Trump Watch: the president addresses Congress; the DOJ walks back investigations of local police
A daily roundup of news about President Trump and his policies, from Philadelphia and around the country.
President Trump delivered a highly-anticipated speech to a joint session of Congress last night, laying out his plan for the country and touting his first 40 days in office. "Heavy on ambition, light on detail," reported the Inquirer's Jonathan Tamari and Tom Fitzgerald, adding that many of the notes Trump hit were campaign hallmarks: increased military spending, repealing and replacing Obamacare, support for law enforcement, and a crackdown on illegal immigration. The president stuck largely to his prepared remarks and won praise for honoring the wife of a Navy SEAL killed in Yemen in the first days of Trump's term. But, the Washington Post noted, the president seems to be moderating his tone, not his "hard-line campaign promises" and more controversial policies.
Analysis-wise, yours truly annotated the text of Trump's speech with an aim at what it might mean for Philly. And FactCheck.org, crunching the numbers, concluded the president fudged several facts on spending in the Middle East, the cost of immigration to the United States and unemployment numbers.Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told reporters before Trump's speech that he had spoken to the president about addressing recent anti-Semitic incidents around the country -- including bomb threats called into Philly-area Jewish community centers and the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Wissinoming. Shapiro said Trump, at a meeting with state attorneys general, decried the incidents, then said sometimes "the reverse can be true," and "someone's doing it to make others look bad." Shapiro said he found the remark curious and hoped Trump would address it in his speech. The president opened his speech by condemning the threats and cemetery vandalism, but didn't say anything resembling the conversation Shapiro described, and the White House declined to comment on it.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicated his Justice Department would walk back investigations of local police departments, a reversal of the Obama administration's approach to departments in places like Ferguson, Mo. and Chicago, where the DOJ issued damning reports on police there after civil-rights investigations. Sessions suggested that crime is a bigger problem and that such investigations hamper the effectiveness of police departments. Last week, Philadelphia police officers told the Inquirer that many of their colleagues had voted for Trump in the hopes his AG would leave local police departments alone.
Bloomberg News has a long profile on Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old former Sessions staffer, immigration hard-liner and the mind behind the controversial travel ban, who has risen to one of the most influential roles in the White House. Among the more interesting tidbits in the story: a senior administration official says Steven Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, deliberately released the travel ban on a Friday so that it would spur major protests over the weekend, which he hoped, in turn, would inspire the Trump base.
The president signed a GOP-backed law repealing an Obama-era gun regulation. The regulation had required the Social Security Administration to report people who had been deemed mentally incapable of handling their finances to the FBI's instant background check system. The regulation, passed in 2012 in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, was aimed at blocking the mentally ill from obtaining guns. Republicans said it was overly broad and violated Second Amendment rights. (Coincidentally, gun sales, which tend to spike under liberal presidents who favor stricter gun control, are down in the age of Trump.)
The Inquirer's Samantha Melamed profiles the women of Tuesdays with Toomey, who protest every Tuesday outside Sen. Pat Toomey (R.-Pa.)'s offices around the state. The protests, started by a nanny from West Philadelphia, have become increasingly large, with hundreds showing up to protest Toomey's support of the Trump agenda. 11 people were cited with disorderly conduct at a sit-in at the Philadelphia office yesterday.
