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Today's read: 15 minutes.
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We go over what President Trump has been doing during his first days in office, focusing on immigration and pardons.
Tomorrow.
In a members-only Friday edition, we’re going to be putting Joe Biden’s presidency under a microscope, reviewing how he delivered on his core promises, applying the metrics we’ll be using for Trump to his term, evaluating how he responded to core challenges, and analyzing the affect his term will have on the future of the Democratic Party.
Quick hits.
- The U.S. military is preparing to send roughly 1,500 additional active-duty troops to the southern border pursuant to President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration. Approximately 2,200 active-duty troops are currently on the border. (The deployment)
- On Wednesday, Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain those who crossed the border illegally and had been accused of theft. The bill passed 263–156 in the House and 64–35 in the Senate. (The law)
- The Hughes fire broke out in Southern California, burning 10,000 acres and putting 31,000 people under evacuation orders as of Thursday morning. (The fire) Separately, the Palisades and Eaton fires near Los Angeles are at 70% and 95% containment as of Wednesday evening. (The update)
- Houthi rebels released the multi-national crew of the cargo ship Galaxy Leader to Oman. The Yemeni group seized the ship in the Red Sea in November 2023. (The release)
- Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom intends to increase its investment and trade with the United States by at least $600 billion over the next four years. (The comments)
Today's topic.
Trump’s first days. President Donald Trump began his second term on Monday with a series of executive actions, memos and announcements, signing 26 executive orders, 12 memoranda, and four proclamations on his first day alone. Broadly, these actions focused on restricting immigration and asylum, redirecting the nation’s energy policies, changing and curtailing federal employment practices, issuing high-profile pardons, reversing Biden-era executive orders and policies, and more.
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order denying birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States whose father is not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident and whose mother is either in the country without authorization or on a temporary basis. The order has already been challenged in court by attorneys general in 22 states. Relatedly, Trump:
- Declared a national emergency at the southern border, authorizing additional security forces to construct more barriers, and designated certain foreign drug cartels as terrorist groups
- Ended the policy of “catch and release,” which allowed those apprehended while crossing the border illegally to move freely in the country while awaiting their hearings
- Empowered officials to “repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged in the invasion” at the southern border
- Reinstituted the “Remain in Mexico” policy, causing existing asylum appointments to be canceled
- Ended the use of categorical parole programs, including the cancellation of the CBP One app as a method for facilitating entry or parole
- Suspended the U.S. refugee admissions program for 90 days, directing the Department of Homeland Security to release a report on whether the program is in the national interest
President Trump also issued several acts of clemency. On his first day in office, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who had been charged with “certain offenses relating to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Among those pardoned was Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys white supremacy group, while Stewart Rhodes, founder of the anti-government militia group the Oath Keepers, had his sentence commuted. Both were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the anonymous web-based marketplace Silk Road that was used to traffic illicit drugs, whose imprisonment became an important cause among libertarians.
On Tuesday, the President announced a $500 billion project to invest in domestic artificial intelligence infrastructure and suggested the government should institute tariffs of 10% on all goods from China and 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico. He also declared an “energy emergency,” opening paths for federal agencies to pursue more petroleum drilling and issuing a memorandum to temporarily pause offshore windfarm leases and pause electric vehicle incentives.
Finally, Trump signed other notable executive orders:
- Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization
- Establishing the “Department of Government Efficiency”
- Declaring that there are only two sexes that are not changeable
- Delaying a ban of the social media app TikTok in the United States for 75 days
- Reversing many of President Biden’s executive actions, including healthcare directives and voter registration initiatives
- Instituting a federal government hiring freeze, ending DEI practices and work from home policies in federal agencies, and reinstating Schedule F designation to remove job protections for as many as 50,000 federal employees
Below, we’ll get into what the right and left are saying about Trump’s first days. Then, Editor Will Kaback gives his take while Executive Editor Isaac Saul is on paternity leave
What the right is saying.
- The right has differing reactions to the orders, but many view the broad pardons for Jan. 6 rioters as a mistake.
- Some praise Trump’s energy-related orders as a welcome change from Biden’s policies.
