”
- Trump is set to move into the White House as “the most unpopular of at least the last seven newly elected presidents.” (Trump’s response? The polls “are rigged just like before.”)
- In two interviews published over the weekend, Trump “escalated tensions with China while also infuriating allies and institutions critical to America’s traditional leadership of the West.”
- The Trump administration could boot the press from the White House. “They are the opposition party,” a senior official said.
- If Republican lawmakers repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement, “at least 18 million people would lose health insurance in the first year.”
- Trump promised “insurance for everybody” as part of his Obamacare replacement plan.
- The top nine public pharmaceutical companies lost around $25 billion in value in a matter of minutes after Trump said they were “getting away with murder.”
- Trump’s inaugural celebration will be “relatively low-key” and “bereft of many A-list entertainers”—not what many were expecting from the reality-TV star.
What to read
Andrew Rice’s deeply reported New York profile of Jared Kushner gives rare insight into Trump’s businessman son-in-law as he steps into a key role in the administration:
Above all, he and Trump share a clannish outlook on life, business, and politics. Trump prizes loyalty, especially when it flows upward, and no defender has been more steadfast during his turbulent struggle than Kushner. Neither forgets when he’s been wronged. They both appear to enjoy the metallic taste of payback, although of the two, Trump may be the more forgiving.
The world is struggling to understand what a Trump presidency could mean, writes Robin Wright in the New Yorker:
Since the election, embassies across Washington have been scrambling to deduce Trump’s foreign policy from his often contradictory campaign statements and undiplomatic tweets. “You have a conversation with someone, and then there’s a random Trump tweet at night and it’s not clear if it shows a policy shift or it’s just a middle-of-the-night thought,” one Western envoy said. “The bigger question is, What do we take from Trump, and what is he just freelancing off the top of his head?
“We’re bracing ourselves,” the envoy added.
Trump is still being underestimated, writes Yascha Mounk in Slate:
Over the course of the campaign, we should have learned just how easy it is to fall prey to wishful thinking. And yet, many of us are at it again. With a preternatural confidence oddly unshaken by the last months, pundits once again claim that Trump is sure to fail. But the reasons they give for their optimism are, as ever, weaker than they first appear.
That Trump isn’t sure to fail does not mean that he’s certain to succeed. It’s perfectly possible that he’ll crash and burn. But to figure out how to beat Trump, we must start by taking him—and the danger he poses—seriously.
This week in @RealDonaldTrump
Days before his inauguration, Trump continued to launch Twitter attacks against his foes. He attacked Rep. John Lewis. He attacked Saturday Night Live (again). He attacked pollsters, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, and CNN. He did link, approvingly, to two news stories in the past week. The sources? Breitbart and One America News Network.
An avid but sometimes careless Twitter user, Trump retweeted a message that intended to praise his daughter but in fact cited a different Ivanka.
The president-elect also used his Twitter account to urge his 20 million followers to “buy L.L.Bean.”
Last take
Why did Trump once again go after Saturday Night Live? It likely had something to do with this week’s cold open, which took on the president-elect’s news conference and the reported “Russian pee-pee party.”
