TOI Correspondent from Washington: Day One of the second-term Trump presidency is still 75 days away, but it will be a very busy day (Monday) January 20, considering he has made more than 40 “day one” pledges. Among them: Begin the “largest deportation operation in American history,” expand oil drilling, eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles, and ban transgenders from women’s sports.
Of course, he can’t possibly cram everything in on a half-day that begins after he is sworn as President at noon, not to speak of some of his promises being outside Presidential purview or requiring Congressional approval. But still, some of his actions that will follow in the days and weeks after will kick off a new era in American politics, life, and society.
Some of the most dramatic changes will take place on the immigration front where Trump has not only pledged to immediately begin mass deportation but also “restore the Trump travel ban on entry from terror-plagued countries,” “terminate “every open border policy of the Biden administration,” and sign an order to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens, a bedrock principle of civil rights enshrined in the 14th Amendment.
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At various times during his campaign Trump has also threatened to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was used during World War II to detain more than 100,000 US citizens of Japanese origin, although its original mandate was to detain, relocate, or deport non-citizens from a country considered an enemy of the US during wartime. If the principle is loosely applied as it was during WWII, then American citizens whose country of origin the US is at war with at any given time could be detained and deported.
Further into his term, if he hews to the Project 2025 proposals crafted by officials who served in his first administration (a report he has disavowed), there will be a new “Border Patrol and immigration agency” that would resurrect Trump’s border wall and build camps to detain children and families, using the military to deport millions millions of undocumented immigrants. “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized,” the Project 2025 report says.
Some of the most fundamental changes will come in the area of reproductive rights, the so-called abortion issue, particularly if the authors of Project 2025 are instituted into the administration. The report calls for ways to infuse Christian nationalism into government policy by promoting policies that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families,” ideas echoed by vice-president elect JD Vance.
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Among other steps, the project’s proposals call for banning abortion pills, which are used in more than half of all US abortions and criminalizing those who provide abortion care by using the government instruments to track miscarriages, stillbirths and abortions. It also recommends making it harder to get certain emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance.
Major changes are also in the offing on the broader health front, where Trump has said he will let Robert Kennedy Jr, a vaccine skeptic among other dodgy ideas, “go wild.” Hours after the Trump victory, Kennedy, expected to head the Department of Health, said in interviews that he would recommend removal of fluoride from the drinking water supply, a decades-long practice experts say improved oral health.
Trump has dismissed some of the Project 2025 proposals as out of whack but here are many ideas he has embraced including politicizing the bureaucracy and the military to extract unquestioned loyalty to the President. Having fired at least three generals who served in his administration in civilian capacity and unloaded on a four-star general who called him a fascist, Trump, according to his former Chief of Staff Gen John Kelly, said he preferred the kind of general that Hitler had.
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Trump has also pledged to gut the federal Department of Education and suggested subservience to the President from the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve, a venerated institution that has long been independent of the White House. Then of course there is the tariffs, his weapon for all seasons to make America prosperous and punish countries that resist his vision of a level playing field in trade.
Interpreting a ruling from a conservative Supreme Court he engineered during his first term, Trump has set the stage for an Imperial Presidency, the likes of which the United States has never seen. The “failing” New York Times, his bete-noire, put it rather more mildly in an analysis with the headline “America Hires a Strongman.”
