President Trump can undo much of the damage from the Biden regime’s nightmarish last four years shortly after he takes the Oath on January 20th. The President’s reliance on executive orders will supplement a robust Republican led coalition in both chambers of Congress, providing multiple instruments for the 47th President to implement his bold policy agenda. Ever since his resounding victory, a litany of executive orders – ranging from sweeping tariffs on foreign imports to bans on transgender persons in the military to seismic reforms of the Executive Branch – have been proposed. These initiatives will all help President Trump hit the ground running from day one, giving Agenda 47 a robust foundation right out of the gates, and allow the President to make good on his campaign pledge – and electoral mandate – to finally put the interests of everyday Americans first, once and for all. The following are five of the most highly anticipated of expected executive actions that the President might implement from day one. The categories range from economic to cultural to administrative reforms, and are designed to unspool the deleterious harms that have been exacted upon America’s economy, national security, and civic institutions these last four years.
1Tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China: This past week, President Trump announced that as one of his first executive orders, his administration would be implementing a staggering “25% tariff on all products coming into the United States” from our two largest trading partners, Mexico and Canada. He added, “both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem.” The President has elsewhere stated that he will impose an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods imported into the United States. The purpose of these tariffs is twofold: one, operate as a bargaining chip to combat the continued importation of lethal drugs like fentanyl which have been flowing into this country unchecked from China and other places for years now, claiming the lives of millions of Americans along the way. Additionally, the tariffs would be used to spur economic growth in their own right: they are first projected to add hundreds of billions of dollars in federal revenue. This surplus would directly add to the Gross Domestic Product of the national economy. More broadly, robust tariffs would shift global industry back to the United States, and out of countries like China, Russia, India, and Japan. This, in turn, would be a boon for American business – and lead to higher quality products overall for American and global consumers alike. It is no secret that the period after the Civil War through the 1920s was one characterized by tremendous industry and prosperity for the United States, resulting in so many of the inventions – from the automobile to the modern skyscraper to the commercial airplane – that we take for granted today. This was an era defined by limited government, robust tariffs, a focus on American industry, and little to no income tax. A return to the philosophy that spurred this era’s unprecedented growth, which Donald Trump clearly envisions through these tariffs, can likewise help ease so much of the present dependency on income and other taxes that have exacerbated our already unmanageable inflation and debt crises. The President is intent on implementing wide-ranging tax cuts, from no tax on tips and overtime to no tax on social security payments. His administration might even go further than that in pushing the tax envelope — maybe a call to abolish the Sixteenth Amendment outright? In any event, the return to tariffs over taxation – and the broader shift in perspective that represents from international competitors to the domestic market could well ignite a New American Economic Renaissance, one that will see regular Americans keep more of their hard earned pay – a return to the constitutional norm – and, in the process, shrink the size of government, reduce waste, and jumpstart innovation and high quality production to a scale that has not been seen in generations.
Ban on Transgender Individuals In The Military: Donald Trump has made a promise to stop wokeness in its tracks. To that end, he plans to put a total and complete end to the Far Left social experiments, particularly in the military, by signing an executive order that bans transgender-identifying persons from the armed forces. The rationale for passing such an executive order is one with widespread public support. First, the military is not a place for radical ideological experiments. In fact, nowhere should such experiments be permitted in society – from schools to bathrooms to public spaces – but especially in the military, which is currently facing a crisis in both morale and enlistment. This in large part has to do with the woke programming being shoved down the throats of military troops by the top brass, woke generals that have collaborated hand-in-glove with the federal government to indoctrinate America’s fighting forces with progressive lunacy. Not allowing transgenders in the military can be justified on a simple cost-benefit scale: it’s a scandalous waste of taxpayer money, for example, to finance surgeries – or other medical care – for gravely confused individuals. That sort of thing should be done on their own time – and is the matter of psychiatrists, doctors, and therapists. Military funding must be shored up to guarantee America retains the strongest and most powerful military on the planet. All the rest is a sideshow, and is not something that can be gambled with, particularly with emerging threats from foreign adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran – and the advent of new technologies, including drone warfare and bioweapons, that make the need for a powerful military, one decoupled from Marxist chicaneries, more urgent than ever.
