March, 2017
USA
US President Donald Trump continued to make headlines and create controversies in March, his second full month in office.
Baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping his phones:
On March 4, President Trump baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping his phones and publicly announced that Barack Obama had personally wiretapped his phones during the final month of the 2016 campaign. The president later revealed that this extraordinary allegation was based entirely on publicly available news reports — none of which actually supported the substance of his claim. When asked as to how he came to discover that his predecessor had spied on him, Trump cited a New York Times article that did have the words “wiretapped data” in its headline. But the story was about intelligence agencies monitoring Russian officials — and how, through that regular surveillance, they may have discovered contacts between those officials and Trump associates. The article says nothing about Trump Tower being placed under surveillance, let alone about Obama wiretapping Donald Trump himself.
Despite Trump’s tacit admission that his claim was baseless, he continued to insist on its accuracy — even after his allegation was rebuked by the, House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Bill O’Reilly The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the FBI.
Travel ban 2.0:
After an angry weekend in Florida during which he accused former-president Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower, Mr Trump returned to the White House to sign a revised version of his controversial travel ban. The executive order titled "protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States" was signed out of the view of the White House press corps on 6 March. The order's new language is intended to skirt the legal pitfalls that caused his first travel ban to be halted by the court system.
The updated ban:
• Temporarily halts entry to citizens for 90-days of six Muslim-majority countries
(Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen);
• Removes Iraq from the previous list, due to increased vetting of its own citizens;
• Delays implementation until 16 Marc;
• Allows current visa holders to travel to the US;
• Does not affect permanent visa holders (Green Card holders);
• Suspends the refugee programme for 120 days;
• Treats Syrians like any other refugee or immigrant;
• Removes the religious clause favouring religious minorities - namely Christians.
But soon after Trump’s second order on the immigration issue was signed, it was once again blocked by a federal judge, this time in Hawaii.
Allowed his budget director to argue that cutting funding to Meals on Wheels is “probably one of the most compassionate things we can do”:
In another controversial Executive order, President Trump’s proposed budget seeks to increase defense spending by $54 billion — while slashing funding for medical research, climate change, science, public housing, and education, aid to the indigent, development grants for poor and rural areas, infrastructure, and many, many other things. Shortly after the proposal went public, the White House’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney justified it as being necessary.
Failed to staff nearly 2,000 vacant executive branch positions:
Trump continues to govern the world’s most powerful country with a skeleton staff. The president’s dysfunctional transition has left him without a pool of nominees-in-waiting when he took the oath of office. Since then, Trump’s wavering nature — combined with his aversion to hiring any Establishment Republican who opposed his campaign — has allowed nearly 2,000 Executive branch positions to remain vacant.
As of mid-March, Trump had not nominated anyone for more than 500 top-tier administrative posts, making his transition “the slowest in decades,” according to the New York Times. Back in February, Trump had tried to justify this dereliction of duty as an innovative act of cost cutting. He had told Fox News, “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have …I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs.”
As he heads towards the 100 day in office mark, the president has drafted no formal plan for cutting the vacant senior positions, and White House spokesperson Lindsay E. Walters lamely told the New York Times earlier this month that Trump intended to fill them, eventually. For now, the executive offices at the State Department remain “virtually empty.” And the high-ranking civil servants who are in place have been largely ignored.”
Europe
Theresa May has set out her plan for Brexit: the UK will leave the single market and the customs union, and seek a free trade agreement (FTA) with the EU. But in Brussels key policy-makers worry that she may not succeed – either because the ‘Article 50’ divorce talks collapse in a row over money, or because the two sides cannot agree on the transitional arrangements that would lead to the FTA.
EU officials are pessimistic because they observe the pressure May is under from hard-liners to take a very tough approach towards the negotiations. They see limited pressure on her for a softer Brexit. But several factors could favour a less-than-very-hard Brexit: a majority of MPs wants to retain close ties with the EU, as do business lobbies; and an economic downturn (if it happens) could steer public opinion away from supporting a clean break.
The outcome of the Brexit talks will likely be shaped to a large degree by the EU governments. They are mostly united in taking a hard line. Worried about the cohesion and unity of the EU, they do not want populist leaders to be able to point to the British and say, "They are doing fine outside the EU, let us go and join them." Exiting must be seen to carry a price.
The British government has yet to decide what it wants on some key issues, such as: what sort of immigration controls should it impose? What kind of special deal, if any, should it seek for the City of London? What customs arrangements will it ask for? What sort of court or arbitration mechanism would it tolerate? And what transitional arrangements does it want?
Britain formally notified its intention to leave the EU on March 29, while European leaders were gathering in Rome on March 25 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Treaty signed there (on 25 March 1957), whereby a Common Market was established between the six founding members. It is a given that whatever happens in the negotiations, Brexit will be hard. That is because both the UK and the 27 are placing politics and principles ahead of economically optimal outcomes. In the very long run, once both the UK and its partners have understood that a hard separation is not in anyone’s interests, it is anticipated that serious politicians will start thinking about how to engineer closer relations.
