Politics & Government

Today in Trump tweets

By ELIZABETH KOH and TERESA WELSH

January 24, 2017 01:22 PM

After he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Trump told reporters that he plans to announce his nominee to the Supreme Court next week.

President Donald Trump sent several tweets Tuesday on his second business day in the Oval Office, meeting with automobile industry executives and announcing four more executive orders to clear the way for the construction of two controversial pipelines.

He tweeted early Tuesday morning that he planned to meet with automobile executives to encourage American manufacturing and sales, and sent a followup tweet several hours later showing himself surrounded by several of the executives who met with him that day.

January 24, 2017
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Trump had used Twitter to opine repeatedly about declining manufacturing in the United States and spent months on the campaign trail threatening to penalize companies that moved those operations to other countries instead. In the meeting, which included the CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler, Trump said he would relax regulations and encourage growing American manufacturing jobs.

After Trump’s electoral victory, both Ford and General Motors had announced they would retain some jobs in the United States, though each denied dealing directly with Trump or his incoming administration.

Trump also signed four executive orders Tuesday morning, including actions to proceed with the building of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.

The pipelines were strongly opposed by environmental groups, which have criticized the projects as damaging to the environment. Former President Barack Obama had halted the proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015, citing similar concerns.

The official presidential account tweeted a photo of Trump meeting with Senate leaders at the White House Tuesday afternoon.

In another tweet shortly before noon, Trump also showed off a picture of his inauguration crowd, adding that it would be displayed in the press hall.

January 24, 2017
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But social media users quickly picked up on an error in the framed photo. Though the date of Trump’s inauguration was Jan. 20, the photo had the following day’s date instead — the date of the Women’s March on Washington, which drew nearly 500,000 demonstrators to the capital city protesting Trump’s inauguration.

The size of Trump’s inauguration crowd also became an early flashpoint between his new administration and the White House press corps over the weekend, when press secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed Saturday that Trump’s inauguration had been the most attended in history. Aerial photos showing a significantly smaller crowd and ridership statistics from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority disproved that claim, and Spicer obliquely acknowledged that the ridership information he provided two days before was inaccurate. When pressed again to describe the attendance Monday, Spicer reiterated that the crowd was the largest “to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

Trump made no comment about how the placement of the inauguration photo in the press hall had been decided.

The perceived slight over crowd size also led Trump to threaten Tuesday night to that the federal government would take over Chicago if the city’s murder epidemic did not stop. In 2016, there were 762 homicides in Chicago, the highest murder rate in 20 years.

January 25, 2017