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What Trump didn’t want you to see him signing
Only Trump and his insider clique know what presidential directive's Trump - selectively avoiding the press and cameras - has ordered.March 3, 2017
Donald Trump holds up a signed Presidential Memorandum in the Oval Office,
an almost-daily ritual. (Alex Brandon/AP)
Donald Trump is eager to look like a man of action, pulling the levers of government and redirecting the ship of state. The president has had a photo op to reinforce this narrative nearly every day since taking office. A steady procession of guests, from steelworkers to congressmen and the presidents of historically black colleges, has flanked him as he rolled back environmental protections, took aim at Dodd-Frank and killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ever the showman, Trump even postponed his second attempt at a travel ban, which had been scheduled for Wednesday, so that it could get a news cycle to itself. With that in mind, it should speak volumes when Trump does not invite camera crews into the Oval Office to film him taking action. Three recent examples illustrate this:
MAKING IT EASIER FOR MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE TO GET GUNS:
While the press corps was distracted and the cable channels aired footage of Trump surrounded by a bipartisan group of smiling women, behind closed doors and with no fanfare the president quietly signed a measure that killed a regulation enacted by the Obama administration to tighten gun background checks. The rule required the Social Security Administration to send over the names of people who receive government checks for being mentally disabled and others who have been deemed unable to handle their own financial affairs to the FBI office that runs the national background check database. This is a universe of about 75,000 people.
CHANGING THE DOJ LINE OF SUCCESSION:
On the same day that Jeff Sessions was sworn in, Trump quietly signed an executive order to change the order of succession at the Justice Department if the attorney general resigns. It was significant because the president had just fired Sally Yates as acting AG after she wouldn’t defend his travel ban. As he was entitled to do, Trump went outside the official order of succession to elevate Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to replace her. A week before his term ended, Barack Obama had (also without fanfare) changed the order of succession to remove Boente from the list. Because the Senate hasn’t yet confirmed Trump’s nominee for deputy AG, Boente is now serving in that role on an acting basis. Sessions’s recusal of himself from overseeing the FBI’s Russia investigation means it will be handled by Boente.
In an indication that they didn’t want to draw attention to this, it’s worth noting that Trump signed three other orders in front of reporters immediately after Sessions was sworn in. Each was noncontroversial: One would "break the back of the criminal cartels that have spread across our nation and are destroying the blood of our youth,” the president told the assembled press pool. The other would create a "task force on reducing violent crime,” he said. And the third would instruct DOJ to implement a plan to stop crime against law enforcement officers. Basically no one noticed Trump’s fourth order of the day. A USA Today reporter noticed that it was dated on a Thursday but didn’t appear on an official web site that lists such actions until Friday. The White House didn’t explain the discrepancy.
REMOVING TRANSGENDER PROTECTIONS:
Last week, the Trump administration revoked federal guidelines specifying that transgender students have the right to use public school restrooms that match their gender identity. It is one of the most significant social policy shifts ushered in by the new president during his first 40 days, which means it was too big of a deal to bury. But the White House kept the president himself as far away from it as possible, describing it in a statement as “a joint decision made … by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education.” Anyone who knows anything about how government works knows that nothing like this happens without sign-off at the highest levels. In this case, Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had been at loggerheads regarding timing and specific language. So others were involved. The president could also have had the two department heads come into the Oval Office and made a statement with them behind him, or he could have made a show of signing the memorandum himself. Or he could have even tweeted about it. He didn’t.
