What I Learned About Trump’s Second Term by Reading His First 100 Executive Orders

Opinion|What I Learned About Trump’s Second Term by Reading His First 100 Executive Orders

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 (Some of Trump’s second-term executive orders simply undo some of President Joe Biden’s orders, which in turn rescinded orders from the first Trump term.)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.