Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

Click here for the Secret Decoder Ring to this issue!

People Voting

Rich Galen

Thursday January 26, 2017

Twitter

Click here for an Easy Print Version

Since being sworn in last Friday, President Donald Trump has signed four Executive Orders and seven Executive Memoranda.

Those are just the public documents. We have to assume the President has also signed secret documents that we may never know about, either extending or ending activity ordered by his predecessors.

They cover a lot of what the President promised during the campaign. Yesterday, for instance, he signed an order beginning the process of building that wall on the border with Mexico which might have been responsible for more eye-rolling and head-shaking than all other campaign promises in the history of the Republic. Combined.

I don't know the total number of campaign promises Mr. Trump made over the course of the campaign. I'm certain some young reporter has been assigned the task of listening to every speech and each debate to collect them.

Campaign promises are easier to make than keep. The President may not have the power to do it, events may overtake them, or the Congress disagrees and won't provide the authority, the money, or either. According to Polifact.com, Of the 533 promises candidate Obama made he achieved full fulfillment for less than half

The main promise he couldn't keep was to close Guantanamo. There are still 41 prisoners housed at the Cuban prison, or were as of noon last Friday.

So, President Trump is off to a fast start: In addition to the wall (which may run into one of those Congressional speed bumps mentioned above), the President began unwinding Obamacare, put in place a partial hiring freeze, restarted the process for finishing those two oil pipelines, declared war on Sanctuary Cities, dealing with two major trade deals, and other things. The link to the White House page listing them all is on the Secret Decoder Ring page.

Mr. Trump also met (separately) with corporate leaders and union leaders at the White House. No one should have been surprised at how well he got along with the union leadership: He is a developer. You keep the unions happy or your 40-story building stops at floor number 3-and-one-half,=.

But all those promises kept and meetings hosted were absent from the discussion in the Acela Corridor. The morning shows were all about the President's declaration that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote had "between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes" not been cast nor counted.

This came from a report in the Washington Post from sources that attended a bilateral (both parties) and bicameral (both chambers) meeting of Congressional leaders at the White House Monday night.

According to David Wasserman writing in The Cook Reporter, the current number is: Secretary Clinton beat President Trump by 2,864,974 votes. Note, however, the titles of the two contenders.

Why does the President keep harping on this? Who knows.

But here's what I do know. On Tuesday I spent some time browsing through one of those webpages you need to keep away from or you will find yourself still looking through it an hour later.

No. Not that kind of website.

This is the website of USA Today's Newseum.com that shows a graphic of every front page of every daily in the country.

I didn't look at every paper, but a sample of about 25 major dailies from Tuesday morning thought the big news was the Order unwinding the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

One paper - one - thought that the President's riff about illegal voting was worth space on A1: The New York Times.

Thing is, it's hard enough to get legally qualified people to vote, much less people who are facing a federal rap.

Only about 58% of Americans who were eligible to vote participated in the Presidential election. Including third party and independent candidates, the total vote was 136,628,459.

If it is true 200,000,000 were registered last November, that means a little over 63 million Americans could have voted legally, but chose not to. That is almost the exact number of Americans who DID vote for Donald Trump.

Someone in the Gang of Five: Priebus, Bannon, Ivanka, Jared, and Kellyanne has to be able to grab him by the lapels and say: Mr. President, Donald, dad - you have to stop talking about this.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: USA Today's explainer on the difference between an Executive Order and a Memorandum, the WH page on what's been publicly signed, a site that shows how well Obama did in eight years in delivering on campaign promises, and to the Newseum site of front pages from around the nation.

The Mullfoto proves that Mr. and Mrs. Trump have truly made it in Washington, DC.

Become a
Paid Mullings Subscriber!

(To join the FREE mailing list or to unsubscribe Click Here)

Current Issue | Secret Decoder Ring | Past Issues | Email Rich | Rich Who?