We’ve gotten used to seeing a president’s first 100 days as a gauge of progress and a benchmark for history. (Thanks, Franklin Roosevelt.) To understand the early days of President Trump’s second term, however, when so much has happened so quickly, there is an alternative milestone to consider.
Last week, with more than a month to go before he will reach 100 days in office, Trump surpassed 100 executive orders. Reading through them all lays bare the assumptions, obsessions and contradictions of the man signing them.
The executive order is Trump’s preferred governing tool. Even with Republican congressional majorities, he favors the flourish of the order over the hassle of lawmaking. Why bother assembling legislative coalitions when you can just write, “By the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered” and then tack on whatever you like?
There’s a tension inherent in executive orders as an exercise of presidential power. For all their “because I say so” affectations, orders do not carry the same legitimacy or endurance of laws passed by Congress and can be revoked by future presidents. (Some of Trump’s second-term executive orders simply undo some of President Joe Biden’s orders, which in turn rescinded orders from the first Trump term.) Still, these documents can prove enormously consequential, and some represent indelible moments, for good or ill, in American history. The Emancipation Proclamation, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the postwar desegregation of the U.S. military all came about via executive order.
In keeping with this administration’s management style, Trump’s first 107 orders, spanning some 300 pages, can be a bit of a mess. Some are specific in their instructions — whether setting tariff rates for certain countries or permitting only two possible sexes on government documents — and they fulfill promises Trump made before taking office. Many others list no precise actions but only instruct some new task force or council to think of things to do. An agency or program may receive new responsibilities in one executive order only to find itself dismantled in another. Orders sometimes echo Trump’s standard slogans, whether putting America first or making America great, without adding much meaning to them. And stylistically, they veer from formal policy pronouncement to campaign speech to social media diatribe, sometimes all within the same text.
Yet despite the muddle — or perhaps because of it — the new administration’s orders fulfill one essential service: They affirm and expand Trump’s vision of the presidency, of politics, of our Nation. (Yes, “nation” is invariably capitalized.) The orders capture the world as Trump sees it and wishes it to be, and they show how the borders between high principle and low politics, between words and reality, are porous.
America was great until Biden ruined it. The economy is shackled by misguided regulations and must be set free. Trump’s opponents are ideological, while he relies on common sense. American values are always in danger and must be shielded from enemies, often enemies from within. The president is not just the head of the executive branch but also the sole interpreter of law and the lone representative of the people.
For a leader so comfortable in the mayhem of social media, the executive order, with all its trappings of officialdom, is an oddly retro format. But it’s a revealing one. What Twitter was for Trump’s first term, the Federal Register may be for his second.
At a basic level, Trump’s executive orders clarify his priorities.
Two of the most frequently recurring subjects are the economy (especially energy, regulation and trade) and immigration and border issues; together those account for some 40 percent of the orders. About one in seven takes aim at the civil service, with several orders empowering Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (though the man himself goes unmentioned). Roughly 10 percent of the orders deal with foreign policy, especially the evils of international agreements and global bodies such as the World Health Organization. Only a handful of orders primarily address diversity, equity and inclusion programs, yet the administration’s anti-D.E.I. energy permeates many more. About one out of every eight orders engages in various culture-war battles, from abortion to gun rights to religion, and several others indulge in retribution against perceived political opponents.
So, as a breakdown of Trump’s fixations, the orders are not a bad proxy.
The verbs in Trump’s executive orders are telling. “Unleashing” is a constant activity, even appearing in some of the titles. The economy must be unleashed; the potential of private citizens must be unleashed; energy resources must be unleashed. “Unleashing” gives way to “restoring,” whether of prosperity, common sense or freedom of speech. (The death penalty, a Trump preoccupation for decades, also requires restoring, as do names, like “Mount McKinley,” that honor American greatness.) Finally, there is much “protecting” and “defending” in Trump’s orders — protecting citizens against immigrant invaders, defending women against gender ideology, protecting the “priceless and profound gift” of U.S. citizenship from the children of illegal immigrants, and defending religious liberty through a new White House Faith Office.