- Others say Trump’s immigration orders demonstrate how to address the border crisis through executive action alone.
National Review’s editors wrote “pardoning capitol rioters is no way to restore law and order.”
“The riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a national disgrace. It was also a crime. Protesters physically forced Congress to adjourn its constitutionally mandated joint session and evacuate the building. There were assaults on police, theft, and an estimated $2.88 million in damage to property,” the editors said. However, “the Justice Department deployed extraordinary and disproportionate resources to punish the protesters, holding many of them in extended pretrial detention far from home for months. The Supreme Court concluded that one of the major federal statutes deployed against the January 6 defendants had been strained by prosecutors beyond its language.”
“Trump will be able to use the political cover provided by the abusive last-minute pardons handed out by Joe Biden. While Biden’s scandalous pardons will undercut the credibility of Democrats’ criticisms of the January 6 pardons, they don’t justify them,” the editors wrote. “Societies must resist disorder, riots, political violence, and mob rule. They can and must use the criminal justice system to punish those who engage in such acts. The more dramatic the offense, the greater the case for exemplary punishment. The real scandal is not that violent rioters were charged on this occasion but that they were let off on so many other occasions. Imitating a mistake only compounds the original mistake.”
In The New York Post, Emmet Penney said Trump’s orders “[lead] the US toward energy abundance.”
“On Monday, Donald Trump jolted America out of decades of bad energy policy with the stroke of his pen… The age of climate extremism is over; the age of energy realism is upon us,” Penney wrote. “Trump slashed the Biden EPA’s electric vehicle mandate, a coercive maneuver that sought to bully Americans into swapping their affordable internal-combustion-engine cars for pricey electric ones. Trump also stripped out the Biden Energy Department’s attempt to ban gas appliances, yet another inflationary policy that put working people in its crosshairs.”
“None of this should be read as a dismissal of the reality of climate change but as a much-needed halt to ineffective policies that, in practice, have done nothing to solve that problem,” Penney said. “Both the American people and big banks see the writing on the wall. Most Americans rank climate change toward the bottom of issues they care about… With these executive actions, Trump declared his refusal to let America join hands with its allies as they march into the gray garden of managed decline.”
In The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson argued “Trump’s executive orders on immigration prove Biden could have secured the border at any time.”
“One of the first things President Donald Trump did after being sworn in at the inauguration Monday was sign a series of executive orders on immigration and the border. A few of them stand out because they demonstrate how the border could have been secured at any point over the past four years by the Biden administration, without any action or new legislation from Congress,” Davidson wrote. Trump “declared an emergency at the border and ordered the U.S. military to immediately resume construction of the border wall, which Biden had abruptly halted upon taking office… Trump also ordered an immediate end to the use of the CBP One app that the Biden administration had used to dole out mass paroles for illegal border-crossers.”
“The Biden administration could have done all of this — or it could have simply left in place Trump’s border policies,” Davidson added. “What we saw Monday with the enacting of these executive orders from Trump (the first of many) is that a secure border was always within reach these past four years. Biden and the Democrats sold out their fellow Americans, threw open the borders, and then pretended they had no choice in the matter, that forces beyond their control had triggered a mass immigration crisis.”
What the left is saying.
- The left is critical of Trump’s actions, particularly his sweeping pardons.
- Some suggest his effort to end birthright citizenship will fail.
- Others say Trump has conditioned voters to rationalize his most radical ideas.
The New York Times editorial board wrote about “Trump’s opening act of contempt.”
“Mr. Trump’s mass pardon effectively makes a mockery of a justice system that has labored for four years to charge nearly 1,600 people who tried to stop the Constitution in its tracks… Most important, the mass pardon sends a message to the country and the world that violating the law in support of Mr. Trump and his movement will be rewarded, especially when considered alongside his previous pardons of his advisers,” the board said. “It loudly proclaims, from the nation’s highest office, that the rioters did nothing wrong, that violence is a perfectly legitimate form of political expression and that no price need be paid by those who seek to disrupt a sacred constitutional transfer of power.”
