We’ve now survived a full month in Donald Trump’s America. But for liberals it’s felt like centuries — long medieval centuries chock-full of plague, illiteracy, and barbarians running roughshod through the ruins of the old republic. But we aren’t actually living in the dark ages (yet). So we might as well shed some light on what the barbarians have been up to.
Trump has given his detractors so many causes for fear and outrage, it can be difficult — both practically and psychologically — to keep on top of them all as they happen.
To help you stay informed despite this challenge, Daily Intelligencer will provide (more or less) weekly inventories of Trump’s every assault on civic norms, common decency, and/or liberal democracy. Here’s a rundown of everything the president-elect has accomplished since Monday, November 29, arranged in rough order of each affront’s apparent significance and severity:
Provoked heightened diplomatic tensions with two nuclear-armed states.
Before last Friday, the leaders of the United States and Taiwan had not spoken since 1979. This was because China does not recognize Taiwan as an independent state, but rather, a breakaway province. Preventing the island from achieving internationally recognized independence is one of the top priorities of Chinese foreign policy — one that its military has prepared to go to war over.
Thus, America’s friendly diplomatic relationship with the world’s second greatest power is premised on our respect for the “One China” policy.
Seven days ago, Donald Trump chose to disrespect that policy, when, unbeknownst to the Obama White House, the president-elect held a ten-minute phone conversation with Taiwan’s president — and leader of the nations pro-independence political party — Tsai Ing-wen.
The call prompted an immediate diplomatic protest from China, followed by reassurances from the sitting president that no official change in policy had been intended.
Initially, the call appeared to testify to the hazards posed by Trump’s willful ignorance. The president-elect has reportedly refused to sit through daily intelligence briefings and neglected to consult the State Department before meeting with foreign leaders. And, after his precedent-shattering call was met with widespread criticism, he advertised his inability to comprehend the concept of diplomatic fictions.
Alternatively, there was some speculation that Trump had chosen to roll the dice on 37 years of peaceful U.S.-Sino relations for the sake of developing a new hotel in Taipei.
And then, the Washington Post revealed that the call to Taiwan was the result of a wholly different — but no less alarming — cause: Former Republican senator Bob Dole, along with other hawks in Trump’s inner circle, had persuaded the president-elect to make the call as an intentional provocation of the Chinese government.
Whatever comfort came with learning that Trump perhaps hadn’t jeopardized our relationship with a nuclear superpower out of carelessness or greed, was erased by the knowledge that the alternative explanation was one of calculated belligerence.
While Trump campaigned on a kind of neo-isolationism, the president-elect is surrounded by advisers who believe that the United States is at war with Islam and that China must be made to understand our strength.
Trump’s Taiwan call suggests that these crackpot adventurers may actually get to steer the ship of State.
Which isn’t to say that Trump’s bumbling ignorance won’t create it’s own set of diplomatic crises: Last week, the president-elect also appeared to wing a phone call with the prime minister of Pakistan, in which he offered to mediate its dispute with India over Kashmir while calling the Pakistanis “one of the most intelligent people” — sentiments that caused a fair amount of anxiety inside of India.
Few conflicts in the world pose a greater risk of nuclear escalation than that between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. By all appearances, Trump chose to weigh in on that conflict without soliciting instruction from diplomatic authorities.
Defended the propriety of mass murder as an anti-drug policy.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has likened his campaign to rid his nation of drug users to Adolph Hitler’s attempt to rid the planet of Jews: Earlier this year, Duterte noted that the press had portrayed him as the “cousin of Hitler,” then explained that he took little offense at the analogy — after all, whatever else you might think of the Führer, the man was very good at exterminating the impure.
“There are 3 million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. I’d be happy to slaughter them,” Duterte said.
Since taking office last summer, Duterte has presided over the extrajudicial killings — by police and vigilantes — of more than 3,000 alleged “drug addicts.”
In doing so, he has (reportedly) won the admiration of America’s president-elect.
“He wishes me well, too, in my campaign, and he said that, well, we are doing it as a sovereign nation, the right way,” Mr. Duterte said last week, adding that Trump had invited him to visit the White House next year.
Of course, you can’t believe everything an authoritarian mass murderer says. But Trump did not deny Duterte’s account — and given the opportunity to condemn the Philippine president’s campaign of terror, in an interview with Time, the president-elect chose to defend it, instead:
“They come from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met,” Trump says. “They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.”
