New Orleans President Trump promised a slew of executive orders on all manner of issues, piques, and grievances, and he’s been true to his word. The headlines have focused on his attempt to mobilize troops domestically and end birthright citizenship, but it’s a long, dark list. In the name of claiming to de-weaponize the Justice Department, he clearly wants to weaponize the Justice Department for his last four years of exile. He pardoned almost all the 1600 odd folks charged in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, including those that had injured police and others. It goes on and on.
There’s no escaping the reality. It’s going to be a hard four years. We knew once the votes were counted that this was coming. We may have been in denial, but this time, it won’t be pretty. It’ll be more targeted and more competent. There will still be way too much talk, but this time there will also be more action.
Emblematic of all of this hard right turn was an executive order laying off all of the federal employees who have been responsible for affirmative action in the federal workforce. If your scope of work included diversity and equity, the President is saying that you shouldn’t let the swinging door hit you on the way out. This is a layoff, but it’s on its way to a termination. The union will no doubt have a lot to say about this. In fact, various federal agencies will have to parse this with transfers and calculations of competency and desk audits to determine skills for other positions, but DEI, ironically spelling “god” in Latin, is on its way out.
This executive order goes way past the right’s war on “woke.” Trump is voiding an executive order on affirmative action that goes back to President Lyndon Johnson over fifty years ago. Johnson was recognizing the demand for civil rights by African-Americans. Trump is trying to put the death blow to Black Lives Matter. He wants to join Chief Justice John Roberts, whose claim that we are now past discrimination, gutted the Voting Rights Act from that era. Whoever really believes that must not live in America, but I have a bridge over the Mississippi River that I’d like to sell them.
Clearly, Trump is pandering to his hardcore MAGA hater base with all of this mischief and mayhem. Without another election ahead of him, he is obviously more than willing to forfeit any gains he had made among Black and Hispanic voters.
The problem with these pendulum swings and hoping that voters will forget the pain or fall for some new con in four years, is that when it goes to the farthest extremes, support for Trump and his team will fall like a rock. Polls are already indicating that even where Trump has support for some of his policies, he has way less support for the extreme measures he’s trying to enact. The public wants firmer borders, but not mass deportations. The public is not going to like paying for Trump’s tariffs, if it means inflation and higher prices that they can’t stomach.
On this rough ride, Trump is trying to see how much he can get away with. He may find those limits quickly. This is likely to be a Vegas honeymoon, not a long term relationship with the American people.