“Mr. Biden issued dubious pardons to his son and, as he walked out the door, several other family members, as well as pre-emptive pardons to an array of current and former government officials for noncriminal actions,” the board wrote. “But what Mr. Trump did Monday is of an entirely different scope. He used a mass pardon at the beginning of his term to write a false chapter of American history, to try to erase a crime committed against the foundations of American democracy. To open his term with such an act of contempt toward the legal system is audacious, even for Mr. Trump, and should send an alarming signal to Democrats and Republicans alike.”
In MSNBC, Ray Brescia argued “Trump cannot simply erase birthright citizenship.”
“Just as a president does not have the authority to establish a national religion, or stay in office for a third term, the president does not have the authority to erase protections set forth in an amendment to the Constitution. To claim such authority is cynical at best, a sop to nativist elements on the right that should not survive legal challenge,” Brescia said. “But, in the meantime, millions of lives could be thrown into disarray with the president’s stroke of the pen, and perhaps that’s the point.”
“What would it really take to rewrite the 14th Amendment? Well, another amendment, which would require not just a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress in favor of repeal of the 14th Amendment, but also ratification by three quarters of the states. Such events are highly unlikely. The Constitution is hard to amend, as it should be. And the notion that the president can sidestep that process is simply preposterous,” Brescia wrote. “Now, that likely will not stop the president and those who wish to see the end of birthright citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution from trying… That does not change the fact that the Constitution protects this path to citizenship and only an amendment to the Constitution can change it.”
In The Atlantic, David A. Graham said Trump’s second term is “already different” than the first.
“Barely 24 hours into this new presidency, Trump has already taken a series of steps that would have caused widespread outrage and mass demonstrations if he had taken them during his first day, week, or year as president, in 2017,” Graham wrote. “Although it is early, these steps have, for the most part, been met with muted response, including from a dazed left and press corps. That’s a big shift from eight years ago, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Washington, and Americans flocked to airports at midnight to try to thwart Trump’s travel ban.
“The difference arises from three big factors. First, Trump has worked hard to desensitize the population to his most outrageous statements… Second, Trump has figured out the value of a shock-and-awe strategy. By signing so many controversial executive orders at once, he’s made it difficult for anyone to grasp the scale of the changes he’s made,” Graham said. “Third, American society has changed. People aren’t just less outraged by things Trump is doing; almost a decade of the Trump era has shifted some aspects of American culture far to the right.”
My take.
Reminder: "My take" is a section where we give ourselves space to share a own personal opinion from our editorial team. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.
Note: Executive Editor Isaac Saul is currently on paternity leave, so today's "My take" section is written by Editor Will Kaback.
- Trump did a lot during his first few days in office, so I’m going to focus on his immigration actions and pardons.
- The president is squandering a prime opportunity to enact real legislative change, and is instead enacting executive orders that do more harm than good.
- I believe in clemency, but just like Biden, I think Trump went too far.
Trump has issued too many orders in his first 72 hours to cover here, so I want to focus on two that seem to be sparking the most debate: immigration and the January 6 pardons. The other issues covered by his actions — energy, the federal workforce, DEI policies, TikTok, and more — are important in their own right, and we’ll likely cover them more in-depth in the future. But I think immigration and the pardons are the most relevant to discuss in the early days of Trump’s presidency.
To me, one of the biggest unknowns about Trump’s term is how support for his agenda will evolve as his promises become policy. As the initial wave of executive orders rolls in, it’s clear that Trump intends to spend his amassed political capital on an array of issues while stretching the bounds of executive authority. Abstractly, this is normal — the president working to achieve goals he sold to voters on the campaign trail is the epitome of democracy at work. However, choosing to pursue these goals without any congressional involvement is decidedly undemocratic.
On immigration, Trump has called the amount of both legal and illegal immigration an “invasion,” and he is clearly starting his term with an all-out blitz to plug every entry pathway he can. Some of his efforts will stick, others will not — and some strategies I agree with, while many I don’t.
