A whirlwind of a first week as Trump settles in

Has it really only been a week since Donald Trump took the oath of office?

We’ve already had massive protests, a foreign confrontation, a half-dozen major shifts in federal policy and heated confrontations between the White House and the press.

In the language of one of Trump’s former professions, we can’t yet say if “The Trump 45 Show” will get a full eight-year run, but there’s no worry that the audience will be bored.

Good afternoon, I’m David Lauter, Washington bureau chief. Welcome to the Friday edition of our Essential Politics newsletter, in which we look at the events of the week in Washington and elsewhere in national politics and highlight some particularly insightful stories.

A MONTH’S WORTH OF NEWS IN A WEEK

Trump and his aides have done so much in the first week that it’s hard to keep track: That, of course, is part of the plan. Before voters can truly figure out what they think about one act, the White House is on to the next.

In his first days in office, Trump reimposed a ban on international aid to groups that discuss abortion — a measure first imposed by Ronald Reagan. And he named a new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, who wants to quickly end the Obama administration’s push for so-called net neutrality regulations.

And Trump also once again floated the idea of reviving the use of torture and secret “black sites” to interrogate terror suspects. As Brian Bennett wrote, U.S. intelligence and defense agencies oppose both of those ideas.

Those were just sidelines, however. The main events involved healthcare, immigration, trade and the environment.

OBAMACARE

For all the head-spinning amount of news, there was a pattern in most of Trump’s early moves: They started out with a blare of trumpets that generated big headlines, but when the White House released the actual documents — often hours after Trump signed them on television — the fine print provided lots of wiggle room for the new administration.

The pattern began over the weekend with a directive on the Affordable Care Act, telling the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce the “burdens” of President Obama’s signature healthcare law.

As Noam Levey wrote, explaining the new order, Trump’s directive opened the door for his administration to start dismantling Obamacare if it chooses to do so. But the order didn’t actually do anything right away, leaving the administration maximum room to maneuver.

Republican members of Congress remain in the dark about what, exactly, Trump wants them to do on healthcare. Many had hoped to ask him about it when he joined Republican lawmakers on a retreat Thursday in Philadelphia. But Trump visited the gathering just long enough for a short speech and took no questions from the members.

Meanwhile, the GOP remains deeply split on one of the most basic issues, Levey wrote later in the week: Do they want to make sure everyone has insurance, or not? In the Senate and among Republican governors, many say yes. But in the House, a large number of conservative lawmakers say no. Until they resolve that split, legislation to replace Obamacare will be hard to pass.

IMMIGRATION

On Monday, Trump started to make his priorities clearer, and deportation of young immigrants appeared to have fallen off the list.

During the campaign, Trump denounced Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has given a shield against deportation to more than 740,000 young immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children. But so far, the Trump administration has taken no steps to end the program and has continued to process new applications.

Trump’s decision not to immediately end DACA has drawn fire from some anti-immigration groups and they are pushing him to stick to his campaign pledge. But White House press secretary Sean Spicer has now repeatedly indicated that the administration is in no hurry.

The new president is in much more of a hurry to get started on one of his key campaign pledges — building a wall along the Mexican border. That was the topic on Wednesday, as Trump issued orders to start planning the border wall and to take action against so-called sanctuary cities, as Mike Memoli and Noah Bierman wrote.

But, as Bennett explained, there, too, Trump gave himself lots of room. The order on the wall, for example, did not commit to any particular type of barrier, or any specific amount.

It directed the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a plan for “operational control” of the Mexican border. That could end up meaning a few dozen miles of new fencing or a few hundred, but most likely not a wall stretching the full 2,000 miles of the border.

Similarly, the sanctuary cities part of the order allows the administration “at its discretion” to cut off an unspecified range of federal funds from certain cities that “willfully refuse to comply” with federal immigration law. That could sweep in a lot of localities or very few, depending on how big a confrontation the new president wants.

As Evan Halper and Melanie Mason reported, California and other Democratic states already have begun preparing legal obstacles that could block Trump’s efforts to go after sanctuaries. The state is prepared to “litigate until the end of time,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco).

