Day One Executive Orders

– by Joyce Vance

Civil Discourse

Day One of Trump 2.0 was full of shock and awful, precisely what we had every reason to expect. In classic fashion, there was so much, and it was so all over the board that it was hard to focus on any one thing.

I wrote to you about that back in November when I first started thinking about The Democracy Index (starting soon on The Contrarian). At the time, I wrote about how hard it was during his first administration to focus on any one thing Trump was doing because there was so much going on that no one could keep all of it at the forefront, and after a while, outrage fatigue sets in, and people give up. Yesterday was a perfect example of that.

What we cannot afford to do this time is let Trump‘s daily scandal prevent us from keeping track of the most significant trends in his attack on democracy. Once The Democracy Index gets up and running we’ll be tracking the issues and marking the through lines that let us understand the whole, rather than just seeing each day’s individual horrible.

Yesterday was stark because of the sheer volume of things that happened: the inauguration itself, the pardons from both Biden and Trump, and the executive orders and other presidential actions. There is no way to cover everything all at once in meaningful detail. But we’ll focus on them as lawsuits and governmental action proceed, and we see which of Trump’s executive orders look like they may lead to action and which look more like pure political posturing. For today, we’ll just stay high level.

You can see a list and follow links to all of Trump’s executive orders here. Despite saying he’d sign around 200 of them, the actual total was 26, compared to nine first day orders by Joe Biden and one by Trump in his prior presidency. That gives you some sense of how prepared Trump and his Project 2025 friends were.

Executive orders are not a magic wand, though. The president can only use them to direct activity within the executive branch, he can’t make other entities, or private businesses, universities, podcasters, individuals or anyone/thing else that isn’t an executive branch entity or actor comply with his dictates. That’s one big limitation on his ability to act. Orders have to be in compliance with the Constitution and federal laws. They can’t just, say, undo a Constitutional protection for birthright citizenship. If they do, they’ll be challenged in federal court, which, at a minimum, involves a sizable delay.

By midnight last night, the lawsuits had already started, with challenges to birthright citizenship, Schedule F, and DOGE coming out of the starting gate. By this afternoon, 22 states had sued Trump over his unconstitutional effort to end birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen, and other lawsuits, like one brought by pregnant women whose babies will be denied citizenship, have been filed too. As in the first Trump administration, the lawyers are back at it, and despite the favorable treatment the Supreme Court gave Trump when it came to personal immunity from criminal prosecution and its disturbing decisions when it came to abortion, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic here. Writing birthright citizenship out of the Constitution would require an amendment, not a president’s whim. If you’d like a brief explanation of why Trump should lose on birthright citizenship, I have a piece here.

The most profound abuse yesterday was the pardons Trump issued to reward January 6 offenders for their loyalty to him. I wrote about why it would be such a bad idea for Trump to do this for the Brennan Center earlier this month. It erases the attack on our Constitution and our country. The purpose of that attack was Donald Trump’s personal benefit, helping him stay in power after losing the election, contrary to every principle of American democracy. The Founding Fathers did not extend the pardon power to the president so he could use it to reward political loyalists who turned to violence to try and overturn the results of an election on his behalf.

But that’s exactly what Trump did, commuting sentences for fourteen members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who were convicted in the cases where seditious conspiracy charges were brought successfully by the Justice Department. My piece relies on reporting compiled by NBC’s Ryan Reilly, who documented, using available video, that these defendants were captured brandishing and using firearms, stun guns, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bike racks, batons, a metal whip, office furniture, pepper spray, bear spray, a tomahawk ax, a hatchet, a hockey stick, knuckle gloves, a baseball bat, a massive Trump billboard, Trump flags, a pitchfork, pieces of lumber, crutches, and even an explosive device during the attack on the Capitol. More than 140 police officers were injured, and members of Congress fled the building in fear for their lives.

So much for Vice President JD Vance’s claim over the weekend that: “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Trump’s attorney general nominee, Pam Bondi, said during her confirmation hearings that she couldn’t take a position on pardons because she would need to look at each file individually. That didn’t happen. These defendants were released from prison with little, if any, preparation and no regard for their offense on January 6, prior criminal history, behavior while incarcerated, or threat to anyone in the community upon release.

The QAnon shaman is thrilled about his pardon.

Trump’s inaugural speech set the stage for all of this. He lies, panders, and rambles when he talks to the public, but a few key points illustrate where Trump is headed. He may have said he was interested in being a unifier before the inauguration, but that wasn’t what we got yesterday:

• Trump: “For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” He said that, presumably about Joe Biden, who pulled the country out of the Covid slump and handed over what is widely viewed as the best economy in the world with unemployment at a low and inflation under control to Trump. And Trump talk about people who extracted power and wealth from “our citizens” with all of the brogliarchs in the room.

• “My life was spared for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

• “We will not forget our country. We will not forget our Constitution. And we will not forget our God,” Trump said before launching into his plans for executive orders that ignore all of those things.

None of this is normal, and it’s our job to keep it from being normalized. Presidents don’t try to erase the Constitution or turn the federal bureaucracy into a loyalty corps. They don’t release violent criminals from prison so they can return the favor. As the examples grow, our job is to refuse to treat them like they’re acceptable. Trump’s abuses have to remain shocking, not because they surprise us, but because they are profoundly unacceptable and contrary to democratic principles.

Trump wants us to abandon those principles. The easiest slide into autocracy is the one where we give up. Continuing to believe in democracy is a profound act of resistance and courage in a moment like this when we are being told it no longer matters.

Don’t give up.