Trump to Order Defense Chiefs to Draft ISIS Plan, Despite Promised Secret Plan
■ President Trump will order his defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draft a plan to crush the Islamic State, despite his campaign promise that he had a secret plan to do just that.
■ Sean Spicer’s war with the news media goes back to his college days, and it was sad! Really!
■ Mr. Trump meets with manufacturers at the White House — as announced on Twitter.
So there was no secret plan to beat ISIS?
Among the first executive orders that Mr. Trump will sign on Monday will be one to the defense secretary and joint chiefs to come up with a plan to eviscerate the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, according to the new morning newsletter published by Axios.
Other orders seem to follow the script. As President George W. Bush did, Mr. Trump will reinstate language banning foreign family-planning aid to nongovernmental organizations that also provide abortions. He will formalize his five-year ban on administration officials becoming lobbyists, a policy instituted during the transition, and he is likely to impose some kind of hiring freeze in federal agencies.
Spicer’s first war with the news media: Sad!
Before his rise to Mr. Trump’s White House, Mr. Spicer, the press secretary, was known around Washington as the somewhat beleaguered communications chief at the Republican National Committee, and before that, a spokesman around Republican quarters of the House.
But his brushes with the news media — and ensuing raw feelings — go further back than that, to his school days at Connecticut College, where he was a student government senator and his relationship with The College Voice was, shall we say, not terribly cordial. He may have even coined the meme “Sad!”
It started in April 1993, when The College Voice’s “This Week in Assembly” column detailed an amendment to ensure that an antismoking regulation would not affect existing rules for the creation of smoking and nonsmoking rooms for exams, sponsored by one “Sean Sphincter.”
That May, The College Voice allowed that Mr. Spicer was “unintentionally misidentified” and that the paper “regrets the error.”
This did not satisfy Mr. Spicer, who dashed off an angry letter to the editor about the article “in which my name was ‘misspelled.’”
“While those involved claimed that this was a copy joke that went unnoticed, I believe that it was a malicious and intentional attack. For a paper which claims to be run by ‘professional’ standards, I find it a bit sad that this type of reporting is explained as a simple part of production.”
Trump’s first full day — as tweeted
The new president is still on Twitter, naturally, but he apparently hasn’t decided where his followers are to look.
On his old @realDonaldTrump feed on Monday morning, he offered up a little bit of news for the day ahead.
The @POTUS account, intermittently used by President Obama and usually a tad dull, has become a propaganda arm of the Trump White House, with exaltations, quotations and photographs — and a profile pic of Mr. Trump that is pure Trump.
NO DREAM is too big, NO CHALLENGE is too great. Nothing we want for our future is BEYOND OUR REACH. #AmericaFirst
The White House did move the president’s initial @realDonaldTrump post on Monday morning to the official account, 23 minutes later. Perhaps his advisers can nudge him away from a personal account that technically he shouldn’t be using, according to the same rules that he cited when he blasted Hillary Clinton for her personal email server.
A longer look at his daily schedule is here:
TRUMP MEETINGS TODAY:
--Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris and other business leaders
--intel officials
--@VP
--union leaders
--@SpeakerRyan
Separately, Mr. Trump’s not-so-loyal opposition is pushing #MuteMonday, encouraging people to unfollow @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS, find a new leader to follow and share their choice.
Congressional leaders to meet with the president
The bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate are scheduled to go to the White House on Monday for what is billed as a casual reception with Mr. Trump.
At the inaugural luncheon after Mr. Trump’s swearing-in on Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, spent a good 15 minutes yakking with Mr. Trump, apparently to express displeasure with the president’s cabinet nominees, in particular Representative Tom Price of Georgia, the nominee to be secretary of health and human services.
The session will be the president’s first extended opportunity to look for common ground with Democrats, who have denounced his messages and policy priorities, including his executive order on Saturday to pave the way for weakening the requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
And he will have the chance to discuss potential bipartisan initiatives, including his $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan.
Mr. Trump has high hopes for his relationship with Capitol Hill; he declared on Friday, just minutes after being sworn in, that “we all want the same thing,” regardless of political party, and, “we’re going to get along.”
Monday’s late-afternoon gathering will be a first test.
Mr. Schumer is slated to be at the Monday meeting with Senators Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican; Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin; and Representatives Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, and Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the minority whip.
Notably, Mr. Trump is set to meet alone with Mr. Ryan afterward.
Nominees are likely to be only one of the topics.
Senators to introduce bill requiring congressional input if sanctions on Russia are lifted
Mr. Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, appears likely to win Senate confirmation, close relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and all. But senators are still wary of the Russia connections.
Mr. Schumer, along with Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, are introducing legislation that would require a congressional vote for the lifting of sanctions that were imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and proxy war in that former Soviet state.
The two senators will emphasize that the legislation will also cover sanctions imposed just weeks ago by Mr. Obama after intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered with the 2016 election in hopes of electing Mr. Trump president. The measure, modeled after a law that required a congressional vote on the Iran nuclear deal, is expected to have bipartisan support, as that legislation did.
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html
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