One of the main assessments after his victory last November was that the new president is much more ready to implement his electoral program than in his first term, that he and his staff would be more organized and more realistic. In the first three days of the Trump 2.0 era the prediction has been confirmed beyond all expectation on the first leg (organization) and the second (realism) remains to be proven.
The political firestorm that has stirred up Washington and other presidential actions is only the beginning. It’s not just the number and content of the executive orders that have awed Trump’s enemies and friends. Equally important is the harsh style in which the new president announced the measures, discounting in advance the reactions and foreshadowing the continuation, causing excitement in fanatical supporters and terror in opponents or ordinary people whose lives depend on them (such as , the “cleansing” in the deep state with dismissals of federal employees and the abolition of inclusion programs in the framework of the official recognition of only two leaves – male and female)
The three trump cards of the Republicans
Even if some of these orders are being fought in the courts (18 states have already challenged an order that would have automatically granted citizenship to children born in the US to immigrants who are not in the country legally), Republicans have three main trump card: they have a majority in both houses of Congress, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a disorganized opposition.
In the first hundred days of his own presidency, Joe Biden had signed more executive orders (64) than his three predecessors in the same period (Trump, Obama, Bush), overturning Trump’s corresponding orders on a number of issues, from health (p .eg mandating coronavirus masks in federal buildings), to immigration (stopping construction funding of the wall on the border with Mexico) to the environment (cancellation of the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline). “I’m not re-legislating, I’m repealing bad policies that are counterproductive for the country,” Biden said at the time.
Need for a new political narrative
Trump’s Democratic opponents will need time to overcome the paralysis brought on by the electoral defeat and to construct a new, compelling political narrative. The year and a half until the next midterm elections to renew Congress will be decisive, but it will take much more than the “batteries” against Trump’s executive orders that are the continuation of Trumpism after a …Biden break.