These verbs tell us how Trump sees the country. Only an inhibited America would need unleashing; only a neglected America would need restoring; only a vulnerable America would need protecting. No wonder that Trump has immediately declared several simultaneous national emergencies, involving energy supplies, the border, criminal cartels and even the International Criminal Court. And the man Trump blames for this deteriorated state of our union is Biden, who in recent years subbed in for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as Trump’s nemesis of choice.
Throughout his executive orders, Trump trashes his immediate predecessor in the White House for pushing radical climate policies, trampling free speech, embedding D.E.I. throughout the federal government, limiting energy production, encouraging an immigrant invasion, commuting the sentences of death-row inmates and, above all, deploying federal power against political enemies.
That last point is the subject of Trump’s first executive order, E.O. 14147, and it carries on where his campaign left off. “The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community.” Such actions, his order asserts, were not about the legitimate pursuit of justice but about “inflicting political pain.”
The irony of this order, titled Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, is that in several subsequent orders Trump commands his own administration to engage in such weaponization. Trump repeatedly attacks major law firms that have worked with Democratic clients or that have ties to prior investigations against Trump, suspending their security clearances and terminating any government contracts. He also calls on the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to review or investigate various actions by the Biden administration, which he accuses of behavior that is not just “shortsighted” but also “illegal and immoral.”
The former president’s offense, as expressed in the orders, isn’t just that he weaponized government against Trump; it’s that Biden’s failures undercut American greatness. In many orders Trump first extols our nation’s virtues and riches and then chastises the Biden administration for diminishing and misusing them.
“America is blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources that have historically powered our nation’s economic prosperity,” reads a typical order, titled Unleashing American Energy. However, it continues, “in recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources,” leading to high energy costs that “devastate American consumers.” The order goes on to eliminate Biden-era policies promoting electric vehicles and revokes a dozen Biden executive orders involving energy, climate and the environment. Just about everything that is wrong with America is Biden’s fault.
Note the phrasing of the criticism: “ideologically motivated regulations.” This is a default assumption in Trump’s orders: Whatever his opponents do is driven by some hopelessly doctrinaire belief system, whereas Trump follows logic and common sense. One Trump executive order cites “serious concerns of political bias” in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and another is devoted to “eradicating anti-Christian bias” in the public square. Schools are imprinting “false ideologies” on America’s children, another order states, and immigrants who “espouse hateful ideology” must be vetted and removed from the country. And the Biden administration advanced a “corrosive ideology” of systemic racism that makes citizens feel ashamed of their country.
All manner of blinders and biases can take root in our politics and our citizenry; that’s human nature. And the Democratic Party certainly gravitated toward progressive stances on issues of race, sexuality and identity over the past decade, whether out of heartfelt conviction, activist pressure or political expediency. But the corollary assumption — that Trump’s preferences are pure and nonideological, the stuff of simple fact and homespun wisdom — is belied by his own orders.
To decree, as one Trump order does, that for every new federal regulation that is created, 10 old ones must be eliminated, is to stake out an ideological position in the debates over the proper reach of government. It may be good policy or bad policy, but it is not in any sense politically neutral or intellectually self-evident. (The order does not say where that ratio comes from, except to say that it is “important,” and a fact sheet the White House issued to explain the order doesn’t help much, either.) To order that for every four federal workers who are fired only one new worker may be hired is similarly not a value-free proposition, no matter if the order is sanitized as a Workforce Optimization Initiative.
On some occasions, the president calls for studies to ascertain the facts of an issue, even though the text of the order already indicates Trump’s preordained conclusion. When he instructs the commerce secretary to assess whether lumber and timber imports threaten U.S. national security, he does so in an order titled Addressing the Threat to National Security From Imports of Timber, Lumber. And anyone who recalls the evisceration of the U.S. Agency for International Development in February may be surprised to learn that Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order Re-evaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid mandated a 90-day pause in U.S. aid flows to assess their “programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.” By early February, however, Musk was already bragging that he’d spent a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
For the record, the 90-day pause ends April 20. Can’t wait to see how the aid review turns out.
