President Donald Trump pauses while speaking before nominating federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 31.

hide caption

toggle caption

Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Donald Trump pauses while speaking before nominating federal judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 31.

Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

First, we had a candidate and a campaign like no other, then an election and transition like no other. We should have expected President Trump’s first two weeks in office to be just as dizzying as they have been.

Yet Trump lovers and haters alike have stood by, mouths agape. Editorialists have worn out the words « whirlwind » and « firehose, » just as they had recently burned through « unprecedented. »

What has flummoxed official Washington about President Trump more than anything else is his almost manic determination to do things he said he would do – and to do as many of them as possible all at once and right now.

In almost any daylight period of his first fortnight he has signed at least one executive order upending some element of national policy, indulged in at least one personal feud, disputed at least one news story as it was widely reported and vented his emotions in at least one Twitter outburst.

Flying off to Florida for his first « working weekend, » he left the nation’s capital, and the nation itself, panting for breath.

Trump is now the focal point not only of national political events but of national attention, period. When was the last time football was so overshadowed in the media the week before the Super Bowl?

Even on the day of the Super Bowl, Trump was making news by defending Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Fox News and by taking to Twitter to blame a judge « and the court system » if there is another terrorist attack in the U.S.

Trump drives the conversation more constantly than any president before him, with his deeds by day and his tweets at dawn. He does it with his most significant action to date — nominating Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court — and a day later he does it by using the National Prayer Breakfast to make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice.

With Gorsuch, Trump made the one move most certain to unite and delight his voters in his first days in office. If all goes well, Gorsuch should be confirmed and on the bench by late April – in time to be the crown on Trump’s first 100 days.

But if the behavior of the first fortnight is any indication, by then we will all be talking about something else – or several somethings else — that the man once known as « The Donald » has done.

« New Sheriff in Town » Goes Global

Lest we forget one of his earliest and most famous pledges, the new president wasted no time issuing an order initiating work on a wall on the border with Mexico. He also threatened to impose a 20% border tax that would, he said, force Mexico to pay for the wall.

The Mexican president then canceled a planned visit to Washington. Trump later called him and said the U.S. would send troops if Mexico could not handle its own « bad hombres. »

The new president also made good on promises to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that has been in the works for years, substituting talk of a special trade relationship with Great Britain. He made it clear that any previous agreements by the U.S. would be subject to review.

One such agreement struck by the Obama administration apparently riled up the new president during his first conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The U.S. had told Turnbull it would take 1,250 refugees off his hands this year, a deal Trump denounced as « dumb » in the truncated and tumultuous phone call. Australia has been the most consistent backer of U.S. policy on the world stage for the past century.

In other highlights, the president’s first flurry of foreign outreach reportedly included a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a call the White House said was not recorded.

In their Super Bowl Sunday interview, Fox host Bill O’Reilly asked about Trump’s avowed respect for Putin, whom O’Reilly called « a killer. » President Trump shot back: « There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent? »

Promise Keeping Leads to Problems

But if delivering on promises has a satisfying ring to it, Trump’s actions themselves have also had repercussions – often beyond the intended.

His flurry of executive orders and pronouncements began on the afternoon he made his inaugural address. He said the Affordable Care Act (« Obamacare ») would no longer be enforced where it burdened a person or a business. There, he seemed to say, done.

Of course, neither the White House nor the majority party in Congress is quite prepared to offer a replacement to the ACA just yet, so the health insurance companies wonder who will square the circle on costs. But Trump has set the nation’s new course, and for the rest, well, time will tell.

So it was with a rash of other shifts in policy as well. The new president instituted a federal hiring freeze and said any proposed new regulation would have to be accompanied by the killing of two old ones. He froze some government research into climate change, restarted the Keystone oil pipeline project, and temporarily shut down some federal departments’ social media accounts.

Perhaps the greatest controversy thus far has arisen from Trump’s sweeping order barring entry to the U.S. for anyone coming from any of seven predominantly Muslim countries. Coming one week into the new administration, the order also suspended the nation’s refugee program in general, blocked Syrians indefinitely and placed other new restrictions on immigration.

Although the White House denied this was a « Muslim ban », it was close enough to please those supporters who wanted it to be precisely that. Longtime backer Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said the idea had always been to have a Muslim ban and the president had asked to be shown « the right way to do it legally. »

In other words, it played as another campaign promise kept, perhaps the most salient yet. That was surely the tone in the president’s own Twitter messages on the subject, in which he continued to call it a ban even this weekend.

