As President-elect Donald Trump fills his Cabinet with his legion of cronies and tries to negotiate his way out of daily intelligence briefings, we are all bracing for what’s about to go down over the next four years of our lives. From the looks of things, President Barack Obama is no exception.
In his last 29 days in office, the POTUS is doing everything he can to cement important policy that is particularly vulnerable to demolition under Trump’s administration. In addition to granting over 1000 commutations for non-violent drug offenders jailed under mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, Obama is placing an indefinite ban on oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and seeking to transfer one-third of the Guantanamo Bay population to prisons in other countries.
Trump has expressed strong opposing views on all of these agendas. Regarding the proposed closing of Guantanamo, the president-elect has vowed to fill the military prison with ‘some bad dudes.’ During his campaign, he expressed a similar sentiment on Obama’s commutations, warning Americans that their safety could be at risk because of the president’s move to commute sentences for nonviolent offenders. Given his appointment of climate change denier, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, as EPA administrator and ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, it is probably safe to predict that Trump also stands in opposition to Obama’s drilling ban.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385?lang=en
As we all prepare for what a Trump presidency will mean for the United States, President Obama is actively planning policy to protect both the country and his legacy.
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