Wednesday, Feb 12, 2025

Trump 2.0 Presidency’s Fast Start

 

There are many reasons why Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president last November, despite the continuing all-out political assault on his character, and overcoming the unprecedented Democrat weaponization of the American criminal law system intended to prevent Trump’s name from appearing on the November 5th ballot.

One of those reasons was the recollection by many voters of the first Trump administration, despite its occasional internal dysfunctions, as a period that was permeated by a welcome return of normalcy and sanity to America. The economy was revived after years of sluggish recovery, the border was secured, and America was not entangled in any new foreign wars. For the first three years of Trump’s presidency, most things seemed to be going quite well, until the Covid virus arrived from China, and George Floyd had his fatal encounter with a white cop in Minneapolis.

After President Biden and his administration were declared the winners of the very close 2020 election, they betrayed their campaign promises to the voters to re-unite the nation by imposing a thinly disguised form of reverse racism on the nation known as DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and practiced it by selecting a vice president and a Supreme Court justice solely due to their status as “women of color.” Trump has now ended that practice by adopting the no-nonsense strategy of “We win and they lose,” that Ronald Reagan used to defeat the Soviet Union and end the Cold War without firing a shot.

Trump to this day has refused to accept his 2020 electoral defeat by Joe Biden. But instead of wallowing in self-pity and despair, the experience galvanized Trump and made him determined to mount one of the greatest political comebacks in American history.

After winning a decisive electoral victory in November, Trump and his transition team prepared his second administration to hit the ground running with the signing of hundreds of executive orders during Trump’s first week in office targeting all of the major themes of his campaign: ending DEI mandates in the federal government; deporting criminal illegal aliens and restoring order at the Mexican border and reducing inflation by ending the Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels.

The first week of Trump’s second term as president stood in sharp contrast to the start of his first term in 2017. At that time, vengeful Democrats launched a determined resistance that blocked the implementation of many of Trump’s first policy initiatives, and subjected the newly installed president to unrelenting and largely unfair criticism in the mainstream news media.

Today, the Democrats are leaderless and still reeling from their decisive defeat in the November election. They have been overwhelmed by the wide scope and growing political momentum of Trump’s inauguration week blitz, through which he is seeking to exert complete control over virtually all aspects of the federal government.

VOTERS CHOSE TRUMP “COMMON SENSE” OVER DEMOCRAT DEI

Democrats were still struggling to understand why so many voters ignored their depictions of Trump as a threat to American democracy and decided that they were much more comfortable with Trump’s “common sense” positions on the issues of inflation, border security, law and order and the restoration of the American dream, than the niche racial and gender issues and discriminatory policies with which the liberal Democrats were so obsessed.

Also, unlike the Democrats, as well as many “establishment” Republican candidates, voters had learned during Trump’s first term as president that he could be trusted to do his best to keep his promises during the campaign to fight the entrenched Washington establishment on their behalf once he is in office.

Older and much wiser now in the devious ways of Washington, Trump and his administration have begun the process of “draining the swamp” of the unelected administrative state, and eliminating the liberal “woke” ideology which, during the Biden administration, infiltrated every federal government agency and program.

The day after his inauguration, Trump issued a memo to the heads of every federal government agency, ordering them to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. the next day, and place every employee in those offices on paid administrative leave “immediately.” The memo also included a warning to agency officials and employees that any effort to protect these programs by changing their names will not be tolerated, and result in “adverse consequences” for those responsible.

Trump made the thorough cancellation of the Biden administration’s pervasive DEI policies, promoting openly discriminatory racial and gender practices a top priority as soon as he took office again. Over the next 48 hours, Trump issued a series of executive orders to root out DEI not only throughout the vast federal government bureaucracy, but also among federal contractors and the recipients of federal grants. Trump also canceled the executive order signed by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 which was the first to require federal contractors to adopt race-based employment quotas, which became the basis for the next 60 years of federal government-mandated racial hiring regulations.

By the end of the work week, Trump’s newly confirmed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, sent a cable to every U.S. diplomatic post around the world announcing the immediate freezing of nearly all U.S. foreign aid programs for the next 90 days while the administration determines which ones are consistent with Trump’s priorities. As Rubio explained, from now on, “Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”

At the end of the week, Trump completed his initial purge of the federal bureaucracy by firing 17 inspector generals overseeing operations at the Defense Department, State Department, Energy Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Veterans Affairs, and others, presumably to be replaced shortly by those who can be trusted to be loyal to Trump’s governing agenda and priorities, and complete his “revolution of common sense” dedicated to “Make America Great Again.”

