Donald Trump has apparently decided to take his first weekend as President off:
During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised to roll back many of President Obama’s policies on Day One of his administration, some of which can be done away with by a simple stroke of the pen.
Trump will officially become president after he delivers the oath of office at his inauguration on Friday, but it appears the executive actions he planned to take on his first day in office will have to wait until the weekend is over.
During an interview with the Times of London, Trump clarified that “day one” of his new administration won’t begin Friday afternoon, it will start on Monday morning.”… [D]ay one – which I will consider to be Monday as opposed to Friday or Saturday. Right? I mean my day one is going to be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” Trump said in an interview with the Times of London.
“… [D]ay one – which I will consider to be Monday as opposed to Friday or Saturday. Right? I mean my day one is going to be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” Trump said in an interview with the Times of London.
On some level, I suppose I see the logic in what Trump is saying. Saturday and Sunday are not normal working days in any case so it’s not clear exactly what a President could get done on a weekend. At the same time, though, this is the same person who frequently criticized President Obama for golfing on the weekends and attacked opponents such as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for being “low energy.” He’s also told interviewers in the past about how he doesn’t require much more than three to four hours of sleep a night and is frequently working late into the evening. Given that, one has to wonder exactly what kind of image Trump is presenting about how he intends to approach the office he will take in less than seventy-two hours, especially given the fact that there were at least some suggestions before the General Election that he intended to serve as something approaching a figurehead President while letting staffers and Vice-President Pence be the ones who got their hands dirty with the day-to-day work that is involved with being President.
In the long run, I suppose there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this idea. The day or two after Inauguration has always traditionally been filled with ceremonial and social events for the new President and his family, and this is the first time in awhile that Inauguration Day has fallen on a Friday or a weekend. At the very least, I suppose this will give the incoming White House Staff some additional time to get settled into their new positions before hitting the ground running on Monday. At the same time, though, it’s rather ironic to see Trump doing this given the fact that people on the right would relentlessly criticize President Obama for golfing on the weekends as if they would prefer that he be working around the clock.
Trump’s decision to wait until Monday to begin working is also surprising given everything he has promised to do just on his “first day in office.” During the Presidential campaign, Trump made a number of promises about what he will do on his “first day” in office:
- “Repeal every single Obama executive order.” (He has also pledged more specifically to “eliminate every unconstitutional executive order.”)
- “Repeal Obamacare.” (On Trump’s campaign website, he’s less bullish, promising only to “ask Congress” on day one to repeal Obamacare immediately.)
- “End the war on coal.“
- “Begin swiftly removing criminal illegal immigrants from this country.” (More specifically, Trump has promised to do this in his “first hour” in office, “day one, before the wall, before anything.”)
- “Begin working on an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall.”
- Meet with Homeland Security officials and generals to begin securing the southern border.
- “Notify all countries that refuse to take back dangerous illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in this country that they will lose access to our visa programs if they continue to do so.”
- Convene his top generals and inform them they have 30 days to come up with a plan to stop ISIS.
- Fix the Department of Veterans Affairs.
- Call the heads of major companies who are moving operations oversea to inform them that they’ll face 35 percent tariffs.
- “Contact countries and say…’Folks, we love protecting you, we want to continue to protect you but you’re not living up to the bargain’…They’re not paying what they’re supposed to be paying—which is very little, by the way.”
- “Defend the unborn.”
- “Withdraw from TPP.“
- “Start taking care of our…military.”
- Suspend Syrian refugee resettlement.
- “Notify our NAFTA partners of my intention to renegotiate the deal.”
- “Designate China as a currency manipulator.”
- “Direct every agency in government to begin identifying all wasteful job-killing regulations, and they are going to be removed.“
- “Get rid of gun-free zones [in] schools” and “military bases”—which would require repealing a 25-year-old federal law. (“My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day. There’s no more gun-free zones.”)
- “Ask Congress to pass ‘Kate’s Law’—named for Kate Steinle—to ensure that criminal aliens convicted of illegal reentry receive strong mandatory minimum sentences.“
- Learn the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas.
And all of this just on Monday. Perhaps he figured out he needed the weekend to get all this ready to go on the 23rd?