A reporter mentions that what Trump is saying echoes the rhetoric of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users in recent months. The President-elect offers no objection to the comparison. “Well, hey, look, this is bad stuff,” he says. “They slice them up, they carve their initials in the girl’s forehead, O.K. What are we supposed to do? Be nice about it?”
Handed the Environmental Protection Agency to a climate denialist.
On Monday, those of us who would like to keep this whole “human civilization” thing going for a few more centuries were provided a ray of hope: President-elect Donald Trump met with inconvenient-truth-teller Al Gore. The meeting came days after Politico reported that Ivanka Trump planned to make climate change one of her “signature issues.”
Thus, for a moment, it seemed like the president-elect might have decided that he’d rather not do everything in his power to accelerate the onset of ecological catastrophe.
But then, on Wednesday, Trump named Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency (or, as it may soon be known, the Environmental Destruction Agency).
Pruitt is one of the nation’s leading opponents of the current EPA’s climate-change policies, helping to coordinate a 28-state lawsuit against new limitations on the amount of carbon that power plants can emit.
But his opposition to environmental protection extends beyond climate denial: While most conservatives dismiss the significance of global warming, many still believe it makes sense for the government to keep poison out of the air and water.
Not Pruitt. He has unsuccessfully sued the EPA over regulations on smog pollution, and over a rule that safeguards wetlands and streams that helps filter contamination from drinking water.
The man is so in the pocket of the energy industry, he once took a letter decrying fracking regulations — sent to him by the oil company Devon Energy — copied the text of the letter onto Oklahoma government stationery, and mailed it off to the EPA.
Now, he won’t need to write letters or bring lawsuits to express his contempt for any policy that puts the public interest above the energy’s industry short-term profits — he’ll be able to undermine those policies directly.
What’s more, in the wake of Pruitt’s appointment, Trump’s meeting with Gore is recast in its own sinister light: The president-elect’s meeting the climate-change champion may have been a deliberate bid to sow confusion about the nature of his actual policy on the environment. And it may have worked.
Attacked a local labor leader for calling attention to his lies.
Last week, Donald Trump convinced Carrier to move only one of its Indiana plants to Mexico, in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks (and/or a tacit promise to make sure nothing unfortunate happens to its parent company’s federal contracts).
The president-elect then traveled to the factory he’d ostensibly rescued and announced that “over 1,100 workers” would be keeping their jobs thanks to his tireless efforts.
This was news to Chuck Jones, president of the union that represents those workers, United Steelworkers 1999. Trump had locked the union out of negotiations with Carrier, and so Jones had not been able to examine the terms of the agreement. Thus, he urged his workers to keep their optimism on the cautious side, but to no avail. As he would later write, “Our members got their hopes up. They thought their jobs had been saved.”
In fact, when Jones finally met with the management of Carrier, he discovered that only 730 factory jobs had been saved.
Jones told the Washington Post that he’d hoped Trump would be upfront about the terms of the deal, but instead the president-elect had “lied his ass off.” He then reiterated that sentiment in an interview with CNN.
Trump replied by attacking Jones by name, accusing the local labor leader — whose efforts on behalf of his union had turned their plight into a national news story — of being personally responsible for the offshoring of jobs.
After a campaign spent lambasting the treachery of unpatriotic CEOs and globalist elites, Trump now blamed the decline of American manufacturing on the laziness of uppity workers.
These tweets are scary not merely for what they portend about the Trump administration’s labor policies (more on that in a minute) but also because they signal the president-elect’s enthusiasm for using his bully pulpit to stigmatize individual private citizens who dare to draw attention to his lies.
In the wake of Trump’s attack, Jones was inundated with implicit threats on his life and lives of his children.
Meanwhile, Trump’s promises about the Carrier deal have proven even less impressive than they initially appeared. To make its commitment to the Indiana factory concrete and verifiable, Carrier pledged to invest $16 million into the facility. But on Thursday, CNN Money learned that the company will spend the bulk of that money on automation, with the aim of radically reducing the size of its workforce in the short-term future.
Handed the Labor Department to a serial violator of labor law.
On Thursday, Donald Trump named Andy Puzder as his choice for Labor Secretary, a move roughly analogous to naming Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as head of counterterrorism.
