United States

“America First,” the Women’s Marches, Trump on Twitter, and “fake news”

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump echoed the populist criticism of the Washington establishment that had been a hallmark of his campaign and struck a strongly nationalist “America First” tone, promising that “America will start winning again, winning like never before.” The day after Trump’s inauguration, “Women’s Marches” and supporting events were held in cities across the United States and abroad in support of (among other issues) gender and racial equality and in defiance of the legislative and cultural challenges to them that the marchers expected from President Trump and a Republican congressional majority. Estimates varied, but many observers suggested that between 3.3 million and 4.6 million people had turned out to march in U.S. cities, making the collective action one of the largest mass protests in U.S. history.

Women's March, Washington, D.C.A crowd filling Independence Avenue during the Women's March in Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017.Alex Brandon/AP Images

Trump’s first months in office were steeped in controversy. From the outset, his approach to the presidency departed from many of the expectations associated with the conduct of the chief executive. Most notably, he continued to use Twitter regularly, arguably employing it as his principal platform for expressing presidential prerogative. Having appropriated the term “fake news” to denigrate mainstream media coverage of events that were unfavourable to his administration, he sought to circumvent the press and shape the country’s political narrative directly. Critics characterized the sometimes personal assaults contained in his tweets as beneath the dignity of the presidency; supporters saw the unfiltered (seemingly impulsive) immediacy of these terse statements as the embodiment of his anti-Washington establishment stance.