Just yesterday Donald Trump gave a press conference in which he boasted that he has done more in his short time in office than ANY other President EVER. He hasn’t even been in the White House for a month yet, today is only the twentieth day of his presidency. It feels like he’s been President for a lifetime, but there you have it: not even an entire month has passed since he and his tiny hands took over at America’s helm.
In fairness, he does do a lot. This week alone has included meetings with Justin Trudeau, Ivanka in the Oval Office hot seat, the scandalous departure of a national security adviser, dismissing decades of peace talks between Israel and Palestine in under two minutes, rolling back Obamacare, being fact checked by reporters and continuing to wage war on the media. It’s hard to believe but this is everything that has happened in just one week of Donald Trump’s presidency.
It’s a lot to keep up with, but don’t worry The Debrief has collected this list of all the things that Trump did this week so you don’t have to. We have also assessed whether or not Donald Trump’s business actually translates into achievements. Is he really the most productive President America’s ever had? Or, is he just one of those people who spends so much time furiously insisting how busy they are but not really doing anything at all?
1. When Canada Met Easy D
Big D met everyone’s favourite democratically elected world leader on Monday, Justin Trudeau. They talked about trade, apparently but people were more interested in the fact that it seems even Ivanka Trump is not immune to Trudeau’s charms and pictures of her mimicking the heart eyes emoji at him went viral.
Wait, why was Ivanka Trump (an unelected person with zero political experience) present at these meetings? Well, firstly that’s how the Donald rolls but, nepotism aside, they were discussing women in the workforce so you can understand that someone in the president’s team roped Ivanka in to boost the optics (it’s no secret that Trump’s cabinet has a teensy bit of a diversity problem).
Ivanka is apparently very keen to address the following issues ‘maternity leave and childcare, how to recruit and retain women and how to better support women entrepreneurs.’ That’s cool, but she should probably make sure the women making her shoe line aren’t working under ‘sweatshop-like conditions’ first.
2. Sometimes The Hardest Goodbyes Are The Ones You Know Are For The Best
On Valentine’s Day Trump’s security advisor, Michael Flynn, resigned. Why? In a nutshell he did something pretty bad, he mislead the Vice President over conversations he had with the Russian ambassador which, it goes without saying, is a very big shady no no. Flynn is said to have denied having conversations with Russia about sanctions around the time that Obama expelled Russian diplomats from the US over election hacking.
The controversy escalated pretty quickly, going from zero to a hundred between last Friday and Valentine’s Day. Trump initially denied all knowledge of the issue but, by Tuesday, Flynn had gone. The whole sordid affair has raised even more questions about just how large the shadow of Russia looms over Trump’s white house.
3. DGAF Diplomacy
On Wednesday Trump backtracked on decades of US policy on the Middle East when he said that he was open to the idea of supporting a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, if that’s what Israel and Palestine wanted. It wasn’t long before someone had to clear up big D’s mess. Less than 24 hours later the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said that America still very much supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it ‘would be an error’ to suggest anything else, she said.
4. Fake News Thursday
Donald Trump gave an unprecedentedly long press conference yesterday which ran for no fewer than 77 minutes. He used as a vehicle to air some of his gripes. He denounced all of his critics, saying he inherited a ‘mess’ from the Obama administration and dismissed all stories that he and his campaign were cosy with Russia as ‘fake news’.
‘I have never seen more dishonest media, frankly, than political media’ he said. It would be understandable if you were finding this all a little confusing, didn’t Trump’s national security advisor resign because a leak revealed that he had been dishonest about his contact with Russia? Yes, he did. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
‘The leaks are real. The leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake’, Trump said. ‘I’m here again to take my message straight to the people. As you know, our administration inherited many problems across government and across the economy. To be honest, I inherited a mess. It’s a mess. At home and abroad, a mess’ he continued to rant.
He didn’t stop there. Trump also told the room that he had the biggest electoral margin since President Ronald Reagan. An NBC reporter called him out on this, rightly pointing out that it was, in fact, the very sort of fake news that the President seems to be so upset about. His response was priceless:
5. TGIF
At the time of writing it was only 9am in Washington, so who knows what today holds in the chronicles of Easy D and the White House. In yesterday’s press conference, when he wasn’t berating the media, Trump said his ‘administration is running like a fine-tuned machine’ so we expect to see more smooth governance today.
**Productivity Rating: **low. Trump has blustered and postured a lot but, this week, he was more talk than action.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.