No one should forget that Trump first moved ahead in the polls among Republican candidates for president in December 2015 when he proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. And it was clear from polls and interviews that these moves were resonating with Trump’s legion.

Whatever else polls may show about the current political moment, Trump’s voters are still with him – and his hard base could not be more excited.

Pushback Scales Up Quickly

At the same time, there has been pushback on a Trumpian scale. The day after he took the oath of office, hundreds of thousands marched in protest in Washington, D.C., and other major cities in the U.S. — thousands more in Europe.

A week later, when the travel ban was announced, it caused chaos and confusion in international airports around the world. Protesters soon arrived to add their voices. Soon, businesses and schools were objecting as well as human rights activists. Cable TV filled with images of families torn asunder.

Then on the next Friday, a federal judge in Seattle issued a restraining order against the entire executive order. On Saturday night, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (that has jurisdiction over several states on the West Coast) let the judge’s ruling stand pending further proceedings.

The president reacted with outrage, on Twitter. « What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, came come into the U.S.? » Of course, not « anyone » can come into the U.S., at least not through an airport or border port of entry, and that has been true for a long time.

But on Sunday, the president was tweeting again: « Just can’t believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad! »

The Justice Department (where one uncooperative acting attorney general, Sally Yates, had already been fired and replaced) got busy on an appeal. But in the meantime, the Department of Homeland Security went back to admitting people from the targeted countries and the State Department went back to issuing visas.

Other executive actions may also find disfavor once they are more widely known, especially where they may seem to contradict Trump’s campaign promises rather than fulfill them.

One such order struck at the effort to give consumers greater leverage in dealing with investment brokers who manage their retirement money. Snuffing the so-called « fiduciary rule » was only one of several moves that helped bank stocks put yet another leg on the « Trump rally » that propelled the Dow Jones Industrial Average up over 20,000 again on Feb. 3.

There was also an order scrambling the « principals committee » of the National Security Council, dropping the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence but adding presidential chief strategist Steve Bannon. This followed a series of crossed-swords moments with both the retiring DNI (Gen. James Clapper) and the exiting CIA Director (John Brennan).

If we are thinking here about points to remember, many Americans may one day look back on these two weeks as the time they realized how important Bannon was to Trump, his election, and his plans to govern America. Time Magazine marked the emergence of Bannon as the central White House figure by putting him on the cover, calling him both « The Great Manipulator » and « the second most powerful man in the world. »

Bannon had, indeed, begun to look like the power behind the throne, the gray eminence behind much of what Trump was prioritizing – a rival in influence to Jared Kushner, the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Kushner is seen as the most trusted intimate, Priebus as the conduit to Congress and party leaders.

Bannon is also notable in that his background is in finance (Goldman Sachs as well as his own firm) and the media, having been a publisher of the self-proclaimed « platform for the alt-right » Breitbart.com, which has been a haven for white nationalists and a variety of conspiracy theories. He and his close adviser Steve Miller are generally regarded as the architects of the inaugural address and the blitzkrieg of policy moves that followed.

Bannon, is also seen as a flash point in the new White House’s media relations. He has told the news media in general to « keep its mouth shut » and be chastened by their failure to anticipate Trump’s victory in the election.

Arguing over « Alternative Facts »

But Bannon has not been alone in his open animosity toward the traditional news media. What had been a difficult relationship during the campaign has persisted into the governing phase of the Trump phenomenon.

On Day One of the new regime, an almost absurd controversy arose over the size of the crowd in attendance on the National Mall at Trump’s swearing-in, which Trump and his spokesman called the largest in history. Photographs, transportation records and other evidence suggested the crowd was substantially smaller than for the Obama inauguration in 2009.

Trump sent his press secretary out on a weekend afternoon to dispute all other sources of information and insist on the president’s version. Another White House counselor, pollster and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, later referred to the « alternative facts » about the crowds offered by the White House.

A few days later, in his first meeting with congressional leaders, Trump insisted that campaign totals showing him losing the popular vote by 2.8 million were wrong because « between three and five million » people voted who were not citizens.

The state authorities in charge of this process immediately said this was not possible. Indeed, every study done by officials or academics has found little or no evidence of actual voter fraud. Trump said he would order a major investigation of the matter, but no such probe has yet begun.

Stunners Relegated to Minor Mishaps

It is difficult to assess how a given story would have played in the media, or in memory, had it happened at a different point in time check that.

