White House Warns


Department are circulating a so-called dissent cable, which says that Mr. Trump’s executive order closing the nation’s doors to more than 200 million people with the intention of weeding out a handful of would-be terrorists will not make the nation safer, and might instead deepen the threat.

“These career bureaucrats have a problem with it?” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “They should either get with the program or they can go.”

It was yet another stark confrontation between the new president, who is moving swiftly to upend years of policies, and a federal bureaucracy still struggling with the jolting change of power in Washington. There is open hostility to Mr. Trump’s ideas in some pockets of the government, and deep frustration among those enforcing the visa ban that the White House announced the order without warning or consulting them.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/us/politics/sean-spicer-state-dept-travel-ban.html

Donald J. Trump‏ @realDonaldTrump
Nancy Pelosi and Fake Tears Chuck Schumer held a rally at the steps of The Supreme Court and mic did not work (a mess)-just like Dem party!

Kellyanne Conway in an interview Sunday slammed the media, asking when network reporters will be fired over their coverage of the Trump administration.

"Who is cleaning house? Which one is going to be the first network to get rid of these people, the people who think things were just not true?" Conway asked on "Fox News Sunday."
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"I went on three network shows and spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said 'alternative facts,' not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts that they never cover the facts that matter," Conway said.
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"Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go," she added. "I'm too polite to mention their names, but they know who they are, and they are all wondering who will be the first to go. The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go."
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/316750-conway-on-the-media-when-are-they-going-to-fire-these-reporters

Regular readers know that candidate Donald Trump had difficulty with facts. He earned an astonishing 59 Four-Pinocchio ratings over the course of the campaign.

Now that Trump is president, he continues to make misleading statements, based on incomplete information, inaccurate statistics or flights of fancy. Here’s an accounting of his public statements in the first seven days as president, not counting his error-plagued inauguration speech (which had eight problematic claims). If we wrote a full fact check, we noted the number of Pinocchios the statement received.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/27/president-trumps-first-seven-days-of-false-claims-inaccurate-statements-and-exaggerations/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.df205ed3d608

WASHINGTON — Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

The scathing assessment — delivered by one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency — comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd and the president’s false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/business/media/stephen-bannon-trump-news-media.html?_r=0

Amid the glitz of President Trump’s inaugural festivities, one item stood out in particular late Friday night: a spectacular nine-tier cake that the new president and Vice President Pence cut into with a sword.

To pastry chef Duff Goldman, the cake seemed a little too familiar — because it looked almost exactly like one he had made years earlier for Barack Obama’s second inauguration as president.

Just after midnight, the Food Network personality posted a side-by-side comparison of two cakes on his Twitter account.

On the left, Goldman wrote in the caption, was the cake he had created for the “Commander-in-Chief” inaugural ball in 2013. The one on the right was the cake that had just appeared at Trump’s “Salute Our Armed Services” ball.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/food/wp/2017/01/21/trump-had-a-huge-luxurious-inauguration-cake-was-it-plagiarized/?client=ms-android-americamovil-us

January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

Donald Trump is about 24 hours from being inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.

But first he'd like to take some time to remind you about all of the losers he beat to get there.

Two stories this week — one from The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty and the other from the New York Times's Maggie Haberman — feature Trump expounding upon the failures of his opponents, even as he's more than two months removed from the general election and about seven months past the effective end of the Republican primary.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/19/donald-trump-just-cant-stop-reminding-his-2016-opponents-about-what-losers-they-were/?tid=sm_tw_pp&utm_term=.0edc01319743&wprss=rss_the-fix

In these final days before your inauguration, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how we see the relationship between your administration and the American press corps.

It will come as no surprise to you that we see the relationship as strained. Reports over the last few days that your press secretary is considering pulling news media offices out of the White House are the latest in a pattern of behavior that has persisted throughout the campaign: You’ve banned news organizations from covering you. You’ve taken to Twitter to taunt and threaten individual reporters and encouraged your supporters to do the same. You’ve advocated for looser libel laws and threatened numerous lawsuits of your own, none of which has materialized. You’ve avoided the press when you could and flaunted the norms of pool reporting and regular press conferences. You’ve ridiculed a reporter who wrote something you didn’t like because he has a disability.

All of this, of course, is your choice and, in a way, your right. While the Constitution protects the freedom of the press, it doesn’t dictate how the president must honor that; regular press conferences aren’t enshrined in the document.

But while you have every right to decide your ground rules for engaging with the press, we have some, too. It is, after all, our airtime and column inches that you are seeking to influence. We, not you, decide how best to serve our readers, listeners, and viewers. So think of what follows as a backgrounder on what to expect from us over the next four years.

http://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump_white_house_press_corps.php