monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump claimed falsely that the crowd for his swearing-in stretched down the National Mall to the Washington Monument and totaled more than 1 million people. It did not. Trump accused television networks of showing “an empty field” and reporting that he drew just 250,000 people to witness Friday’s ceremony.

“It looked like a million, a million and a half people,” Trump said, falsely claiming that his crowd “went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”

“It’s a lie,” Trump said of the crowd estimates for Friday’s event. “We caught [the media]. We caught them in a beauty.”

Trump also misrepresented what happened to the weather during his swearing in. He said he felt a few drops of rain as he started delivering his address, but then, “God looked down and, and he said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech.. . .The truth is it stopped immediately.”

Light rain continued to fall through the first few minutes of the speech — and VIP’s at the dais took out ponchos, including former president George W. Bush — and then quit. Trump said there was a downpour right after he finished, which did not occur.

Trump declared, “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, right?”

The insecure egomaniac-in-chief will almost surely deny awkward truths, and berate the media for reporting them…how do you think the man…will react when the Bureau of Labor Statistics first reports a significant uptick in unemployment or decline in manufacturing jobs? What’s he going to do when the Centers for Disease Control and the Census Bureau report spiking numbers of uninsured Americans? You may have thought that last weekend’s temper tantrum was bad. But there’s much, much worse to come.

Anyone laboring under the impression that the new Trump administration will be all bark and no bite when it comes to overturning long-established bipartisan policies should watch Team Trump’s assault on the Environmental Protection Agency closely. Aside from appointing Scott Pruitt, who is mainly familiar with EPA as a hated adversary in court, to be in charge of that agency, plans for an initial regulatory wave and budgetary policies amount to a 180-degree turn in environmental enforcement, as reported today by Axios. They include the complete elimination of climate-change programs; a half-billion-dollars in funding cuts for EPA grants to state and local governments; an immediate halt to Clean Air Act regulations affecting new and existing power plants; an about-face on auto emissions standards; and a general defanging of EPA’s crucial ability to overrule federal and state regulations that pose environmental dangers.

No less a figure than Spicer himself claimed to grasp this simple distinction when he spoke to students at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago just two weeks ago. “I’ve never lied,” he said, “and I’d argue that anyone who is an aspiring communicator adhere to that, because if you lose the respect and trust of the press corps, you’ve got nothing.”

But there’s much, much worse to come.

Trump’s unscripted remarks were, instead, largely about himself, even as he praised Mike Pompeo—a West Point and Harvard Law School graduate, Kansas congressman, and Tea Party supporter—as his choice to lead the C.I.A.

“No. 1 in his class at West Point,” Trump said. “Now, I know a lot about West Point. I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at M.I.T. for thirty-five years, who did a fantastic job in so many different ways, academically—was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart persona.”

Apparently as proof, the President noted that he had set an “all-time record” in Time magazine cover stories. “Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it’s one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right?” he told the intelligence officials. “I’ve been on it for fifteen times this year. I don’t think that’s a record that can ever be broken.” Time told Politico’s Playbook that it had published eleven Trump covers—and had done fifty-five cover stories about Richard Nixon.

Press as the enemy. A proper target for warfare.

Be specific. What do you have in mind?

Aside from all the noise of Trump and his spokespersons and his war on the press, we have to stay appraised of what is going on as a consequence of his cabinet choices. Here's where the real and consequential stuff is going on. If you thought maybe the Koch crowd were somehow marginalized with a Trump presidency, you'd be very wrong indeed.

Quote:

Anyone laboring under the impression that the new Trump administration will be all bark and no bite when it comes to overturning long-established bipartisan policies should watch Team Trump’s assault on the Environmental Protection Agency closely........

And even after 20 years, the Democrats won't be returning to power until a new generation of Democrats decides that it is time to purge all the wacky extremists from the Democratic Party, and then does so.

In all of this you (and the magazines you cite) betray a lack of knowledge of the specifics of issues about which you pontificate so broadly.