Like Isaac, I think Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship is likely to fail. I also believe ending birthright citizenship is both a bad idea and bad strategy. Through a human lens, birthright citizenship recognizes that being a U.S. citizen can be defined by your allegiance and contributions to the country. To deny citizenship to children who have known no other home than America is callous and undercuts what makes the country special.
Twenty-two states immediately sued to challenge Trump’s order, and it’s unlikely that he can enforce it even while the case moves through the court system. Absent any short-term wins, Trump seems to be hoping that he can bring this issue to a sympathetic Supreme Court. I share the assessment of writers on the right and left that his case will fail, even with a 6-3 conservative majority. This is the problem with pursuing an all-out blitz: If his legal effort falls short, Trump will have expended a lot of energy and political capital on an issue that is far down the list of immediate actions (like tightening the asylum process) needed to address the crisis at the southern border. I view this order as similar to Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare: a costly effort with little chance of succeeding.
The other immigration actions have a much better chance of succeeding. Trump is clearly communicating a less permissive attitude toward would-be immigrants, and moves like ending parole programs and reinstating the "Remain in Mexico" policy will meaningfully curtail the number of unauthorized immigrants seeking to enter the country. Already, Trump seems to be successfully forcing the hands of the Mexican and Guatemalan governments, who are setting up infrastructure to receive an expected influx of deportees. Solving the problem will take a lot more than executive actions, but Trump’s orders can at least help avoid the kinds of surges we saw at points during Biden’s term.
However, many of Trump’s orders don’t serve any tangible goal. For instance, his decision to cancel the flights of 1,660 Afghans — including some family members of active-duty U.S. military members — previously cleared to resettle in the U.S. comes off as punitive and cruel. These are not the “invaders” or “criminals” that Trump warns of; they’re the kind of people that America should welcome with open arms.
I think Trump has a powerful opportunity to spur meaningful, lasting, and positive change on immigration — the likes of which we have not seen in decades. He’s identified real problems with our system and possesses the political will to pursue real change. Paired with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, he could genuinely achieve what his predecessors could not and pass major immigration reform during his term. But the sweep of these actions — mobilizing the military, pausing asylum, halting the parole process, trying to end birthright citizenship — will incur far more costs than benefits. The innocent people who are trying to flee danger or persecution in their countries and immigrate to the United States legally out of a sincere motivation to better their lives, who often help our country grow and stimulate our economy, will be caught in the machinery of these changes. All told, these executive actions are a step in the wrong direction.
I have even more trouble grappling with Trump’s January 6 pardons. If you’ve gotten to this point in the take, you’re probably expecting a full-throated denunciation of the pardons, echoing the thoughts of writers on the left (and right) who lambasted them in no uncertain terms. I actually think the discussion is more nuanced than that: I don’t agree with the scale and scope of Trump’s action, but I fundamentally believe that our criminal justice system is prone to excess and abuse in how it treats criminal defendants.
Isaac has written about his view on the criminal justice system in Tangle previously, and I won’t rehash his arguments here except to say that he and I are aligned on two core points: Our system tends to exacerbate criminal behavior more than rehabilitate it, and the United States uses imprisonment as a punishment far more often than is productive or necessary. When it comes to the January 6 defendants, I fully support consequences for those who broke the law, but I also believe the Justice Department acted improperly in how it handled many cases.
The biggest example of this prosecutorial overreach came in a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the DOJ wrongly charged hundreds of rioters under an obstruction of justice statute that elevated the severity of their cases. This case did not fall along ideological lines; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority in the 6-3 decision, while Amy Coney Barrett dissented. At the time the ruling came down, roughly 50 defendants had been convicted and sentenced on that obstruction charge alone, and 27 of them were incarcerated.
Perhaps you’re okay with those people being in prison because, after all, they still took part in a disgraceful act that merited harsh punishment. I understand that view, and I sympathize with it; January 6 was a shameful day, and those who stormed the Capitol should face consequences (and at least one of the people Trump pardoned agrees, turning down the get-out-of-jail free card because she doesn’t think she deserves it). But I also believe that individual consequences should be commensurate with the severity of individual crimes, and in many cases, prison is not the answer. If I’m being consistent in my view that incarceration is a vicious cycle that upends lives and families — and that we should reduce our reliance on it as a punishment — I have to hold that view for people I sympathize with and those I don’t.