How would the country have reacted if the first days of any other presidency had included a nasty firefight in a foreign country that killed a U.S. Navy SEAL and a substantial number of civilians? Or if the senior career staffers at the State Department had decided to retire, almost en masse?

How would the country have reacted had either of the last two presidents issued a proclamation on Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention Jews? And would that story have had legs if it turned out the State Department draft of that Holocaust message had indeed included a reference to Jews that went missing from the White House version?

What if another president, having campaigned on support for expanded Israeli settlements on the disputed West Bank, suddenly said 5,500 such units « would not be helpful » to peace talks? What if that president also suddenly softened support for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?

In our particular point in the time, stories such as these can scarcely find space or time in the media. Even stories that seem to gasp for air find oxygen in short supply.

The new president remains popular among Republicans, and intensely so among that harder base of backers who voted for him in the primaries. These supporters could not be more gratified at first two weeks of the Trump presidency if he had finished it by walking across the Potomac.

More generally, however, polls find the new president getting no bounce at all from taking office. Gallup and CNN/ORC put his approval in the low 40’s, CBS News’ poll had him at just 40 percent.

The election of 2016 should have taught us not to place too much faith in polls. But it is hard not to notice these numbers are the lowest for any new president since polling began.

Someday, we may look back and be amazed at how high President Trump soared from a poor start. Or we may say the first report card was a portent of what was to come for his presidency.

In any event, we are not likely to forget how it began.

HOUSTON — It takes two to dance like this: one going forward, the other backward. The New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons stood face to face here Sunday night, hands clasped, and skipped to a Super Bowl finish unlike any we’ve ever seen. It was the NFL’s greatest comeback and its biggest collapse, a product of so much done right and so many things gone wrong.

The Falcons led the Patriots 21–3 at halftime and 28–3 in the third quarter. The Patriots’ deficit was too great, and Patriots defensive end Chris Long knew too much. Long’s father Howie is a Hall of Famer. Chris grew up on the NFL. He knew nobody had ever done what his team had to do.

Long would say later: “Some of us had some doubts. We naturally had some doubts.” But safety Duron Harmon told his teammates: “This is going to be the best comeback of all time.” Receiver Chris Hogan said he and his offensive teammates told each other, “This is a story they’re going to be talking about for history.”

This is the story they’ll tell in New England: Tom Brady leading the Patriots to 25 straight points to force the first overtime in Super Bowl history, then another six to finish it. In Georgia, fans will talk about the time the Falcons blew the Super Bowl. Both are true stories.

First the Patriots believed they would win, and then the Falcons seemed to believe the Patriots would win. Perhaps Atlanta was just exhausted. By overtime, when James White ran for a 1-yard touchdown to complete New England’s 34–28 comeback win, the Patriots’ fifth Super Bowl title seemed as inevitable as the sun giving way to the moon.

You want a cigar? Ask Bob Kraft. There he was, passing them out in the New England locker room while he shook the hands of players that even serious Patriots fans would not recognize. The Patriots have learned this much under Kraft’s ownership: Brady is the best quarterback of all time, Bill Belichick is the best coach ever, and they can’t win Super Bowls by themselves.

Belichick cannot make Danny Amendola catch a 17-yard pass from Brady. But he can make smart decisions, some big and some small, and some bigger than they seem at the time. Nobody gave it much thought when Belichick, down 28–3, went for it on fourth-and-three in his own territory with 6:46 remaining in the third quarter, but let’s be clear here: A lot of NFL coaches would have punted there. They would have been wrong, but they would have done it. Maybe they would have feared turning the ball over on downs and getting blown out. They would have rationalized. And this is the essence of Belichick: He never thinks about fallout. He thinks only of winning the game.

• Pats fans, get your championship gear here | SI’s Super Bowl LI commemorative package

Brady completed that 17-yard pass to Amendola. Then Brady scrambled for 15 yards on third-and-eight. The Patriots scored their first touchdown. Stephen Gostkowski missed the extra point. The Falcons led 28-9 with 17 minutes left to play in the game.

And Belichick went full Belichick again with an onside kick. Too early? Didn’t matter. It failed, but that didn’t matter either. Needing a single first down to get in prime field goal range, the Falcons weren’t able to get the ball to any of their best playmakers: Julio Jones, Devonta Freeman, Tevin Coleman or Mohamed Sanu. They ended up punting.