Puzder is the CEO of the fast-food company that owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardees chains — restaurants that have been serial violators of the Fair Labor Standards Act. According to data compiled by Bloomberg BNA, 60 percent of all Labor Department investigations into Puzder’s signature eateries turned up instances of wage theft or other forms of worker mistreatment. While on the high side, that figure isn’t that far out of step with industry standards: Nearly half of enforcement cases brought by the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour division in 2015 targeted the restaurant industry.
Companies like Puzder’s have tried to dodge responsibility for these abuses, by arguing that parent companies can’t be held liable for the actions of franchisees. But in 2015, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that workers had a right to bargain with parent companies over working conditions.
Puzder will now have discretion over how to enforce that ruling (or, at least, he will until Trump gets the opportunity to appoint new members of the NLRB, and the ruling gets reversed).
Puzder has also been a vocal critic of large increases in the minimum wage and the Obama administration’s decision to expand access to guaranteed overtime pay.
He also likes to advertise his burgers via soft-core pornography.
As Labor Secretary, Puzder will oversee the Women’s Bureau, an agency tasked with representing the needs of working women.
Requested security clearance for a conspiracy theorist who claims that the Clintons operate a Satanic child-sex ring out of a popular D.C. pizzeria.
Michael Flynn is an Islamophobic retired general and intelligence expert, who occasionally promotes unhinged conspiracy theories. He will be the top national security adviser to our next president.
Michael G. Flynn Jr. is the Islamophobic chief of staff of his father’s consulting firm, who constantly promotes unhinged conspiracy theories — including one about how the Democratic Establishment keeps child sex slaves imprisoned at a popular Washington pizzeria.
This week, a delusional — albeit morally courageous — man showed up at that pizzeria with a firearm, prepared to liberate those poor children. Also this week, CNN learned that Trump’s transition team had sought to supply Flynn Jr. with a security clearance.
Flynn Jr. has since been removed from Trump’s transition team. But his father, who (apparently) felt his son deserved access to state secrets, is still slated to become one of the most powerful men in the world next January.
Baselessly accused a private company of ripping off the government, shortly after the CEO of that company criticized his trade policies.
On Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune published an article that mentioned Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s recent criticism of Donald Trump’s trade policies.
Twenty minutes later, the president-elect baselessly accused Boeing of ripping off the government to the tune of $4 billion, and announced his intention to cancel one of its major federal contracts.
It’s unclear whether the first development informed the second one. But it’s difficult not to infer a connection, given Trump’s penchant for attacking all who criticize him, and the fact that there is factual basis for his tweet’s claim. (The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the entire Air Force One program will cost $3.2 billion between 2010 and 2020. However, Boeing has not even been awarded a contract to assemble the planes, only multimillion-dollar deals to design certain aspects of the aircrafts. If costs are “out of control,” Boeing has little to do with it — and there is no $4 billion contract to be canceled).
On Friday, Boeing pledged $1 million to president Trump’s inauguration.
“Week” 2 (November 19 through 28)
Questioned the legitimacy of the election he just won.
Trump spent much of his campaign sowing doubts about the legitimacy of American elections, going so far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton was conspiring with international bankers and undocumented immigrants to steal the presidency through large-scale voter fraud.
One of the few ostensible benefits of Trump’s surprise victory was that the leader of the Republican Party would, presumably, stop sowing doubts about the integrity of our democracy. But Trump shattered that half-full glass on Sunday.
In response to the Clinton campaign’s decision to cooperate with the Wisconsin recount effort spearheaded by Jill Stein, Trump tweeted:
Here, the president-elect condemns his opponents for refusing to accept the results of November’s election … by declaring his own refusal to accept the results of that election; and suggests that the vote totals don’t need to be audited, by claiming that that the vote totals are off by more than two million.
But the problem with these remarks is much larger than unintentional irony. If Trump can’t acknowledge a (functionally irrelevant) popular-vote loss, how might he respond to an election result that actually challenged his grip on power?
Or, more immediately, how might he and his party go about ensuring that “illegal voting” (a.k.a. “nonwhite voting”) has less of an impact in 2020? Trump’s tweets could foreshadow a coming push for nationwide voter suppression — if it doesn’t foreshadow something much scarier than that.
