
President Donald J. Trump concludes his remarks at the 450th mile of the new border wall Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021, near the Texas Mexico border. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
McKinley, the Mountain Formerly Called Denali
Consider, suggests Kimberley A Strassel in the WSJ, stowing away the confetti before celebrating Trump’s flurry of executive orders. Trump’s first week in the executive office was “a bit more sound than fury.”
Below, Ms. Strassel separates the wheat from the chaff.
What’s Happening?
Happening now: The orders with the most immediate impact are those that Trump was able to initiate the minute pen hit paper.
The termination of dozens of Joe Biden’s executive orders—ranging from the former president’s initiatives on “racial equity” to the recent removal of Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. These matter but were also entirely expected.
Expected also were Trump’s reversals of Biden reversals of Trump policy, for instance Trump’s reinitiation of U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement on climate (and Biden’s U.S. International Climate Finance Plan for developing countries). He cut the U.S. officially loose from the Janet-Yellen-brokered “global minimum tax” deal and shut down the mobile app (CPB One) the Biden team had been using to facilitate large numbers of asylum-seekers.
The Future Is Electric
Coming soon: A second tranche of orders set in motion big changes will necessitate more policy work and take weeks or months to get in place, explains Ms. Strassel.
The Defense Department has 10 days to produce a plan for using the military to secure the border.
The State Department has 14 days to recommend the designation of certain cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Officials are ordered over coming months to terminate federal diversity and equity programs and end transgender privileges in federal facilities (like prisons), tighten asylum standards, and dismantle Biden’s war against Alaskan energy and the fossil-fuel industry.
Several orders begin the process of government reform, and include setting up the new Department of Government Efficiency, ending federal remote work, and putting in place new policies that reward merit in the federal workforce.
Coming TBD: Past those two categories, things get murkier. Trump made waves with national emergency declarations for both the border and energy, agrees Ms. Strassel, yet it remains unclear how or if they will be used.
The declarations make available to the president dozens of authorities he wouldn’t be able to exercise in the absence of a declared crisis—for instance, greater ability to redirect personnel and federal funding to the border, or the power to waive certain environmental rules in the name of facilitating more energy. But should Congress act to increase his border budget, or the energy market boom organically, he might not need or choose to exercise anything.
Destinations Unknown:
Destined for Thought: A significant number of Trump’s orders do nothing more than orient his administration toward his priorities. Consider them mission statements. They require federal employees, for instance, to refrain from censorship of American citizens’ speech, to end the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, to facilitate “price relief” for Americans, to “unleash” U.S. energy, to “secure” the border and to establish “America First” policies in foreign affairs. While these will surely guide policy in the future, they produce little now.
Destined for Study: Trump intriguingly chose to punt a few of his bigger promises to study mode. That includes ordering reviews of “unfair trade practices,” “trade deficits,” “currency manipulation,” the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and the feasibility of creating an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs. (The order notably also orders the U.S. trade representative to identify prospective new trade deals.) Temporary freezes were put on federal hiring, regulations, offshore wind development and foreign aid—so the new team can conduct evaluations. Several of the Day One executive orders also call for the incoming administration to investigate and report back on controversial Biden-era actions, including DOJ lawfare and government censorship of social media.
Destined for Court: (Trump) didn’t punt all those edgy promises, though, and the lawsuits are already flying. In the legal crosshairs including Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship, his TikTok reprieve, his reversal of Biden’s orders banning development of hundreds of millions of offshore federal waters, and his reinstatement of “Schedule F”—which would make it easier to transfer or fire certain types of civil-service employees.
Destined for a base cheer: Republicans are in a jubilant mood, and Trump included a few feel-good-about-America directives. He ordered flags to be flown at full mast on his and all future Inauguration Days (Biden had ordered them at half mast after Jimmy Carter’s death).
Under an order titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” (Trump) converted Alaska’s Denali back to Mount McKinley and vowed to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And let’s not forget his memorandum “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civil Architecture.” Brutalism beware.
Dept. of Settling Scores: On the back of Biden’s pre-emptively pardoning the members of Congress and staff who sat on the Jan. 6 Committee, Trump pardoned some 1,500 defendants in Jan. 6 cases.
Continues Ms. Strassel, “In the wake of Biden’s pardons of his son Hunter and other family members, Trump revoked the security clearances of former intelligence officials who in 2020 suggested Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. (He also revoked the clearance of his former national security adviser John Bolton, who has been critical of Trump.)”
As usual, the press is presenting Trump’s raft of orders as norm-busting. But per this breakdown, Trump’s first flurry of orders can be viewed as only somewhat more aggressive than Biden’s first volley of orders (in which the former president reversed Trump’s actions on climate and the border, killed the Keystone pipeline, imposed mask mandates and infused the government with a radical racial “equity” agenda).
(Donald) Trump was aiming for a shock-and-awe first day, and certainly got some notice for actions, but the hard work remains for departments, agencies and Congress.
As Peggy Noonan notes in the WSJ, “It’s going to be non-stop, 24/7 rock-’em-sock-’em. God bless our beloved country. History ahead, everybody hold on tight.”
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