A little over a week into the President Donald Trump administration, there is so much going on it’s almost impossible to pick one topic. I think that’s the point.
Since taking office Trump has been checking things off his to-do list daily, more so than any politician I’ve ever seen. Acting largely through executive orders and presidential memoranda, announcements are coming out of the White House so fast, the media and the people can hardly keep up.
No one has time to digest the last big action before another one of similar, or even greater, importance takes its place. It’s like when you’re trying to shovel the end of your driveway, and the city grader plows the whole side of the street into a windrow right in front of it. You’ve been snowed under.
An invitation to TransCanada to re-submit its application to build the Keystone XL was one of the first actions, one that was swiftly responded to by the proponent a few days later. While this is a huge development in a process that’s taken the better part of the last decade, it’s old news just a week later. So much has flowed out of the end of Trump’s pen in the day’s following, the media has almost totally forgotten about it. Keystone? Huh?
Since then Trump has moved forward on building his Great Wall of America. He’s put out an executive order called “Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Pending Repeal.”
Then there’s the ban on travel from seven primarily Muslim nations, an executive order called “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”
This one has much of the world, free and otherwise, in an uproar. It’s even unified much of Canada’s political class in its opposition. That’s saying something.
Since then he’s ordered that for every new federal regulation, two must be cut.
New administrations are often judged on how much they accomplish in their first 100 days. Trump’s agenda reads more like the first 10 days. What’s he going to have left to do on day 90? Or day 365, around the time he’s due to deliver his first State of the Union address to Congress? We didn’t see this much happen in a whole season of The West Wing.
The action south of the border is so fast and furious, it make’s Barrack Obama’s “Yes We Can Change” agenda look positively glacial in comparison.
Already there’s been kickback. His travel ban got the boot from a judge, so his acting attorney general wouldn’t act to enforce it. She was promptly fired and replaced. In what is arguably the most litigious nation in the world, the legal fights against many of his actions will feed lawyers’ families for years.
Then there’s Congress, Republican in both houses. Many members of Congress owe their election to riding on Trump’s coattails. The Democrats will try to make things difficult, but don’t have the power to do so. Still, expect them to gum up the works in ways we can’t yet imagine.
Not that I know anything about football, but it looks like Trump has one play in his playbook – blitz! Blitz! Blitz! Blitz!
The question is going to be: at what point will Trump run out of steam? When will the daily new initiatives end? At what point will he be satisfied in remaking America, and, to an extent, the world, in his image? When will everyone else have a chance to catch their breath?
Some of us are already reaching for the oxygen.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
