United States

Women's March, Washington, D.C.A crowd filling Independence Avenue during the Women's March in Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017.Alex Brandon/AP Images

Trump’s first months in office were steeped in controversy. From the outset, his approach to the presidency departed from many of the expectations associated with the conduct of the chief executive. Most notably, he continued to use Twitter regularly, arguably employing it as his principal platform for expressing presidential prerogative. Having appropriated the term “fake news” to denigrate mainstream media coverage of events that were unfavourable to his administration, he sought to circumvent the press and shape the country’s political narrative directly. Critics characterized the sometimes personal assaults contained in his tweets as beneath the dignity of the presidency; supporters saw the unfiltered (seemingly impulsive) immediacy of these terse statements as the embodiment of his anti-Washington establishment stance.

Scuttling U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline, and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

Among Trump’s first steps as president were executive actions aimed at fulfilling a number of his most prominent campaign promises. In addition to directives paving the way for the unraveling of Obamacare and guaranteeing nonparticipation by the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a trade deal championed by Obama, Trump was quick to reverse Obama’s policies directed at protecting the environment. The new president signed memoranda that set the stage for reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,179-mile (1,897-km) oil pipeline project that had been rejected by his predecessor in 2015—as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline, the completion of which entailed construction of a section cutting across part of the Missouri River that would potentially endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and which had been halted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pending the completion of an environmental impact statement. Trump’s actions were aimed at delivering on his campaign promise to expand U.S. energy exploration and production. The new president’s most controversial policy decision in the first six months of his presidency regarding the environment came in June 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a broad range of measures (agreed to by 195 countries) aimed at limiting increases in worldwide temperatures and mitigating the economic consequences of global warming. Trump, who doubted that climate change was real, argued that the agreement was unfair to the United States and that its mandate for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would damage the U.S. economy.

ICE enforcement and removal operations

Within his first week in office, Trump had fulfilled another of his signature campaign promises by issuing an executive order mandating the construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico aimed at controlling illegal immigration. An additional executive order authorized the withholding of federal funds from “sanctuary” cities that had chosen to provide refuge for illegal immigrants. That order was answered with defiant statements by a number of big-city mayors. Nevertheless, at the administration’s behest, in February the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency began an aggressive effort to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants. The operation targeted individuals with serious criminal records, but opponents of the policy argued that it was being used less specifically to simply round up undocumented immigrants. Many observers were surprised in June, however, when the Trump administration announced that it would allow the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to stand, thus continuing to bar the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children. At the same time, though, the administration eliminated a parallel program that would have similarly prohibited the deportation of undocumented parents of children who are U.S. citizens or legal residents.

The travel ban