Trump signing slew of executive orders shows he’s learned how to truly hit the ground running
Donald Trump is doing it differently this time.
In 2017, Trump hit Washington like a tornado, overturning and scattering things in his path — but much of what he attempted never got done.
Proposals that were rushed out half-baked didn’t make it through Congress or survive bad press or challenges in the courts.
Investigations hobbled Trump’s White House.
The wall didn’t get built.
Trump gave Paul Ryan his tax bill and Mitch McConnell his judges, but he wasn’t prepared to put a lot of his own ideas into practice.
Monday, Trump hit the ground running.
He issued a battery of executive orders that his team had been preparing for months, expected to sign 100 or more within the first day.
He even set up a desk in the Capital One arena to do ceremonial signings in front of the crowd.
Most of the orders weren’t secret, even if Democrats were so obsessed with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that they ignored Trump’s own “Agenda 47” campaign promises.
Some of the things Trump discussed in his inaugural address will require support in Congress, but the executive orders are largely focused on things the president can do himself.
That’s a contrast to Joe Biden, who often ignored the president’s job as commander-in-chief and top law-enforcement officer and instead used executive orders to do things that Congress or the states are supposed to decide, such as spending money on student-loan forgiveness, stopping evictions or mandating vaccines in the workplace.
It all starts with immigration.
There’s no issue on which Trump has such a clear mandate to break with his predecessors.
Declaring a national emergency at the border, Trump pledged not only to restore his previous, successful policies such as “Remain in Mexico” (which required asylum-seekers to wait outside the country) but also to deploy the military to the southern border and halt catch-and-release and refugee resettlement into the country.
He’ll target Mexican cartels by designating them as foreign terrorist organizations and use a law signed by John Adams to go after criminal gangs as alien enemies.
The cartels, which control a third of Mexico’s territory and have their way with its government, have never faced anything like this.
More controversially, he’s challenging Supreme Court precedent and the language of the Constitution by trying to ban birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens.
That’s less likely to fly.
There will be court fights ahead, but most of this is within the military and law enforcement powers of the president.
The message will go out quickly across the planet that there’s a new sheriff on the border.
Trump says he’ll declare a national energy emergency and fight inflation and energy scarcity.
He hasn’t filled in the details on how much of Joe Biden’s “green energy” spending he’s going to undo or what the new Department of Government Efficiency will cut, and he’ll need help from Congress on both counts.
But he’s revoking the electric vehicle mandate and enabling more drilling and mining: Drill, baby, drill!
On trade, Trump isn’t launching new tariffs on Day One, but he’s gearing up the government’s tariff-collecting powers so he can threaten tariffs in upcoming talks with foreign leaders.
If he’s wise, he’ll use that leverage to negotiate better trade deals rather than using tariffs to add new taxes to the price of everything.
Trump pledges an end to the woke era and COVID madness with executive orders ending government pressure for social media censorship, ending racial preferences and DEI, declaring that there are only two genders, and reinstating with backpay military service members fired for refusing the COVID vaccine.
But by pledging an executive declaration to keep TikTok operating for the next 90 days, he runs the risk of helping keep Chinese government mischief alive on our phones.
He’s also doing some pointless symbolism of his own, pledging to officially rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” and restoring the name of Mount McKinley to the peak for a few years designated by its Native Alaskan name of Denali.
Where Congress will become a more central battleground is when Trump wants more money for border enforcement, and when his 2017 tax cuts are due to expire.
The first time around, Trump often didn’t seem to understand what he had the power to do, and what he didn’t: Government is harder than it looks.
But he’s readier this time, and at 78, the man who declared “I was saved by God to make America great again” is starting with a renewed sense of urgency.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at JP Online.