That’s all to say, I would support President Trump commuting the sentences of (note: not pardoning) some Jan. 6 defendants who were not charged with violent crimes if he had done so in a targeted manner that communicated his rationale for each case (as he suggested he would do before the election, and as Vice President JD Vance also vocally supported). If you criticized Biden (as we did) for his acts of clemency last month, which forgave some criminals who did lasting harm to their communities, you should also criticize this move by Trump.
The president pardoned the vast majority of the convicted rioters of all wrongdoing in a sweeping manner, with an apparent lack of knowledge of or care for the crimes he was excusing and without expressing any remorse for the pivotal role he played on that day. Of those pardoned, many had been convicted of violently assaulting police or playing leading roles in organizing the attack. Trump’s action signals that political violence will be forgiven if it aligns with a cause the president deems just. That’s an idea we should not tolerate no matter who is in the White House.
Trump has done so much in his first days that a full assessment would require multiple editions. While I’m critical of his immigration orders and pardons, I don’t think his actions have been uniformly bad — or even close to it. I’m particularly intrigued by his initial approach to energy policy and think he could spur positive developments for the country with those orders. But so far, his actions on immigration and clemency have overshadowed all else, and I think they set a negative tone for the start of a term that many Americans — including me — were hopeful for.
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Under the radar.
A new executive order could pause federal funding for “gain-of-function” research, a controversial process of making pathogens more contagious for scientific study. Republicans have long sought to end gain-of-function research, blaming it for the Covid-19 pandemic, while supporters of the research dispute this claim and argue the research provides important assessments on how to combat pathogens. Others argue that, without this research, other nations will outpace the U.S. scientifically. Reports indicate some viruses, like the H5N1 bird-flu pathogen, may be exempt from the funding halt if the order is put into place. The Wall Street Journal has the story.
Numbers.
- 26. The number of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, the most since the Federal Register began keeping track of the statistic in 1937.
- 9. The number of executive orders signed by former President Joe Biden on his first day in office.
- 4. The number of presidential administrations since 1937 who have signed one or more executive orders on their first day in office.
- 47%. The percentage of Americans who said they approved of Trump's presidency on his first day back in office, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week.
- 30%. The percentage of registered voters who support deporting all unauthorized migrants in the United States, according to a January 2025 Fox News poll.
- 59%. The percentage of registered voters who support deporting all unauthorized migrants accused of crimes.
- 41%. The percentage of U.S. adults who support ending birthright citizenship for the children of unauthorized immigrant parents, according to a January 2025 Ipsos/New York Times poll.
- 57%. The percentage of registered voters who said they opposed pardons for people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, according to a January 2025 Wall Street Journal poll.
- -21%. The decrease in the percentage of Republicans who strongly disapprove of the Jan. 6 attack between January 2021 and January 2025, according to a CBS/YouGov poll.
- One year ago today we covered SCOTUS hearing arguments on Chevron Doctrine.
- The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was Trump’s pardon of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.
- Nothing to do with politics: An important new world record: world’s fastest ice marathon run by a woman dressed as a mammal
- Double-click: We went deeper into Trump’s energy emergency declaration in an Instagram reel here.
- Yesterday’s survey: 3,769 readers responded to our survey about former President Biden’s pardons with 71% disapproving or strongly disapproving. “While I generally agree with Biden's actions, and understand WHY he did it, I said right away that it sets a horrible precedent,” one respondent said.
Have a nice day.
Since 2014, Oxford University Press has conducted research to track how children use language in expression, resulting in an “Oxford Children’s Word of the Year.” This year’s research was conducted in a two-phase series surveying more than 6,000 children between the ages of 6 and 14 in the UK. In reverse chronological order, the words for previous years were: climate change, queen, anxiety, coronavirus, Brexit, plastic, Trump, refugee, #hashtag, and minion. This year, 61% of children participating in the final survey chose the word kindness. “With so much going on in the world we should all be kind to each other,” one of the children surveyed explained. Oxford University Press has the results.
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