Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Ding-dong.
On the morning of January 20, 2017, the President-elect will visit Barack Obama at the White House for coffee, before they share a limousine—Obama seated on the right, his successor on the left—for the ride to the Capitol, where the Inauguration will take place, on the west front terrace, at noon.
Donald Trump will be five months short of seventy-one. He is America’s oldest first-term President.
On August 1st, members of his transition team moved into 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, a thirteen-story office building a block from the White House.
The team is led by Chris Christie and includes several of his political confidants, such as his former law partner William Palatucci.
As of August, under a new federal program designed to accelerate Presidential transitions, Trump’s staff was eligible to apply for security clearances, so that they could receive classified briefings immediately after Election Day.
They began the process of selecting Cabinet officials, charting policy moves, and meeting with current White House officials to plan the handover of the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and other agencies.
Trump aides are organizing what one Republican close to the campaign calls the First Day Project. Trump spends several hours signing papers—and erases the Obama Presidency.
Stephen Moore, an official campaign adviser who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “We want to identify executive orders that Trump could sign literally the first day in office.”
The idea is inspired by Reagan’s first week in the White House, in which he took steps to deregulate energy prices, as he had promised during his campaign.
Trump’s transition team is identifying executive orders issued by Obama which can be undone. “That’s a problem I don’t think the left really understood about executive orders,” Moore said. “If you govern by executive orders, then the next President can come in and overturn them.”
Trump’s advisers are weighing several options for the First Day Project: He can renounce the Paris Agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions, much as George W. Bush, in 2002, “unsigned” American support for the International Criminal Court.
He can re-start exploration of the Keystone pipeline, suspend the Syrian refugee program, and direct the Commerce Department to bring trade cases against China.
To loosen restrictions on gun purchases, he can relax background checks.
But those are secondary issues; he would begin with a step (“my first hour in office”) to fulfill his central promise of radical change in American immigration. “Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation.”
Roger Stone, a long-serving Trump adviser, says it is a mistake to imagine that Trump does not mean to fulfill his most radical ideas. Stone said. “He can ban anybody from Egypt, from Syria, from Libya, from Saudi Arabia."
Trump would have the opportunity to alter the Supreme Court, with one vacancy to fill immediately and others likely to follow. Three sitting Justices are in their late seventies or early eighties.
As for the Trump Organization, Trump could retain as much control or ownership as he wants, because Presidents are not bound by the same conflict-of-interest statute that restricts Cabinet officers and White House staff. Presidential decisions, especially on foreign policy, could strengthen or weaken his family’s business, which includes deals in Turkey, South Korea, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/president-trumps-first-term?mbid=gnep&intcid=gnep
