With half the country firmly behind him and with the blessing of America’s tech billionaires, President Donald Trump is working at breakneck speed to try to remake America.
using sweeping declarations of presidential power Going far beyond his first term, Trump has promised to change how the federal government views rights. the migrants and trans people.
He says the Gulf of Mexico will become the “Gulf of America.” from Alaska Denali mountain peak He will once again honor President William McKinley never visit but preferential rates like trump And it was used to justify the 1798 law Japanese internment camps during World War II they will call, Trump promises this time, to go after it foreign-born criminals, he said.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders for the Jan. 6 defendants in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.
Carlos Barria/Reuters
Trump promised to end it birthright citizenship even though many legal experts said that this was not possible opponents were sued. But Trump insisted 14th Amendment of the Constitution — which confers citizenship on any person born in the United States — the legal status of a person’s birth parents should now be considered.
In another executive order, Trump suggested security clearances must be removed In the weeks before the 2020 election, more than two dozen retired government intelligence officials disputed Republican accounts of emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, calling them possible Russian propaganda. And TikTok suddenly resurfaced according to Trump’s China-based parent company he could ignore a bipartisan law for now Congress passed by requiring the app to be sold or shut down.
President Donald Trump signs an executive order pardoning felons on January 6 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2025.
Jim Watson/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
To outside experts, Trump’s flash of unilateral executive power seems extraordinary. History suggests it can go on without Congress and the courts behind it, and opposition groups have said they are ready to sue.
Marsha Barrett, a political historian and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said there is certainly precedent for presidents to force change when Congress won’t act, as when President Harry Truman ordered the military to be desegregated.
“But to have so much confidence in that power on day one could be interpreted as an effort to demonstrate that the executive branch has hidden the branch of Congress,” Barrett said. “While executive orders are certainly an expression of broad presidential power, I think their application has a gap compared to presidents who have run much of their platform through Congress.”
In other words, without first getting Congress firmly on board, everything Trump declared on his first day in office could be undone as quickly as four years from now when he leaves office. There is also the question of how much influence Americans would have on government services.
“The evidence is there and it’s worth paying attention to how they implement that vision,” said Max Stier, founder and CEO of the Nonpartisan Association for Public Service.
The federal government needs “constructive reform,” Stier added, “not options that will further erode the capabilities of our public institutions.”
President Donald Trump receives an executive order to commute the sentences of people convicted of Jan. 6 crimes in the Oval Office of the White House, Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington.
Evan Vucci/AP
Eight years ago, many of Trump’s executive orders would likely have been dismissed as “un-American” by critics like the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and by Democratic governors. But having remade the Republican party firmly in his image, Trump arrived in Washington this week celebrated like any other politician.
Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington on January 20, 2025.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Tech CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, joined the new president in the Capitol Rotunda. Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs Tesla, SpaceX and social networking site X, will be given full access to the White House as one of Trump’s closest informal advisers.
On Trump’s side, there is a Republican-controlled House and Senate, as well as a US Supreme Court, with several of his handpicked judges, who have shown that they are willing to side with him in several cases.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.
Jim Watson/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Even the Democratic governors who run the states that went after Trump in the election seemed to tone down the criticism, at least for now.
“I’m ready to work with the Trump Administration to continue our progress here in Pennsylvania,” said Gov. Josh Shapiro, once a leading candidate to serve in the Harris administration but is up for re-election next year.
“At the same time, as I have done throughout my career, I will always defend our basic freedoms and resist efforts to erode them,” he added, emphasizing that “there is more that unites us as Americans than divides us.” “
Nationally, Trump won 49.9% of the popular vote, compared to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 48.4%, according to the latest election results. That means the new president will rule a country deeply divided over his leadership, with many Americans wary, ambivalent, or outright opposed to his last term as president.
Soon after Trump was sworn in, liberal advocacy groups like Public Citizen, the ACLU, and Democracy Forward began filing lawsuits.
For Trump, however, his return to Washington signaled a new “golden age” as he insisted much of the country was behind him.
“Nothing stands in our way because we are Americans. The future is ours and our golden age has just begun,” he said.