Still, Atlanta should not have been worried. The fourth quarter had begun and the Falcons were up by 19. In NFL postseason history, no team had ever blown such a lead. The Patriots drove down for a field goal. It was 28–12 with less than 10 minutes left. Still no reason to worry.

And then … well, maybe you couldn’t see this coming, except that Jake Matthews did. Matthews is the Falcons’ left tackle. On Thursday, as the Falcons’ last media availability of the week was ending, I asked him if the Patriots’ defense did anything he hadn’t seen before.

A few things, he said.

Like what?

“Normally, you’ve got your stud pass rusher off the edge,” Matthews said. “They mix it up. Their linebacker, Hightower, will come off the edge and rush, like a pass rusher.”

So here was Dont’a Hightower, the Pats’ middle linebacker, lined up at left defensive end, just like Matthews said he would be. Freeman should have blocked him but he whiffed. Ryan should have seen him but he didn’t. Hightower strip-sacked Ryan, the Patriots recovered, and the Super Bowl went from not-a-game to sort-of-a-game to whoa-this-is-definitely-a-game.

The Pats moved 25 yards in five plays to make it 28–18. They had to go for two; any fan could see that. The hard part is having the right play ready. The Patriots had one they had been practicing for two weeks: A direct snap to the running back, either White or Dion Lewis. White ran in for the conversion. Suddenly it was 28–20. 

Arthur Blank stood in his pinstripe suit, a man worth three billion bucks who must have felt like a hundred. Blank owns the Falcons. His coach, Dan Quinn, was patiently trying to explain how the Vince Lombardi Trophy ended up in the Patriots’ hands. Blank placed his left foot on Quinn’s podium and listened.

“I don’t second-guess our playcalling,” Quinn said. “Honestly. We’ve got terrific guys. We know how to match up. We know how to get open.”

They do know how to match up and get open—it was obvious all game. There were times when the Patriots defense seemed overmatched by Atlanta’s offense, and here, with the Falcons leading 28–20, was one of those times: Julio Jones, the NFL’s best receiver, reaching up to grab a pass Ryan shouldn’t have thrown, then keeping both feet inbounds for a spectacular 27-yard gain.

It was athleticism and technique rolled into something impossible. You could watch that replay 10 times without understanding it. Surely this was the backbreaker. The Falcons had the ball on the New England 23. They led by eight. Their kicker, Matt Bryant, made 28 of 29 field goals inside 50 yards this year; the only one he missed was blocked.

The Falcons just had to run three times, burn some clock, and kick a field goal to make it a two-score game … except they lost a yard on their first run, and maybe started thinking about the wrong things. Their offense had been stalling. Their lead had vanished. They didn’t need to stay aggressive; they needed to go up two scores. But that urge to stay aggressive was there, and 2nd-and-11 is usually a passing situation. So offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan called for a pass.

New England defensive end Trey Flowers—“That guy is a monster,” teammate Alan Branch said—stunted and bore in on Ryan. This wasn’t Hightower coming off the edge; Ryan saw Flowers the whole way. And this is what Shanahan wouldn’t say, but Ryan did: He should have thrown the ball away. It was the only sensible play. But Atlanta did not lead the league in scoring by throwing the ball away. Ryan tried to evade the rush. Flowers sacked him, and the Falcons ended up punting. The Patriots had the ball, down a score, with the best player in the history of the league at quarterback and three and a half minutes to work with. On the Patriots sideline, Chris Long believed now. They all did.

Brady threw 62 passes Sunday. Two of them were among the worst he has ever thrown, and I’m not even talking about the interception that was returned for a touchdown in the first half. Twice, he had time to throw, planted his feet, and simply missed wide-open receivers. It was something Brady never does.

But this is what Brady always does: Whatever is next. Failure does not stick to him. After getting the ball back on the Falcons’ punt, the Patriots snapped the ball 20 more times in this game (one would be negated by penalty). Brady threw on 18 of them, and on 16 of those he lined up in the shotgun. The Patriots were not fooling anybody with how they planned to win this game: They had Tom Brady and the Falcons did not.

Brady threw two incomplete passes from his own nine yard-line to start the drive, but he completed his next one on 3^rd-and-10 for 16 yards to Chris Hogan. Soon, the Pats were on their own 36. Brady dropped back and looked for Julian Edelman.

