Trump eyes control after tumbles
President Donald Trump gets down to work yesterday, signing a slew of executive orders to start rolling out his policy agenda after a tumultuous start put his administration on the back foot.
Embarking on his first full week in office, the 45th US president will try to steady the ship, seeking support from lawmakers, business leaders and unions at the White House.
Since he was sworn in on Friday Trump's White House has been pilloried for lying to the public about crowds at the inauguration, and the president himself for making a campaign-style speech before a memorial to fallen CIA officers.
Some two million Americans poured into the streets for women-led demonstrations, the scale of which were unseen in a generation.
Trump aides say the next week will see a steady if not daily drip of executive actions, which may include immigration and limiting environmental legislation and the behemoth Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, designed to get back to Trump's agenda.
Meanwhile, The White House vowed on Sunday to fight the news media "tooth and nail" over what it sees as unfair attacks, with a top adviser saying the Trump administration had presented "alternative facts" to counter low inauguration crowd estimates.
On his first full day as president, Trump said he had a "running war" with the media and accused journalists of underestimating the number of people who turned out Friday for his swearing-in.
White House officials made clear no truce was on the horizon on Sunday.
"The point is not the crowd size. The point is the attacks and the attempt to delegitimize this president in one day. And we're not going to sit around and take it," Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said on "Fox News Sunday."
On Sunday Trump vowed to swiftly start renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico.
But reality has also bitten.
A pledge to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been put on the back burner for now.
A Washington group of lawyers and researchers plans to file a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump today, alleging that the US president is violating a constitutional ban on accepting payments from foreign governments.
In a statement released Sunday the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said the newly sworn-in Trump was in violation of the Constitution because his business properties abroad operate partly based on goodwill from foreign governments and regulators.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal said Sunday said a top military counsel to Trump is under scrutiny by US counterintelligence agents who have probed the new national security adviser's communications with Russian officials.
The paper reported that Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general who was among senior White House staff sworn in Sunday, has come under investigation as part of a counterintelligence examination of communications between Russian government members and Trump's inner circle.
Inquiry findings and whether it was still underway remained unclear, the WSJ said.
And a petition on Whitehouse.gov demanding that the billionaire president immediately release his tax returns passed 209,000 signatures, the threshold beyond which the White House is supposed to respond within 30 days.
However, on Sunday, the president's strategist, Kellyanne Conway, sparked widespread anger - including from Wikileaks, after saying the returns would be kept hidden from public view.
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