Not only does the Trump administration dismantle agencies and programs on ideological grounds before thorough assessments are conducted, but Trump still assigns them additional duties. In an order signed Jan. 29, the president instructed the secretary of education to spend up to four months building a commission in the department to focus on patriotic schooling; in an order signed March 20, Trump told the secretary to just close the Department of Education. In a Feb. 7 order titled Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa, Trump determined that Afrikaner farmers were suffering racial discrimination from their government and should receive priority for entry and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admission Program. Just one wrinkle: In an order signed two weeks earlier, Trump suspended the refugee program altogether, arguing that admission of more refugees “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Trump did offer a loophole: Only those refugees “who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States” should be admitted or those whose presence is deemed “in the national interest.” His later order designating white South African farmers as worthy of admission says a lot about who he thinks can assimilate into America and serve the interests of our nation.
Many of Trump’s executive orders illuminate the president’s interpretation of America’s values — what kind of people belong here, how the nation’s history should be taught, which principles are worth upholding and defending.
On this point, some of the orders are so generic as to be meaningless. One of the shortest declares that U.S. foreign policy must always “put America and American citizens first” and that the secretary of state must make sure all policies, programs and staff members align with that goal. In another, Trump requires that taxpayer money should be spent “only on making America great.” It’s hard to know how to execute such orders, other than to proclaim them.
In an executive order creating a council of advisers on science and technology, Trump points to Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong to show that “the American story is one of boundless creativity and bold ambition, driven by an indomitable pioneering spirit.” He extols the “potential” of the American citizen and the nation’s economy, potential that can be encouraged — or, yes, unleashed — with proper policies and attitudes.
But throughout his orders, the president also betrays defensiveness about American values, often defining them by what they are against, by who threatens them. Immigrants, for example, are a constant danger to the American experiment. For all their emphasis on the country’s potential, Trump’s orders typically depict new arrivals as malicious people who might display “hostile attitudes” toward America’s government, citizens and culture or even be “potential terrorists.” It is a stark juxtaposition — a nation so enamored of its own potential that nonetheless insists on treating those who wish to join it as potentially destructive.
Trump wants our schools to offer an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” It’s an understandable impulse, yet it ignores how an honest accounting of that era — or, really, of any other — inevitably reveals episodes that are far from noble or inspirational. Such episodes don’t make the American story wrong; they make it real.
During his first term, Trump compared America’s instincts with those of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, asking, “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” Now, however, Trump revels in that sense of innocence and wishes to eliminate anything casting America’s past in a negative light. In an order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, the president decries efforts to “rewrite our nation’s history” with “divisive narratives” of racial or sexual injustice. The only “objective facts” permitted are those that celebrate the country’s “remarkable achievements” and “extraordinary heritage” and “unmatched record of advancing liberty.” It is a static vision of history, no less dogmatic or ideological than the interpretations he so roundly rejects.
There is much talk of America’s founding documents in Trump’s executive orders, including the president’s desire to salute the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year in grand style. In an order on how the U.S. military should uphold American values, he directs the service academies to teach that the United States and its founding documents “remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
Trump’s attitude toward those documents is more revealing the more detailed he becomes. In an order on changing the hiring process for civil servants, he stresses that the federal government must attract employees who are “committed to achieving the freedom, prosperity and democratic rule that our Constitution promotes.” He also affirms that people should not be hired if they are “unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the executive branch.”
But what happens when defense of the Constitution and fidelity to the executive come into conflict? In a later order, titled Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies, Trump provides his answer.
“The Constitution vests all executive power in the president and charges him with faithfully executing the laws,” the order begins. It goes on to criticize independent regulatory agencies for operating “without sufficient accountability to the president, and through him, to the American people.” The implication is that only the president — and not, say, the people’s elected representatives in Congress — embodies the popular will, and that this unmediated relationship with the people grants him unprecedented power.
The order explains how civil servants should interpret the laws they have sworn to uphold. The short answer: Don’t bother.
The slightly longer answer: “The president and the attorney general, subject to the president’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch,” and those interpretations are “controlling” on all federal workers, the order states. “No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the president or the attorney general’s opinion on a matter of law.”
Consider the logic: Because the Constitution empowers the president and the president faithfully executes the law, the president’s actions as chief executive are necessarily lawful, and his interpretations of the law — say, when he talks about running for a third term or when he attempts to unmake the 14th Amendment — are necessarily correct. And so a document that is held up as the greatest force for good the world has ever known is deployed to justify the personal preferences of one man.
And that’s an order.
Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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