“The Impossible is what we do best,” so said Donald Trump during his inaugural speech minutes after taking the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States. After dozens of bold promises and unilateral executive actions delivered on the busiest first day in power – and second day, for that matter – that we have ever witnessed, which of these plans are most likely to be fulfilled and which seem close to impossible?
Let’s break Trump’s uniquely bold agenda into three essential categories: the immediate, things that happened right away with the stroke of his pen; the imaginable, those more far-reaching initiatives that we can plausibly expect to be fulfilled eventually; and the incredible, meaning plans seemingly as close to impossible as we might imagine for a variety of reasons without ruling out the possibility they could ultimately reach fulfillment.
Trump and the Immediate
In the realm of the immediate, 78 executive orders issued by Joe Biden – primarily related to immigration and the environment and described by the new president as “disruptive, radical executive actions” – went away in one fell swoop. The 47th president declared a state of emergency at the southern border, reinstating several policies from his first term that were reversed by Biden, most notably his Remain in Mexico policy and his termination of the CBP One app that facilitated entry to the country for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
The president similarly declared a national energy emergency, allowing him to cut through bureaucratic hurdles regarding the environment to, in his words, “drill, baby, drill.” And in his whirlwind of decisions taking immediate effect, Trump also withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Accord, doubling down on decisions he made in his first term. He will expedite top-secret security clearances for members of his administration and terminate such privileges for the 51 former intelligence officials who, in the heat of the 2020 presidential campaign, led the public to believe that the contents of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop were Russian disinformation.
Trump and the Imaginable
Next come actions that are imaginable, primarily executive orders that will either take time and study to implement and/or undoubtedly meet with stiff resistance from Washington’s permanent bureaucracy. He will terminate DEI programs across the entire federal government, recognize only male and female as legitimate gender designations, and remove special protections for transgenders imprisoned by the federal government. He will seek to open up the Alaska Wildlife Reserve for energy exploration and reverse Biden’s last-minute decision to restrict offshore drilling on federal waters, which will take considerably more time and effort to abolish than it took to implement. And he will seek to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, allowing greater executive power to shut down and destroy them.
There are several additional orders by Trump that require further study or investigation, most prominently efforts aimed at the Biden administration “to correct past misconduct by the federal government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the intelligence community.” The president called for probes into unfair trade practices and China’s compliance with a trade deal that he signed in the last year of his previous administration. He ordered a study into the viability of an External Revenue Service to collect tariffs and duties from foreign trade partners. He ordered a thorough review of federal regulations on a wide range of energy sources, including wind, solar, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. And he renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, a designation not likely to be universally embraced domestically or by foreign governments.
And then there is the much-ballyhooed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a non-governmental advisory board headed by Elon Musk, which has generated considerable attention but whose legitimacy has already been challenged. One suspects that DOGE will succeed in shedding light for all to see on monumental government waste, fraud, and abuse, even if its current formation is altered.
Trump and the Incredible
Unsurprisingly, given Trump’s far-reaching plans to achieve a complete makeover of the federal government, some of the orders he unleashed immediately upon re-assuming office fall into the realm of the incredible. Put another way, they are plans only Trump would dare attempt to implement. Arguably, the most ambitious item on his wish list is the dismissal or reclassification of thousands of federal employees. He has placed a freeze on hiring federal workers except in the military. Through Schedule F, civil servants involved in any way with political or policy decisions will no longer have virtually permanent job security but serve only at the pleasure of the president. Once Trump was elected, Biden and his minions were not hesitant to admit they would do all they could to “Trump-proof” the Swamp. We will soon know how effective such resistance will prove to be.
There are also at least two initiatives that may well fail to meet constitutional muster. Trump has delayed the shutdown of TikTok for 75 days, a dubious decision given that it was passed by both houses of Congress due to China’s ability to obtain all manner of private information about the more than 100 million members of the widely popular online platform. The president has vowed to have the federal government share in the purchase of TikTok with a private investor, hoping he can find a partner before the decision is likely reversed by the courts.
He also has vowed to end “birthright citizenship” for the children of illegal aliens. The plain language of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution reveals the difficulty of such an initiative: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump will likely argue first that the amendment, ratified in 1866 following the Civil War, was intended to offer citizenship to the children of slaves, not to the offspring of those in the country illegally. And he will likely assert that the children of illegals are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It will take an entirely new reading of the amendment by the Supreme Court to effect such a monumental change, though the High Court has proven, particularly with the Dobbs decision on abortion, that it is not loath to strike down long-standing precedents.
No doubt, Trump is a man on a mission, empowered by what he and his faithful followers believe was divine intervention on July 13 in Butler, PA. Indeed, in his inaugural speech, he stated his conviction in plain words: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” While much of his agenda amounts simply to common sense, his most far-reaching plans represent nothing less than a bodacious statement that he will exert all of his extraordinary power to restore the standards and practices that long ago made America great in the first place.
