Donald Trump is remaking the traditional boundaries of Washington, unleashing unprecedented executive orders and daring anyone to stop him.
Here’s the latest:
That wobbly faith in the criminal justice system under Trump’s watch appears to mirror the American public’s perspective.
About half of Americans are “not very” or “not at all” confident that the Justice Department, the FBI or the Supreme Court will act in a fair and nonpartisan manner during Trump’s second term. In each instance, roughly 3 in 10 are “somewhat” confident and about 2 in 10 are “extremely” or “very” confident, according to an AP-NORC poll from January.
A day that began with the outgoing president’s pardon of lawmakers and his own family ended with the incoming president’s pardon of supporters who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol four years ago.
The clemency grants by Biden and Trump are vastly different in scope, impact and their meaning for the rule of law.
But the remarkable flex of executive authority in a 12-hour span also shows the men’s deeply rooted suspicion of one another, with both signaling to their supporters that the tall pillars of the criminal justice system — facts, evidence and law — could not be trusted as foundational principles in each other’s administrations.
Russell Vought, nominated to lead the Office of Management and Budget, is scheduled for a hearing before the Budget Committee at 10 a.m. ET.
Vought was OMB director during Trump’s first term. He already had a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Vought was closely involved with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term that the Republican nominee tried to distance himself from during the campaign. The budget director oversees the building of the president’s budget and reviews proposed regulations.
“The Panama Canal belongs to Panama and will continue to belong to Panama. The Panama Canal is not a concession or a gift from the United States,” José Raul Mulino said Wednesday while appearing on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The Panama Canal came into being in 1914, following a bilateral treaty in 1903. At the dawn of our independence with Colombia.”
Trump falsely claimed during his inaugural address that China runs the canal, a critical trade route. He said the U.S. “gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”
Mulino said Trump’s “misinformed” remarks don’t worry him because “that in strict law is an impossibility.”
“Panama is not distracted by this type of pronouncements,” he said.
The Justice Department is directing its federal prosecutors to investigate any state or local officials who stand in the way of beefed-up enforcement of immigration laws under the Trump administration, according to a memo to the entire workforce obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Written by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, the memo also says the department will return to the principle of charging defendants with the most serious crime it can prove, a staple position of Republican-led departments meant to remove a prosecutor’s discretion to charge a lower-level offense.
Much of the memo is centered on immigration enforcement. Bove wrote that prosecutors shall “take all steps necessary to protect the public and secure the American border by removing illegal aliens from the country and prosecuting illegal aliens for crimes” committed in U.S. jurisdiction.
▶ Read more about the Justice Department and immigration enforcement
The Right Rev. Mariann Budde asked President Trump during her sermon Tuesday to have mercy on the LGBTQ+ community and migrants here illegally. Trump has promised mass deportations of undocumented migrants. And he’s signed an executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female.
In an angry overnight post on his social media site, Trump sharply criticized Budde as a “so-called Bishop” who’s a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.” Trump said she was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” He said she and her church “owe the public an apology.
Many U.S. adults are on board with the idea of beefing up security at the southern border and undertaking some targeted deportations, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. But findings also suggest his actions may quickly push the country beyond its limited consensus on the issue.
Half of U.S. adults think increasing security at the border should be a high priority for the federal government, according to the poll, and about 3 in 10 say it should be a moderate priority. Just 2 in 10, roughly, consider it a low priority.
President Donald Trump is swiftly breaching the traditional boundaries of presidential power, bringing to bear a lifetime of bending the limits in courthouses, boardrooms and politics to forge an expansive view of his authority.
He’s already unleashed an unprecedented wave of executive orders, with actions intended to clamp down on border crossings, limit the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and keep the popular Chinese-owned TikTok operational despite a law shutting down the social media platform.
Trump is drafting a new blueprint for the presidency, one that demonstrates the primacy of blunt force in a democratic system predicated on checks and balances between the branches of government.
▶ Read more about Trump’s first days in office
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