Reinstate Schedule F: Late in his final term in office, President Trump executed an action that would return and consolidate bureaucratic power under a single executive – namely, the President of the United States. To put it simply, the intent was to return the Executive Branch back to the mandate of its designers: where power flows down from the President of the United States to his various department heads and agencies. Today, we have a much different picture: in many cases, unelected bureaucrats wield more power than the President of the United States, and worse, are accountable to nobody. As observed in the last Trump administration, in some cases these bureaucrats – who, under the Constitution, are supposed to report to and carry out the orders of the President and his various cabinet officials – worked to actively undermine President Trump’s America First agenda. Not anymore. That is why it’s so crucial for the President, this time around, to implement Schedule F reform – allowing the 47th President to dismiss employees within the executive branch at-will. The reason for this policy is not, as critics in the media would contend, authoritarian. Rather, it is democratic. In the Executive Branch, the American people have only directly voted for a President and Vice President. Thus, only these two officeholders – being the only two democratically elected and deliberative officers in the whole Executive Branch – should have a say over the bureaucracy which helps the President implement and enforce his agenda. If the President finds some number of these bureaucrats wanting in their duties, he should have every right to terminate them at-will. This is not a revolutionary development, but a return to constitutional governance consistent with the letter and spirit of the document’s original meaning. The Executive power is fully vested in a President of the United States under Article II – not an unelected “civil service.” The idea that civil servants are “apolitical” has always been hogwash, a myth propounded by these very same people who never want to be held responsible for anything. The last administration’s operations, where a number of bureaucrats – within the intelligence agencies, DOJ, and elsewhere – worked to actively subvert President Trump’s own agenda should have dispelled any such doubts on that assertion. There is no fourth branch of government, nor has there been an amendment to change the Constitution’s original structure by aborning such a creation. Thus, the legality of the measure is straightforward – and the American people have voted for the President to drain the swamp. Schedule F would go a long way towards making that promise a reality, precipitating generational and lasting reform to our governing institutions.
Increase U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Through Drill, Baby, Drill! Two pledges the President has made to instate on day one: mass deportations and Drill, Baby, Drill! The latter, which became a staple all throughout President Trump’s 2024 campaign, would tap into America’s sprawling reserves of liquid gold – which have been disgracefully bottled up for years now due to scams like the “Green New Deal” that have made the United States more dependent and vulnerable on foreign exporters like Saudi Arabia. All of that could come to a crashing halt on January 20th, if the President signs an executive order that unleashes America’s fracking potential by reversing Biden and Obama-era restrictive regulations on federal lands and waters, expediting permits, and potentially offering tax incentives. He can also ask his Interior Secretary to expand leasing programs for oil and gas exploration on federal lands. What is more, the President will surely resume projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, and direct agencies – like the Department of Energy – to prioritize fossil fuel projects with aggressive timelines for lease sales and permit approvals. The goal has always been to not only make America energy independent, which Donald Trump achieved in spades during his first term, but energy dominant. No more reliance on foreign adversaries, like Russia and the Middle East, while needlessly crimping our own domestic reserves, which are the greatest of anywhere in the world. Instead, Donald Trump will unleash America’s energy might – which are poised to launch, along with his tariffs, a newfound golden age of prosperity and innovation.
Immigration Executive Orders: DACA, Reinstate Remain In Mexico, Birthright Citizenship. The second part of the two-part day-one promise has been to mass deport the 25 or 30-plus million illegals that have infiltrated our porous borders and taken a stay within the interior over the last four years. These mass deportations will need to be supplemented by public policies that will help fortify the President’s immigration agenda, one oriented around shutting down the border and preventing the steady stream of illegal aliens from gushing into the homeland for all time. He can begin with rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which started under Barack Obama – and allowed a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal migrants who brought their children over the southern border. As a law, DACA was and always has been flagrantly unconstitutional. The President will need to re-prioritize immigration policy to place an emphasis on mass deportations, and, to the extent people come here legally, on merit-based applications only. Furthermore, he should reinstate Remain In Mexico, which would require asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are being processed in U.S. courts, rather than in the United States – which would dramatically reduce domestic crime. Finally, in conjunction with ending DACA by executive action, the President has long entertained the idea of ending birthright citizenship once and for all, the radical policy that allows any person born on U.S. soil to parents who came from anywhere in the world, no matter their status – they can even be dangerous terrorists – to automatically become citizens. In an age defined by an unmanageable border crisis already, continuing the longstanding and constitutionally nebulous and ahistorical policy of “birthright citizenship” would be suicidal. There is no system in place currently to properly vet, let alone assimilate and acculture the tens of millions of illegal persons, and even recent lawfully assimilated arrivals, in the United States. Not only is this a significant drain on the economy and threat to public safety, but it also erodes civic identity and the character of a nation. It’s one thing to be a pluralistic society, but to be a pluralistic society in which nobody understands one another because ten thousand different languages are spoken by people with no ancestral claim to our collective social birthright or history, does not a great nation make. In fact, to the contrary, it is the near-certain recipe for civilizational ruination – one that is repeated by every major empire throughout history, which becomes so decadent that it forgets the timeless, common sense building blocks that all societies need to stay together. Lest that be our fate, President Trump can start getting the ball rolling with executive orders that will stop the crisis at our border, and begin the trajectory towards national renewal.
Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.
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