Appointed Ben Carson secretary of Housing and Urban Development — despite the fact that Carson has no relevant experience and recently declared himself unqualified for any cabinet position.
Ben Carson is a retired neurosurgeon who has more experience hawking “cancer-curing” vitamins than managing a bureaucracy. Carson’s personal assistant alluded to this fact earlier this month, when he explained that Carson did not want a cabinet position because he believed that his lack of government expertise “could cripple the presidency.”
And then Donald Trump named Ben Carson as his pick for HUD secretary.
Beyond Carson’s lack of managerial experience, he has absolutely no experience in housing or urban policy. He does, however, believe that efforts to enforce the Fair Housing Act — which both prohibits discrimination in the housing market and requires municipalities to actively combat such discrimination — are “communist.”
He also believes that that there is a broad scientific consensus that aliens built the pyramids — but that this consensus is wrong, because the biblical Joseph built the pyramids with help from God, as a means of storing grain.
Carson’s appointment suggests that Trump’s preference for empowering incompetent loyalists over qualified professionals knows no bounds. Although, if Trump sees HUD primarily as a tool for enriching well-connected real-estate developers, Carson’s combination of loyalty and grifting experience may make him uniquely “qualified” for the position.
Allowed his D.C. hotel to actively court the patronage of foreign diplomats.
The president-elect owns a company with myriad overseas investments, creditors, and partnerships — and a lot of permit requests pending before foreign governments. The number of conflicts of interest this situation creates is uncountable. And Trump knows that if he continues to ignore these conflicts — and simply shapes American foreign policy around his own business interests — there’s little we can do to hold him accountable.
“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” Trump explained last week in an interview with the New York Times. And he’s correct, to a point: The president is exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws. Some legal scholars believe that the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Trump from profiting off the gifts or payments of foreign governments. But absent the cooperation of congressional Republicans, it will likely be difficult to press that issue.
Meanwhile, Trump is already leveraging his claim on the White House for everything it’s worth. Earlier this month, the Trump International Hotel D.C. provided 100 foreign diplomats with Trump-brand champagne and a request for their patronage. Several diplomats told the Washington Post that they intended to make Trump’s hotel their delegations’ home away from home, so as to “build ties with the new administration.”
Invited the manager of his blind trust onto a phone call with the president of Argentina.
During the campaign, Trump promised that he would distance himself from his business interests by placing his assets into what he refered to as a “blind trust,” but is actually an entity that would allow him perfect knowledge of the assets he holds — and that would be managed by his children, who are now members of his transition team.
Since winning the White House, Trump has refused to accept the (wholly inadequate) constraints this vow would place on his actions. The president-elect has already invited his daughter Ivanka — the manager of his blind trust – to a closed-door meeting with the Japanese prime minister, and onto a phone call with the president of Argentina.
The day after that phone call, the Trump Organization received the Argentine government’s approval to move forward on its high-rise development in Buenos Aires.
Met with Indian business partners who have publicly declared their intention to capitalize on his status as president-elect.
Trump took time away from his transition to meet with the developers of Trump Towers Pune, a pair of 23-story buildings in the west of India.
“We will see a tremendous jump in valuation in terms of the second tower,” one consultant who worked on the project told the New York Times. “To say, ‘I have a Trump flat or residence’ — it’s president-elect branded. It’s that recall value. If they didn’t know Trump before, they definitely know him now.”
Tried to coerce Britain into appointing a right-wing extremist as its ambassador to the United States.
After filling his own administration with racist incompetents whose primary qualification for high office is their loyalty to Donald Trump, the president-elect publicly requested that U.K. prime minister Theresa May do the same.
Nigel Farage is a member of UKIP and an arch-critic of May’s Tory government. (Imagine if May publicly announced that “many people” wanted to see Harry Reid as America’s ambassador to Britain.)
But using Twitter to sour America’s relations with foreign governments appears to be a core part of Trump’s approach to diplomacy.
Berated the media at a closed-door meeting for publishing unflattering photos of his double chin.
Trump spent much of his campaign demonizing journalists as biased liars and/or the paid propagandists of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. The mogul’s attempts to delegitimize the Fourth Estate have not let up since Election Day. In addition to making himself less accessible to press scrutiny than any president-elect in recent memory, Trump has also declared America’s most-read newspaper to be a “failing institution,” and invited the nation’s leading journalists to an off-the-record meeting — so as to berate them in person.
