His second term may not begin until the January 20 inauguration, but Donald Trump plans to hit the ground running. As soon as he holds the authority once again as president to sign executive orders, he intends to let fly a flurry of them – many of which are already written and simply await his signature.
What will the 47th president’s first day back in office entail? Expect immediate action on illegal immigration and the southern border, energy, and the renewal of his 2017 deregulation program on steroids.
Back to the Border
Once president again, Trump is expected to declare illegal immigration a national emergency. This would free up military funding to get back to work on building the border wall. In a Truth Social post from November, the president-elect also said he would shift military resources to aid in his deportation plans.
Deportation is another big item on the presidential to-do list. Some of the executive orders will likely be aimed at ramping up immigration enforcement and giving federal officers more leeway to arrest people who are in the country illegally but don’t otherwise have a criminal record. Trump has frequently promised to deport a record number of illegals, beginning on his first day back in office.
Mr. Trump has also pledged to close President Joe Biden’s “parole” program and put an end to “birthright citizenship” for those born in the US to illegal immigrant parents. The latter may prove the more challenging, as the administration will inevitably have to fight lawsuits in federal court over the constitutionality of such an action.
Trump Has That New President Energy Once Again
It’s unclear just how much he intends to do on Inauguration Day, but Trump does have big plans for energy regulation. The president-elect already has orders ready for his signature to overturn many of Biden’s policies. “I made a series of big Day One promises in my campaign,” Trump said at a Phoenix, AZ, rally in December. “I intend to keep those promises to the American people.”
“I will sign Day One orders to end all Biden restrictions on energy production, terminate his insane electric vehicle mandate, cancel his natural gas export ban, reopen ANWR in Alaska – the biggest site, potentially anywhere in the world – and declare a national energy emergency,” he continued.
Trump also plans to revive his first-term policy requiring the removal of two regulations for each one his administration plans to enact. Only this time, he’s demanding ten cuts for every new regulation! He lacks the authority to erase anything passed by Congress through simple executive orders, but Biden signed a bevy of his own – all of which are in danger once Trump returns to the White House.
Consider the price of gas across the last two presidencies. The national average for regular gasoline in January of 2017 was $2.349 per gallon. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has tracked this data monthly since September of 1990. Not once during the Trump era did the national average rise higher than $2.901.
Under Barack Obama, the highest monthly national average was $4.602, and it spent most of Obama’s eight years at $3 a gallon or higher. Still, even under Obama’s administration, gas did spend some time under $2 a gallon. It was $2.334 in January of 2021 when Biden took office, and it broke $3 in June, never to return. At its worst, the national average for regular gasoline was less than ten cents shy of $5 a gallon.
Will America see affordable gas again soon? That may be too much to hope for – but if it can happen, it’s only through an aggressive campaign of deregulation and Trump’s famous “drill, baby, drill!”
Begging Your Pardon
The president-to-be has also promised pardons and commuted sentences for those charged regarding the January 6, 2021, incident at the Capitol. The left immediately referred to it as an insurrection and a riot, and it made enough folks uncomfortable that even many on the right now use those words. Video surveillance showed fairly orderly, non-violent Trump supporters walking about the building – even guided by Capitol Police in some cases. It was nothing like the “mostly peaceful protests” that saw cities across America aflame after the death of George Floyd. Still, At least 1,572 people have been charged in relation to the so-called riot, and the sentences of those already convicted range from just a few days to as long as 22 years in federal prison.
President-elect Trump promised to bring relief to his supporters who have been “living in hell,” as he put it, suffering under a “very nasty system” of justice. “I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump told NBC News during an interview in December. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
Donald Trump has scheduled himself a busy first day back in the Oval Office, but if his first term demonstrated anything, it’s that no one should doubt he’ll go through with his plans. It won’t be America 2017 all over again on day one – for that matter, it might never be – but Trump certainly isn’t wasting any time getting the process started.
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