Trump’s Egregious Executive Orders Won’t Lower the Price of Eggs

The executive orders were already on the Resolute Desk by the time Donald Trump began his inaugural address at the Capitol. Stephen Miller, Trump’s long-time friend and now deputy chief of staff, had made sure of that. 

Trump always liked the visual of a desk stacked high with binders, even if those binders were empty. Early on in his first term, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity even devoted a segment to quizzing Trump over his messy Oval Office desk. “Look at my desk. Papers,” Trump bragged. “You don’t see presidents with that on their desk.” 

But these binders weren’t empty. They were filled with nearly 100 executive orders Trump would sign over the course of his first day back in office. They ran the gamut from directives allowing exploratory oil drilling on protected federal lands to declarations that there were only two genders. The app migrants use to track their immigration hearings shut down. Migrants were later told their hearings had been canceled.

There were two Trumps on display in the Oval Office on Monday. One was Trump the president. The other was Trump the television producer, dutifully instructing photographers and newscasters from the world’s media outlets on which angles would play best with their audiences. The moment was Trump at his most gruesomely honest, inflicting immense suffering on whole swaths of the people he dislikes while leading the media around by the nose. It was one of the few times Trump has ever looked genuinely happy. 

Then came the pardons. Trump had promised on the campaign trail to pardon all of the people convicted for their roles in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Many of them are serving time for violently attacking and severely injuring Capitol police officers. Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 of them with the stroke of a pen, including “about six commutations” by Trump’s count. The actual number is 14.

Among those who Trump freed is Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of leading a seditious conspiracy against the United States for his role organizing the January 6 attack. By Monday evening, Tarrio’s lawyer reported that the violent militia leader was being processed for release from Louisiana’s FCI Pollock federal prison. Trump couldn’t contain his glee.

“This is a big one,” Trump boasted to the photographers he’d so meticulously arranged around him just a few minutes before. Then Trump did what any showman would do: He invited the pardoned rioters to hang out at his post-inauguration rally later that evening. “We hope they come out tonight, frankly!”

Spite was a common thread in Trump’s burst of executive action. Some executive orders seemed aimed specifically at diminishing former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. His decision to (again) withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement was a clear slap at Biden’s pioneering climate legacy. Renaming Mount Denali to Mount McKinley is a bitter repeal of Obama’s action from a full decade ago. Trump’s vendettas never come with expiration dates.

One of Trump’s longest-burning hatreds was Biden’s decision to allow transgender Americans to serve in uniform. Trump reversed that order on Monday evening, banning transgender Americans from military service. The service status of the military’s 15,500 transgender troops is now an open question. Do they still have jobs? Will they need to be closeted? Will they be forced to use their deadnames? There is no direction in the order. Just hatred and the exercise of power for power’s sake.

Trump also dismantled much of Biden’s environmental legacy. The series of executive orders that make up Trump’s “national climate emergency” reinstate and expand many of the industry’s worst behaviors, including launching oil drilling projects on protected lands, ending all new permitting for offshore wind projects, rolling back programs promoting electric cars and recommitting America to both develop and use more fossil fuels. 

In another stinging rebuke that actually makes life harder for the seniors he pledged to serve, Trump ended Biden’s executive action lowering prescription drug costs for millions of Americans. Trump had long promised an alternative, better proposal during his campaign days. Instead, his great deal for America’s seniors turned out to be nothing at all.

There’s hardly a corner of American life left untouched by Trump’s barrage of executive orders. Public health will be forever changed by his order withdrawing America from the World Health Organization, a group we co-founded 75 years ago. That news rebounded across European TikTok accounts, which American teens can still view after Trump signed an order delaying a looming ban by 90 days.

The president also made good on his frequent promises to upend America’s immigration system. In ten back-to-back orders, Trump fired senior Justice Department leaders in charge of immigration issues, sealed the border to new migration, revoked asylum seekers’ right to enter the country and authorized the military to police the southern border as auxiliary immigration agents. Even Trump allies at ICE privately acknowledge that his orders have thrown the agency into chaos ahead of planned immigration raids later this week.

Even immigrants who once lived under the illusion of security now face an unpredictable and dangerous new politics. In an entirely unconstitutional order, Trump unilaterally declared an end to birthright citizenship—even though that would require a constitutional amendment. Instead, Trump merely claimed to have the authority as president to correct bad law, a power held by the federal courts.

“I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions,” Trump remarked earlier in the day. “We will do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.” He wasn’t kidding.

Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship will pick up plenty of court challenges in the days and weeks to come, but those challenges are no longer a reassurance that unconstitutional acts will be stopped. The Supreme Court’s Republican majority now takes an almost imperial view of executive power. They could just as easily find that Trump does have the  constitutional power he invented on the spot Monday night. 

Migrants from war zones fared no better. In one sweeping order, Trump canceled the resettlement of nearly 1,700 Afghan refugees. Many of those migrants had already finalized their legal status and were preparing to board airplanes for the United States. As of Monday, those refugees no longer have any idea if they are still welcome in America. 

By the end of his first day, Trump had revoked 78 of Biden’s signature policies and overridden dozens more through superseding orders. It was by any standard an incredibly energetic effort to shred his predecessor’s legacy, and experience has taught us that Trump excels at nothing quite so much as destruction.

Executive orders are sticky legal entities. They exist in a gray area that makes them especially appealing to presidents who want to evade Congress. Most orders can’t even be reviewed by the federal courts, so they offer a seductive tool for operating without oversight or appeal. That makes executive orders feel almost immutable once signed — which is exactly what presidents are counting on.

But that’s not quite true. The people still have tools to fight back—tools they successfully deployed during Trump’s first term to strike down his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban on three separate occasions. The courts are undeniably weaker and more Trump loyalist today than they were during Trump’s first administration, but lawsuits still represent the most direct way regular people can play a role in stopping potential executive overreach.

Still, Trump’s frenetic flurry of score-settling signatures leaves little room for optimism among the tens of millions of Americans who will soon bear the brunt of those orders. Those people have never existed to Trump, or to the millions of MAGA voters who built their cultural identity around getting back at communities of people they’ve never met.

Trump’s most egregious orders will find themselves challenged in court. Many more will slip by unnoticed except by the communities they upend and the citizens they harm. Trump’s ability to sow chaos through paperwork hasn’t diminished a bit since he was ousted from office four years ago. But as Trump the producer told reporters Monday night, all that action makes for great TV.