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Trump's biggest executive actions, explained

Here is a list in chronological order:

4. Defund foreign health groups counseling abortion – Jan. 23, 2017

Carolyn Kaster/AP
Anti-abortion activists and supporters of President Donald Trump march up Constitution Avenue en route to the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2017, during the 44th annual March For Life.

ACTION

The Presidential Memorandum: The Mexico City Policy prevents federal money from going to international organizations that perform abortions, lobby for legalization of abortion, or promote abortion. It reinstates the policy first put in place by President Reagan, which some human rights organizations label the “global gag rule.” Trump expanded the scope of the law by changing the application from family planning health services to all global health services, including HIV/AIDS clinics that had previously been exempted by George W. Bush.

ANALYSIS

“It wasn’t unexpected that they would reinstate the global gag rule, but the dramatic expansion of the scope of it is truly shocking,” Geeta Rao Gupta, senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, told Slate. The move drew praise from antiabortion advocates. It “sends a strong signal about his administration’s pro-life priorities,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, in a statement.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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