* On the same day that Trump told U.S. automakers that “environmentalists are out of control,” he did this:
President Trump signed executive orders Tuesday to revive the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, another step in his effort to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy.
He also signed an executive order to expedite environmental reviews of other infrastructure projects, lamenting the existing “incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process.”…
Trump said that both pipeline projects would be subject to renegotiation. His order for the Keystone XL project “invites” the company to “re-submit its application.”
* Several news outlets – including Politico, the Washington Post and the New York Times – have published stories about how Trump aides have to work behind the scenes to keep the president from acting on his worst instincts. In addition to what this tells us about POTUS, Eric Levitz points to what might be even more important about these stories.
Nearly a dozen of Trump’s closest confidantes helped plant an embarrassing news story about how their boss can’t handle embarrassing news stories. Which is to say: A president who prizes loyalty in his subordinates has already been betrayed by a huge swath of his inner circle.
It isn’t hard to understand why Trump’s aides would want to distance themselves from the mogul’s decision to begin his presidency by shouting self-aggrandizing delusions at CIA employees, congressional leaders, and the Fourth Estate. But we aren’t in the late days of a losing campaign, when it’s normal for advisers to start leaking dirt on the boss to save their reputations. We’re less than four full days into the Trump presidency, with (barring death, impeachment, resignation, or coup) at least 1,461 to go.
* Fareed Zacharia has an important take on the executive order Trump signed yesterday formalizing the end of U.S. involvement in TPP.
.@FareedZakaria on Trump abandoning TPP: Today is the day the US essentially handed over Asia on a platter to China https://t.co/5SRgm7L7nv
— Don Lemon Tonight (@DonLemonTonight) January 24, 2017
* Rebecca Traister writes, “The Future of the Left is Female.”
A lot of people predicted that women were going to change America’s political history in January of 2017. But pretty much no one anticipated that they’d be doing it as leaders of the resistance. On Saturday, millions of women and men — organized largely by young women of color — staged the largest one-day demonstration in political history, a show of international solidarity that let the world know that women will be heading up the opposition to Donald Trump and the white patriarchal order he represents. Women — and again, especially women of color, always progressivism’s most reliable and least recognized warriors, the women who did the most to stop the rise of Trump — were the ones taking progressive politics into the future.
* Speaking of the #WomensMarch, here’s a wonderful story:
As hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets to march for equality this weekend, several women near Los Angeles decided they, too, wanted to protest.
But these women, who are currently in treatment for cancer, couldn’t travel to participate in the worldwide phenomenon. So, they decided to have an alternative protest—in their hospital.
couldn’t make it the LA march today so we had to do our own protest around the hospital (only got 1 floor– we tried tho) #WomensMarch pic.twitter.com/AsPIuHVd6K
— allie oetken (@allieoets) January 21, 2017
* Finally, good morning!