Edelman could play 200 more NFL games and he would never make the catch that Julio Jones made. He isn’t big enough. He doesn’t jump high enough. But this is another little sliver of genius from Bill Belichick: He isn’t looking desperately for a Julio Jones—he knows there is only one of them.

Other teams fall in love with big, fast, mediocre receivers—faux Julios who don’t play the position well but who look like they can. Belichick finds small, quick, shifty, precise, sure-handed receivers who can track the ball. They get open and they catch the ball, which is all that matters.

Edelman, a former college quarterback, is a master at it, and here he was, trying to catch a pass from Brady. Falcons outside linebacker Vic Beasley Jr. would say later that he had trouble finding the ball in the lights. Edelman had no such trouble. He somehow reached down and kept the ball off the ground for a 23-yard completion. Quinn challenged the catch and lost.

Four plays later, White scored to make it 28–26. Brady hit Amendola for the conversion.

The game was tied. It was also over. Patriots cornerback Logan Ryan said: “We weren’t afraid to lose this game. Atlanta might have been afraid to lose it at the end.”

The Patriots kicked off with 57 seconds remaining in regulation, and the Falcons’ Eric Weems inexplicably stopped a kickoff from going into the end zone and returned it only to his 11. Atlanta had burned all its timeouts, the last on the challenge to Edelman’s catch, and so the league’s most explosive offense again ended up punting.

When the Patriots won the toss to start overtime, they needed a touchdown to end the game. The Falcons were spent. Ryan said, “When it got to overtime, man, I basically untied my cleats and watched Brady.” He was kidding about the cleats but not the sentiment. Even Chris Long, riddled by doubts just an hour or two earlier, said he thought the defense was “not going back out there. Tom, he’s an assassin, man. He tears people’s hearts out.”

The Patriots never even faced a third down in overtime. Boom, boom, dink, dunk, touchdown. In the end, it was so simple. You come back from a 28–3 deficit the same way you win five Super Bowls and establish yourself as the greatest quarterback in history: one play at a time. 

UK is the University for Kentucky. At UK, we are educating more students, treating more patients with complex illnesses and conducting more research and service than at any time in our 150-year history. To read more about the UK story and how you can support continued investment in your university and the Commonwealth, go to: uky.edu/uk4ky. #uk4ky #seeblue

DALLAS–(Business Wire)–Razberi
Technologies, a provider of video surveillance appliances and
software, has hired Joe Vitalone as chief sales and marketing officer
worldwide. In this role, Vitalone will have executive responsibility for
growing Razberi’s sales revenues as well as expanding the company’s
partnerships and distribution channels globally.

Vitalone is a seasoned veteran with more than 30 years of sales,
marketing, and business development experience in the telecom and
security industries. He will report to Razberi CEO Tom Galvin.

“Joe’s proven track record of growth combined with his channel expertise
and strong partnering abilities align well with Razberi’s strategic
direction, » said Galvin. “Under his leadership, many more channel
partners will realize the value that Razberi’s solutions offer their
businesses.”

Vitalone
joins Razberi from Arrow Systems Integration, a division of Arrow
Electronics, where he most recently served as chief marketing officer.
Previously, Vitalone was executive vice president and president of Mitel
Networks for the Americas region. He has also held executive level
positions at ShoreTel, LifeSize, CoVi Technologies, and Polycom.

“Razberi is known for its innovation and technology leadership in the
security industry, which they have translated into major partnerships
and customers around the world,” said Vitalone. « They have great
momentum in a fast-growing market, and I am eager to use my contacts and
experience to take Razberi to the next level.”

Security integrators and enterprises use Razberi
video surveillance solutions across the world, in industries such as
energy, education, finance, retail, government, and more.

About Razberi

Razberi Technologies makes intelligent surveillance appliances that
record closer to cameras, improving video quality while reducing
capital, bandwidth, and space costs. By deploying Razberi ServerSwitchIQ^™
appliances in a distributed architecture near the network’s edge,
enterprise security leaders and system integrators can reduce megapixel
video impact on the network by up to 95 percent. Combining a PoE switch,
server, storage, and intelligence, the scalable platform is
open-architected to work with top video management systems (VMS) out of
the box. Built-in Razberi VyneWatch^™ health monitoring
software alerts security pros to issues 24×7, while LocBeri^®
cybersecurity features lock down vulnerable ports. Razberi designs and
manufactures its products in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit razberi.net.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170206005086/en/

H2 Strategic Communications
Chandra Hosek, 512-524-9652
chandra@h2comms.com