Trump wields the power of the pen

President Donald Trump opened his second administration by issuing 42 executive orders—fewer than the 100-plus that his supporters on Capitol Hill expected. But the orders that received a signature on his first day in office—and those that didn’t—paint a picture of Trump’s plan to test the limits of executive action in relentless pursuit of his domestic policy agenda.

Graham Dodds, professor of political science at Concordia University, has studied the executive orders of past White House administrations. The actions a president takes in the early days in office set the direction for the rest of the administration, he said.

“It’s a way for the new president to set a tone, to say, ‘There’s a new leader in town. We’re going to do things differently,’ and to sort of make dramatic breaks with his predecessor’s policies. So it’s a way of broadcasting the start of the new regime,” Dodds said.

On Monday, Trump signed nine orders on international relations, 13 on domestic policy, and 20 on government administration and efficiency.

Changes such as immediate U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, exit from the World Health Organization, and retreat from refugee commitments as a member of the United Nations highlighted Trump’s intent to redirect government resources to domestic needs. The lack of orders related to foreign conflicts also signaled Trump’s focus at home, said Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It did not surprise me,” Kupchan said when asked about the absence of any orders on Ukraine or Israel. “That’s because Trump’s brand, the America-first brand, is predicated upon this assumption that for many Americans there’s too much world and there’s not enough America. And that’s one of the reasons that Trump in his inaugural address focused almost exclusively on a domestic agenda.”

His most forceful change with respect to the international community also speaks to that focus: The United States will designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

“It would broaden the powers that the United States has to go after the various kinds of financial networks and suppliers to the cartels,” Kupchan said of the designation. “It’s a new tool in the toolkit. It would open up, in some ways, a Pandora’s box of different issues. One would be that a lot of the cartels that operate in Mexico get their guns from American manufacturers. Technically, those American manufacturers might be liable.”

Scott Andrew Fulks, an immigration attorney with Deckert Law Firm, explained that the terrorist designation overlaps with Trump’s other domestic priorities such as immigration.

“[Terrorist designates] are essentially ineligible to apply for most immigration benefits. Therefore, if someone has been known to be a member of these cartels, basically they are precluded from applying for almost all but a few immigration benefits,” Fulks explained. He questioned the legality of some of Trump’s immigration orders, especially an attempt to change the 14th Amendment’s provision of citizenship by birth. The American Civil Liberties Union and several states have already begun legal challenges to the citizenship order.

Trump will need Congress to put much of his agenda into law to protect it from future administrations and executive actions of their own. Dodds, the professor from Concordia, believes Trump’s first slew of executive actions for now help reassure voters who are keeping a close eye on his campaign promises.

He recalled how former President John F. Kennedy failed to deliver on a campaign promise to bar racial discrimination in federally funded housing in his early tenure as president.

“And the people who had said, ‘As a candidate, you said you would. And now that you’re elected, you’re not. What is going on?’ A lot of them wrote in protest to say, Mr. President, you promised that if elected, you would use the stroke of a pen, an executive order, to end racial discrimination in housing. You’ve not done so. Here’s a pen, please use mine. Thousands of people mailed in pens to protest,” Kupchan recalled.

While Trump is expected to sign more executive actions in the coming days, he is also preparing to pass more long-term policy changes through a pair of bills that are beginning to make their way through Congress.