Executive Order

Nothing is more dangerous than success. In America, anyone can survive failure – you get up, dust yourself off and try again. But few politicians, or political parties, survive success because success kills urgency. And without urgency, voters don’t vote. President Donald Trump has been dangerously successful. With a seeming snap of his fingers, he has restored our nation’s borders. He has dismantled elite wokeness – rescuing our God-given pronouns and kicking men out of women’s sports. He has neutered Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons, ended taxpayer-funded pro-Hamas campus activism and quashed Bidenflation. To the astonishment of our foreign policy establishment, he has strengthened Europe’s support of NATO to match our 5-percent-of-GDP goal.

On the one-year anniversary of the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt on his life, President Trump celebrated on stage with Chelsea FC after they won the FIFA Club World Cup in Giants Stadium. No one dancing around the trophy looked happier than Trump, who appeared like an aged striker who’d ducked into the locker room to put on a blue suit and a red tie. "I knew he was going to be here but I didn't know he was going to be on the stand when we lifted the trophy. I was a bit confused,” said Chelsea FC star Cole Palmer. Above all else, Donald Trump celebrates winning, and this was a big win, complete with confetti shower. Plus, you can’t discount the fact that on this day, of all days, Trump was just happy to be alive, the greatest win of all.

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

President Trump announced Tuesday that his administration is planning to unveil a program that lets foreigners acquire a path to citizenship for a one-time $5 million fee. Unlike the existing EB-5 visa program, which grants green cards to wealthy investors for about one-fifth of the cost, Trump’s “gold card” initiative aims to attract greater capital while using the revenue to help reduce national debt. “We’re going to be selling a gold card,” Trump said from the Oval Office during an Executive Order signing on price transparency in the hospital system.  “You have a green card. This is a gold card.

With Donald Trump moving so rapidly on so many fronts, it is hard to grasp the big picture. What are his overriding goals, politically and electorally? What has he already accomplished?  Here is a summary in case you are keeping score. Trump has done more in a few weeks than any president in history. He took office with a coherent, detailed program and control of Congress (though a very narrow majority in the House). He is acting swiftly before his political capital dissipates.  Trump hopes to sustain his winning electoral coalition beyond his time in office. That’s why he chose a young populist, J.D. Vance, as his vice president and presumptive successor.

By the time you read this, the first raft or two of Donald Trump’s executive orders will have been promulgated. No one outside the charmed circle of his close advisors knows what is coming down the pike, but all indications are that the orders will be energetic and far-reaching. Colin Powell would probably have pulled out the phrase “shock and awe.” Most observers believe that there will be robust attention to immigration, the border, energy, regulation, taxes and the conduct of elections. There will probably also be orders touching the fate of some 1,500 people charged in connection with the self-guided tour of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I would not be surprised if there were also orders regarding the conduct of some of the prosecutors involved in those cases.

For 30 years, Donald Trump regularly visited the Paul Molé Barber Shop in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Adrian Wood, the barber who owns the shop, remembers that Trump would instruct barbers precisely where to snip his mane, and would never allow them to expose his bald spot, as revealed by a report in the New York Post: ‘He’s a complete control freak. He dictates exactly how you cut every hair on his head. “Cut here, cut there. That’s enough.” And you just do what he says.

More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures, according to a new poll. Trump opted to sign a series of executive orders this past Saturday rather than wait for Congress to reach an agreement on legislation as a prior relief package was set to expire. Democrats and the White House met repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, but despite making 'progress' both sides said they were still too far away to be even close to making a deal. A new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies and provided exclusively to The Spectator found that 51 percent of voters agreed that it was right for Trump to take executive action under these circumstances, while just 24 percent disagreed.

The Executive Order is political weakness at its most powerful. The spectacle of Donald Trump adding his Sharpie-stroke to the catalogue of puissant signatures confirms the United States’ slow but steady drift from a Romanesque republic to Roman-lite empire. Trump was supposed to be better, or at least different.The wisdom of the day has it that the business of America is business, even when, as in healthcare, that business is thoroughly corporatized. Who better to negotiate through the paralysis of Congress than a commercial deal-maker, a splitter of the difference, a washer of one hand with the other?