Trump’s orders do, however, almost certainly mean that the number of deportations will rise. So, too, will the number of immigrants being held in federal detention for crossing the border illegally. The government already spends more than $2 billion a year on detaining immigrants. That price tag could now quadruple, former officials say.

As the week went on, the dispute over the border wall plunged the U.S. and Mexico into a diplomatic crisis, with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto scrapping plans for a White House visit next week. As Kate Linthicum and Tracy Wilkinson wrote, the tension threatens a range of important U.S. interests.

And as Don Lee wrote, Trump’s rift with the Mexican president set off worries about future of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which both countries, in theory, would like to renegotiate.

On Thursday, Trump floated one idea for how he could pay for the border wall — a GOP plan that would raise taxes on all imports. Opponents of that idea, who include big retailers, oil refiners and the influential conservative Koch brothers, warn that move could raise prices for consumers.

Whatever else it would mean, it’s definitely not Mexico paying for the wall.

Later today, Trump is expected to announce a new policy severely restricting the admission of refugees to the U.S.

In the meantime, Del Wilber and Bennett discovered that federal agents are reinvestigating several dozen Syrian refugees living in the U.S. who may have slipped through a crack in the vetting procedures. The refugees had possibly derogatory information in their files that investigators initially missed.

ENERGY, THE ENVIRONMENT AND TRADE

Trump has offered mixed messages about how aggressively he plans to reverse Obama administration policies on climate change. But his order reviving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects sent one unmistakable signal, Halper wrote: Big oil is back.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Keystone will get built, though. As Halper noted, oil prices have dropped a lot since the TransCanada Corp. first proposed the pipeline. It may no longer make economic sense. And the economics will be harder to make work because of Trump’s insistence that the pipeline be built with American-made steel.

That new requirement on steel was just one of the moves Trump made as he moved quickly to revamp U.S. trade policy.

THE OPPOSITION

Trump hadn’t been in office 24 hours before the first huge protests took place — rallies in major cities around the country that brought together at least a couple of million protesters. Those demonstrations could presage an emerging anti-Trump movement, Cathy Decker wrote. But, she noted, sustaining unity could prove difficult.

The question for the future, Mark Barabak wrote, is whether the protests mark a turning point or just a day to let off steam: Where do the protesters go from here, he asked.

Democrats, led by officials in California, have adopted a strongly oppositional strategy to the new administration. In his annual State of the State speech, Gov. Jerry Brown held out California as a model for the country and sharply criticized Trump’s policies, John Myers wrote.

The speech was a reminder that Brown loves the limelight, wrote columnist George Skelton.

As Decker noted, Trump returned fire and has targeted California. That was a clear undercurrent of his sanctuary cities order as well as his insistence, against all evidence to the contrary, that 3 million-5 million illegal voters had taken part in November’s election.

Trump’s fixation on non-existent widespread illegal voting, as well as his seeming obsession with the size of the crowd at his inauguration, provided fodder for all sorts of long-distance psychologizing about the president’s insecurities.

It also contributed to an unapologetically aggressive tone taken by the administration in its first days, highlighted by Spicer’s first briefing as press secretary, which started things off with a bang.

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering about the the White House’s ”alternative facts” regarding Trump’s inauguration crowd, Bennett took a careful look at Spicer’s main claims and why they’re wrong.

SUPREME COURT

Trump has said he will announce a nominee to replace late Justice Antonin Scalia next week, most likely Thursday.

Three judges, all men currently sitting on federal appeals courts, appear to be the leading candidates for the job. David Savage has profiled each of them: Judge William H. Pryor, a protege of Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general nominee; Judge Thomas Hardiman, a Philadelphia-based appeals court judge who reportedly has the backing of the president’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry; and Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Byron R. White.

LOGISTICS

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That wraps up this week. My colleague Sarah Wire will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in Washington and the Trump administraiton with our Essential Washington blog, at our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

David.lauter@latimes.com

@davidlauter