TRUMP’S HISTORIC FAST START

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin wrote, “No president in modern history has come to the Oval Office better prepared and more determined to get big things done fast. No sooner had he taken the oath than executive orders, pardons, appointments, speeches, public meetings, and press conferences began piling up.”

Whereas new presidents traditionally promise major accomplishments during their first 100 days in office, Trump was able to start delivering impressive results before the first 100 hours of his second term ended. During his first week as president, Trump had more interviews with the press than Joe Biden typically held in a year. Trump also revoked about 80 of Biden’s executive orders covering everything from the open border with Mexico to Green Energy mandates.

TRUMP IS KEEPING HIS PROMISE TO BRING THE BORDER UNDER CONTROL

While the polls during last year’s presidential campaign consistently showed that inflation and the state of the economy ranked first among the concerns expressed by voters, Trump put his greatest emphasis on criticizing Biden’s open border policies, and his determination to deport dangerous criminal migrants because he saw the immigrant invasion as a serious national security threat rather than just a policy issue.

During an impromptu talk to his supporters shortly after he delivered his inaugural address, Trump recalled, “They [his campaign advisors] all said inflation was the number one issue. I said I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and mental institutions [is the main issue] for the people that I know. And I made it my number one.”

Trump then added: “I talked about inflation too. But you know, how many times can you say an apple has doubled in cost? I’d say it, and I’d hit it hard, but then I [would always] go back to the fact that we don’t want criminals coming into our country.”

That is also why so many of the first executive orders that Trump signed dealt with the broken immigration system. They included his order to end birthright citizenship, which many immigrants see as a powerful incentive and the major benefit for their children from crossing into the country illegally. He made another order that designated the drug cartels and the criminal gangs that profit from the smuggling of immigrants across the border and the large-scale human trafficking of children as terrorist organizations.

But the single action that arguably did the most to stop illegal border crossings was Trump’s order shutting down the free, government-supported smartphone app known as CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) One. It had been enabling up to 43,500 illegal immigrants a month to register from their home countries electronically with U.S. border authorities to enter through official U.S. border crossing points and stay in this country without their claims for asylum ever being properly reviewed or vetted.

Trump also issued a proclamation suspending the ability of immigrants who cross the border at places other than the official ports of entry to apply for asylum.

Another executive order that Trump signed will enable him to finally complete the construction of an effective border wall system along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, including sophisticated surveillance equipment, such as lights, cameras, and fiber-optic cables enabling Border Patrol agents to maintain effective 24/7 surveillance even in the most rugged, remote and difficult to access areas of the border.

IMMIGRANT ROUNDUPS AND DEPORTATIONS HAVE ALREADY BEGUN

Trump’s highly experienced border czar, Tom Homan, began launching roundups of illegal aliens in major cities across the country as soon as Trump took office, followed by deportation flights using U.S. military aircraft to return the illegals to their home countries. As a result, there was an immediate drop in the number of illegals trying to cross into the U.S. at the southern border, because they knew that if caught, they would no longer be allowed to stay in the United States.

As Homan continues to ramp up those arrest and deportation efforts, Trump will ask the Republican-controlled House and Senate to appropriate enough money to double the number of holding beds in border patrol detention centers from the roughly 40,000 beds now available. Trump also issued an order declaring the situation at the border to be a national emergency, which will permit the Defense Department, under the leadership of Trump’s loyal Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, to begin deploying thousands of troops in support of the border patrol’s enforcement mission.

Trump has also begun efforts to reinstate the successful “Remain in Mexico” policy he put in place during his first term, after persuading the reluctant Mexican government to go along. The policy forced illegal immigrants detained at the southern border back into camps inside Mexico, where they would have to wait, often for years, until their asylum claims were heard in an American immigration court, and almost always denied. This is instead of allowing them, as the Biden administration did, to enter the country and then either disappear, or live here indefinitely at American taxpayer expense.

As a result, the chaos at the southern border has already ended. And the huge job of rounding up and deporting the most dangerous of the more than 10 million illegal immigrants that Biden’s open border policies allowed to enter the country, as Trump has promised to do, has just begun.

