Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, hosts a press call nearly every day to update reporters on the transition process, and on Jan. 4, someone raised a question about Donald Trump’s plans for inaugural weekend. “When the administration talks about issues happening on ‘day one,’” the reporter asked, “does that mean Saturday or Monday since the inauguration is on a Friday?”Spicer insisted that Americans should expect to see the incoming president hit the ground running. “I think day one is day one,” he explained. “It’s Friday, January 20th and [the president-elect] is prepared and ready to go. He wants to, as he said before, enact real change, day one. And that will mean within hours of his being sworn in. He’s put his team on notice that he expects nothing less than everyone to get right to work for the American people.”A Democratic source flagged a related interview Spicer did with Breitbart News three days later, in which he said Trump is “not going to wait” to take action: “I think that Friday, that Saturday, that Sunday, that Monday are going to be really, really a big flurry of action that shows straight up to the American people and everybody that when he talked about change he meant it and wasn’t going to wait.”Well, maybe he’ll wait a little.
Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Friday, but he’ll consider his first day on the job to be Monday. The detail emerged after he sat down with British and German journalists over the weekend and offered up his thoughts on a wide range of topics.”I mean my day one is gonna be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” he said.
The Boston Globe report added that one of the president-elect’s first acts — you know, after a little down time in that first weekend — will be to sign an executive action related to “strong borders.”I seem to recall Republicans complaining quite a bit in recent years about the idea of presidents trying to adopt policies through executive actions rather than legislation. It’ll be interesting to see the scope of Trump’s initial foray into White House policymaking, and whether it’s consistent with the GOP concerns from recent years.As for the incoming president’s schedule, it appears Spicer’s assurances from a couple of weeks ago weren’t quite true. Trump is eager to get to work, but not he’s not that eager.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."