CNN — President Donald Trump is acting on his campaign promises at the fastest clip in modern memory — sending almost hourly shockwaves through the government, the legal system, the science community and around the world.
Trump’s three-day sprint through his to-do list contrasts sharply with the disarray and empty fights that marred the start of his underperforming first term.
In his zeal to make good on his pledges, Trump is delivering gift after gift to his most loyal supporters, making progress toward conservative goals developed, in some cases, over many years, in an extraordinary display of populist, nationalist, right-wing ideology.
After his stunning outburst of executive power, the United States is already a different country, and official Washington is a changed town since Trump took the oath of office on Monday.
And his conservative overhaul is almost certainly only getting started since only one member of his Cabinet – Secretary of State Marco Rubio — is so far confirmed, and GOP congressional majorities have yet to fully gear up on his priorities.
In a flurry of activity that is happening almost too swiftly to follow, Trump is giving his critics every reason to think their worst fears for his new presidency will be realized and worse.
On Wednesday, as on each of his days back in the White House so far, Trump rained blow after blow on liberal governance, spelling out just how heavy a price Democrats will pay for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss and Joe Biden’s fateful decision to initially seek another term.
Imposing his will on government, border and bureaucracy on Day 3
— The Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors to investigate and charge state and local officials who refuse to cooperate with his mass deportation program. “Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want. More agents in the communities, more people arrested, collateral arrests,” Trump border czar Tom Homan told Fox News. “Game on.” The new guidance could set up the most intense clashes between federal and state power in decades.
— Thousands more active duty US troops were ordered to the southern border, two days after Trump declared a national emergency to facilitate new deployments.
David Culver meets legal migrants who keep America’s farms running
— The administration put government employees in all federal diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility offices on paid administrative leave, as a first step to dismantling the programs reviled by conservatives and firing the employees.
— Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz sent home about 160 National Security Council aides, pending a staffing review designed to align the critical body that’s dedicated to keeping America safe to the president’s political views, the Associated Press reported.
— The Justice Department, meanwhile, halted agreements that require reforms of police departments where the Justice Department found a pattern of misconduct.
— A day after pardoning, commuting sentences or ending cases against more than 1,500 January 6 rioters and alleged participants in the US Capitol attack, Trump performed another end run around the legal system. He unconditionally pardoned two Washington, DC, police officers over their role in the death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, in a case that drew protests after the murder of George Floyd.
— The administration also directed federal health agencies to pause external communications, such as regular scientific reports, updates to websites and health advisories.
— Amid expectations of big, conservative-orientated changes to the way the government handles civil rights investigations, the acting Associate Attorney General Chad Mizelle ordered DOJ attorneys to pause their cases.
— And after Trump rocked the public health community by pulling out of the World Health Organization, a new memo obtained by CNN Wednesday told public health agencies to have all documents and communications — including regulations, guidance, notices, social media, websites and press releases — approved by a presidential appointee.
— In some of the most extraordinary imagery of the new Trump term so far, Stewart Rhodes, leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, held court in a House office building Wednesday. A Trump commutation sprung him from an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy for a plot to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.
GOP lawmaker welcomes rioters back to Capitol to ‘hear their …
One promise he isn’t making any progress on
But while Trump is freeing far-right extremists, putting billionaire tech oligarchs at the epicenter of government power and delivering again and again for his MAGA base, there is one notable group of Americans, critical to his election victory last year, who have received little attention so far.
Swing-state voters angry over high prices for groceries and housing are still waiting to find out how Trump will live up to his promise to help them. His constant threats to slap tariffs on Canada, Mexico, the European Union and even Russia are raising the prospect of even higher consumer costs.
The president insists that the key to a better standard of living is more energy production to lower the cost of transporting goods. But that’s a medium-term solution at best and ignores the impact of global oil and gas markets. In a symbolic move in his first day in office, Trump signed an executive action to require all government departments and agencies to deliver “emergency price relief” to Americans. But the move came with no concrete steps.
Democrats have been demoralized and directionless since the election, but Trump’s increasingly extreme start to his second term may begin to give the party an opportunity to form a new strategy.
“This is going to be a defining message for the midterms, which is who’s Donald Trump working for?” Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts told Kasie Hunt on “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday. “He brings in people with a net worth of over $1 trillion collectively to sit in front of his Cabinet. He’s clearly working for them, with his meme coins and his TikTok inside dealing. … Is he working for January 6 cop beaters and the tech oligarchy? Or is he working for people who are trying to afford child care?”
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Trump feels no limits
Trump doesn’t seem to feel any constraints as he enters a second term with a pliant Republican majority in both chambers of Congress.
This sense of impunity is being underlined as the White House considers invitations to some of the January 6 convicts that he pardoned, as CNN has reported.
The pardons were more sweeping that many Republicans had hoped and expected. Even Vice President JD Vance had suggested on Fox News before the inauguration that people convicted of violence in the Capitol riot shouldn’t be pardoned.
The magnitude of Trump’s pardons also embarrassed and irked some Republican senators, who are again getting used to reporters asking them to justify some of the most outlandish orders and comments from the Oval Office.
North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said Tuesday that “I just can’t agree” with Trump’s granting of swathes of pardons to the rioters, which he said raised “a legitimate safety issue on Capitol Hill.”
Many Trump supporters believe that January 6 convicts were charged and sentenced too harshly. So the president’s pardons are likely to be hugely popular among his most outspoken supporters — even if polls show that majorities of Americans opposed the idea of pardoning those who smashed their way into the US Capitol.
“People get it, they want to see these people released,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday. “I was very clear about it. Very clear. I said I was going to release them, and probably very quickly. And they voted for me.”
The Constitution gives presidents almost unlimited pardon authority — which Biden used this week to preemptively shield family members from potential Trump DOJ investigations.
But more broadly, Trump’s decision to simply ignore the verdicts of courts and juries creates an extraordinary precedent of a president flouting the legal system.
Judges who sentenced January 6 convicts raised the alarm on Wednesday.
“No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity,” Judge Beryl Howell wrote on Wednesday. She argued that the pardons raise the “dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law.”
The judges’ rebukes are more an attempt to shape the historical record than to slow Trump.
But while Trump reigns unrestrained at home, with Democrats in the minority, opposition is stirring overseas to his trade war and land grab threats.
“I think it’s necessary to have a backbone,” Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told CNN’s Richard Quest at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I mean, we’re not going to behave as a victim.”
Anders Vistisen, a Danish member of the European Parliament, had a more earthy warning for the US president. “Dear President Trump, listen very carefully,” Vistisen said. “Greenland has been part of the Danish kingdom for 800 years. It’s an integrated part of our country.”
“It is not for sale,” Vistisen added. “Let me put it in words you might understand. Mr. Trump: F**k off.”
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