At that meeting, Trump complained about everything from the tenor of CNN’s campaign coverage to NBC’s habit of publishing photos in which the president-elect appears to have a double chin.
It’s hard to imagine a worse way for a political figure to dispel concerns about his authoritarian tendencies than to attempt to dictate which images of himself can be publicly disseminated.
Criticized the cast of a Broadway musical for asking the vice-president to work on behalf of all Americans.
Mike Pence went to a performance of Hamilton on Broadway. A lot of liberals — and LGBT individuals — go to Broadway shows. And Pence believes in gay-conversion therapy, but not in same-sex marriage. So he was booed.
After the show, a cast member told Pence from the stage, “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights … We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”
Pence took this in stride. Trump was furious that his safe space had been violated.
Settled a fraud case for $25 million.
The president-elect decided that the case against his defunct “university” was strong enough for him to accept a $25 million settlement.
Admitted that his charity was guilty of self-dealing.
After months of accusing Hillary Clinton of philanthropic corruption, the Donald J. Trump Foundation informed the IRS that it had violated the prohibition on “self-dealing,” which bars the heads of nonprofits from using their charity’s funds to aid themselves. Previous reporting by the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold revealed that the president-elect had used his foundation’s money to pay out legal settlements, acquire Tim Tebow memorabilia, and purchase large portraits of himself.
“Week” 1 (November 9 through 18)
Derided protestors as paid professionals whose acts of free speech are fundamentally “unfair.”
American presidents generally try not to discredit their detractors via patently false right-wing conspiracy theories — a point that someone on Trump’s staff apparently relayed to him, as the president-elect’s Twitter account declared its “love” of the protestors’ “passion” nine hours later.
Invited the manager of his “blind trust” to a meeting with the prime minister of Japan.
Even before his election, Trump had already made a mockery of good government norms, by refusing to extricate himself from the myriad conflicts of interest his company presents. Instead, the president-elect promised to place his assets into what he refers to as a “blind trust,” but is actually an entity that would allow him perfect knowledge of the assets he holds — and that would be managed by his children, who are also members of his transition team.
This week, Trump revealed that those children will also, apparently, take part in diplomatic meetings with the leaders of foreign countries.
Assembled a team of racists to lead his White House.
First, Trump tapped the allegedly anti-Semitic mastermind of an “alt-right” website as his chief White House strategist. Then, the president-elect tapped a retired general who believes that “fear of Muslims is rational” as his national security adviser. Finally, he named a man that a Republican Senate deemed too racist to serve as a federal judge in 1986 — one who thinks the Voting Rights Act is “intrusive,” and (allegedly) told an African-American federal prosecutor that he should “be careful what you say around white folks” — as the head of the Justice Department.
Took credit for the fact that Ford will not be relocating a plant to Mexico (which they never had any intention of relocating to Mexico).
In truth, Ford opted to keep the Lincoln SUV production line in Kentucky, after considering moving it to Mexico — but in either event, the plant would have remained open, and no jobs would have been lost.
But fake news outlets — and some not-so-rigorous “real” ones — celebrated Trump’s “victory,” anyway.
Declared America’s leading newspaper a “failing” institution.
Trump has made a years-long habit of denigrating any media institution that accurately reports information he doesn’t like. But the stakes of this behavior are drastically higher now that he leads the world’s most powerful country.
Abandoned his press pool.
Presidents-elect typically feel compelled to allow a pool of reporters to travel with them to public events, as a gesture to the public’s right to have a watchful eye on its leader. Trump feels no such compulsion.
Floated the idea of hiring his son-in-law to a White House position, in possible defiance of laws against nepotism and norms against conflicts of interest.
Public officials are barred from hiring family members to agencies that they have authority over. They also, generally, avoid hiring the significant others of the heads of their blind trusts.
Took calls from foreign leaders on unsecured phone lines, without consulting the State Department.
Trump spent the 2016 campaign savaging Hillary Clinton for her reckless violation of the State Department’s protocols for transmitting information. He has spent the past week taking calls from foreign leaders — on the unprotected phone lines of Trump Tower — without first soliciting pertinent briefings, in defiance of longstanding practice.
Referred to his White House transition as though it were the next season of The Apprentice.