President Trump continued his fast pace in his second week in office, as these pictures show.
After signing an executive order suspending the refugee resettlement program and barring visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries on Friday, Trump saw protests at airports across the country as well as lawsuits, including ones from three states and another from San Francisco.
The conservative Koch brothers came out against the ban, as did the CEOs of Ford, Apple, Google and Facebook. Trump blamed some of the weekend’s chaos on a Delta Airlines computer outage and criticized Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for crying at a press conference over the travel ban.
The acting attorney general, a holdover from President Obama, refused to defend the order in court, leading Trump to fire her while his spokesman warned dissenting diplomats to “get with the program.”
His Administration, meantime, couldn’t decide whether the travel ban was a “ban” or not, and defended omitting any reference to Jews from its official Holocaust Remembrance Day statement.
Trump held more phone calls with foreign leaders, including one with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a testy one with Australia’s prime minister that ended abruptly and one with Mexico’s President in which he said, reportedly lightheartedly, that he might send U.S. troops to deal with “bad hombres.”
On Tuesday, Trump announced his pick for the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia and held open by Senate Republicans: Colorado federal judge Neil Gorsuch. The liberal grassroots urged Democrats to mount a rare filibuster, while Trump told Republican Senators to throw out the rulebook if they need to.
Trump also spoke at his first National Prayer Breakfast, suggesting that they should pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on The Apprentice.
