Weekly Review

President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, an appellate-court justice from Colorado, to the U.S. Supreme Court. “The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer,” Gorsuch wrote in his college yearbook, quoting former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.^[1][2][3] Trump dismissed the acting U.S. attorney general for refusing to defend his ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and referred to a conservative district-court judge’s ruling that his ban be suspended as “ridiculous.”^[4][5] In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte, whose “war on drugs” has killed more than 6,000 Filipinos since July, said he would consider accepting refugees affected by Trump’s ban “in the name of humanity.”^[6][7] Trump traveled to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where he attended a gala to benefit the Red Cross, which has been working to help the Syrian refugees whom he banned from entering the United States.^[8][9] A group of Harley-Davidson executives rode their motorcycles to the White House to meet with Trump, the CEO of Uber resigned from Trump’s business council after more than 200,000 people deleted the company’s app because Uber failed to support taxi drivers protesting Trump’s immigration ban, and Republican congressman Dave Brat of Virginia complained about his constituents’ response to the Trump Administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “The women,” said Brat, “are in my grill.”^[10][11][12]

Trump’s national-security adviser said that the nation of Iran was “on notice” after it tested a ballistic missile, and Iran responded by noting that “only seven minutes is needed for the Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv.”^{[13][14][15][16]} Trump hung up on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and warned Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that he might send U.S. troops across the border to deal with “bad hombres.” ^[17][18] At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump, who was introduced by the producer of the TV show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, gave a speech asking the audience to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s television ratings.^[19] Trump correctly predicted that the New England Patriots, whose owner he refers to as a “friend,” would defeat the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI; Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter; and the Canadian groundhog Winnipeg Willow died.^[20][21][22]

The White House reportedly considered issuing an order that would prevent a U.S. antiterrorism program from investigating white-supremacist groups, a leaked FBI report concluded that “white supremacist extremists” have infiltrated U.S. law-enforcement agencies, and a Philadelphia police officer with a tattoo closely resembling the Nazi party’s eagle symbol emblazoned with the word “Fatherland” was cleared by his department of any wrongdoing.^[23][24][25] Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump, claimed that former U.S. president Barack Obama banned Iraqi refugees for six months in 2011, which he did not, and then claimed that two Iraqi refugees came to the United States and masterminded a “massacre” in Kentucky, which never happened. “It didn’t get covered,” said Conway.^[26] White House press secretary Sean Spicer referred to a Saudi frigate attacked by Houthi rebels as “our Navy vessel,” the Ticonderoga-class cruiser U.S.S. Antietam ran aground and leaked 1,100 gallons of oil into the Pacific Ocean, and the Department of Defense posted online an instructional bomb-making video it claimed was acquired in a U.S. raid in Yemen that killed as many as 30 civilians, then removed the video after realizing it had been publicly available for the past ten years.^{[27][28][29][30]} It was reported that White House aides often work in the dark because they cannot figure out how the light switches operate.[31] In the Arizona desert, a two-mile-long crack in the earth grew.^[32]

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