US President Donald Trump used his 50th day in office to rally behind the new Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, vowing that America's new healthcare system would "cut taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars" and "empower individual Americans".
In a weekly address broadcast from the White House, Mr Trump said that Obama's Affordable Care Act had led to "seven long years of botched rollouts, soaring costs, cancelled plans and bureaucratic mandates". Action on Obamacare was an "urgent necessity" he said.
“Seven years ago this month, Obamacare was signed into law over the profound objections of American people. Our citizens were told they would have to pass Obamacare to find out what it was and how bad it was. Now we know that the hundreds of pages were full of broken promises,” he said.
Mr Trump spent much of Thursday and Friday in the White House seeking to convince wavering Republican senators and congressmen to back a proposed replacement deal for Obamacare published this week which has elicited strong opposition from the conservative wing of the Republican party.
In addition to dinners and meetings he also invited legislators to a bowling evening in the White House’s underground bowling alley on Thursday. The charm offensive marks Trump’s first major leap into the legislative battles of Washington, prompting comparisons between Mr Trump’s career as a deal-maker and his role as Republican-in-chief.
As he reached the half-way point of his much-anticipated first 100 days in office, Mr Trump also received a boost from new job figures which showed the US economy added 235,000 new jobs last month, prompting expectations of an interest rate rise next week by the Federal Reserve.
Mr Trump has previously dismissed the monthly job figures from the Labour Department as "phoney" and "one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics". But speaking on Friday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Mr Trump believed the February figures were "real". "I talked to the president prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly: 'They may have been phony in the past but it's very real now'," Mr Spicer said.
Global warming
Mr Trump's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, also sparked controversy when he told CNBC he did not believe carbon dioxide was a primary contributor to global warming.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” he said, before adding: “But we don’t know that yet . . . We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
Meanwhile, several states confirmed their intention to appeal Mr Trump's revised travel ban which outlaws travel from six Muslim-majority countries into the United States for 90 days and suspends the US's refugee programme for 120 days. New York, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington have joined Hawaii in appealing the ban, which was signed on Monday and due to come into effect next Thursday.
Questions over Trump's allegations that former president Barack Obama ordered the wire-tapping of Trump Tower last year also persisted on Friday, with House minority leader Nancy Pelosi calling on FBI director James Comey to publicly contradict Mr Trump's claims. While Mr Comey has not publicly commented on the issue, US media have reported that Mr Comey urged the Justice Department to refute the claims which were made by Mr Trump on Twitter last Saturday.
With Mr Trump's first meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel scheduled for next week, the US president spoke with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas by phone on Friday in their first contact since Mr Trump took office.
The US president suggested last month that Washington could move away from the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. He has also voiced support for moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that would be politically explosive.