TRUMP TAKES ADVANTAGE OF JOE BIDEN’S PARDON SPREE

Trump also joined in the widespread expressions of outrage, even by some prominent Democrats at Biden’s unprecedented actions granting an unusually broad pardon to his convicted son, and the last-minute pre-emptive pardons he issued to the other corrupt members of the Biden family who enriched themselves through Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling schemes. But ironically, the mass pardons through which Biden released thousands of convicts from federal prisons made it much easier for Trump to justify carrying out his promise last week to pardon 1500 of his loyal supporters. They had been arrested, criminally prosecuted, and harshly treated by the Biden FBI and Justice Department for taking part, no matter how innocently, in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building in protest against the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s contested 2020 presidential election victory over Donald Trump.

The first week of Trump’s second term as president also included a visit to the Hurricane Helene-devastated area of North Carolina where four months later, homeless local residents were still waiting for the help that FEMA and their insurance companies had promised but not yet delivered. President Trump responded by promising to get rid of FEMA, and giving residents a platform from which to tell their stories and voice their complaints to a national audience.

Trump then went on to inspect the wildfire-ravaged communities of Los Angeles, where he took the side of the displaced residents against Mayor Karen Bass, who coldly insisted that they must wait another week before she would let them visit their burnt-out homes to salvage what they could and start their lives over again. Trump told the incompetent Democrat mayor, “I just think you have to allow the people to go on their site and start the process tonight. A week is actually a long time [to wait], the way I look at it.”

Trump also met briefly at the L.A. airport with one of his most outspoken Democrat critics, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who asked the president for more federal assistance. Trump responded by telling Newsom that California needed to improve its failed water management and forest management policies, which led to those fires, end the state’s illegal immigrant sanctuary protections, and tighten up its voter ID laws, but the president also promised to provide the wildfire victims with a lot of federal help.

TRUMP PUT THE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC COMMUNITY ON NOTICE

Trump also took the opportunity to send a message to the international business, finance, and government leaders gathered at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In a video presentation, Trump invited them to build their new factories in the United States, to take advantage of his plan to reduce domestic corporate tax rates and government regulations. If they don’t do that, Trump warned that they will have to pay the new tariffs that he threatens to impose on imported foreign goods, even from some of America’s closest allies and trading partners.

Trump also demanded, in light of the high cost of helping Ukraine to defend itself from the invasion by Russia, that all NATO members increase their spending on defense to 5% of their GDP, more than double the previous alliance defense spending quota of 2%.

He also complained about the taxes and restrictive regulations imposed by the European Union on the European operations of America’s most profitable corporations, including Google, Apple, and Meta, and made it clear that under his leadership, the United States would follow an “America First” foreign policy and trading strategy, on a nation-by-nation basis.

ENDING BIDEN’S WAR ON DOMESTIC FOSSIL FUELS

Upon taking office two weeks ago, Trump put an immediate end to the Biden administration’s war on America’s fossil fuel industry. By encouraging the domestic production of more oil and natural gas, through a policy of “drill, baby, drill,” and by ending the federal incentives for inefficient renewable energy sources, Trump has promised to bring down the cost of energy for consumers and businesses. That will enable the reduction of high prices for goods and services across the American economy, while generating more income through the sale of more American-produced oil and natural gas to energy-starved countries around the world.

Trump’s first week as president also included some small victories over Democrats in Congress, and a handful of still recalcitrant Republican senators. In the second Trump administration’s first legislative victory, 46 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats crossed party lines to join all the Republicans in voting to pass the Laken Riley Act. Named after the University of Georgia nursing student who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, it would enable such criminals to be deported without being convicted.

FIGHTING TO CONFIRM TRUMP’S CONTROVERSIAL CABINET PICKS

The Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth, Trump’s controversial pick for Defense Secretary, even though Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Mitch McConnell voted against him, forcing Vice President J.D. Vance to cast the winning vote in favor, breaking the 50-50 tie.

Hegseth has promised to restore the Pentagon’s once high standards of military preparedness in contrast to Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who was more interested in meeting the Biden administration’s liberal DEI and climate change standards, even at the expense of the military’s warfighting ability. By doing so, he hopes to raise the low level of morale among U.S. soldiers in uniform, and thereby attract more recruits to join the various military services that have been unable to meet their enlistment targets in recent years, even though they have reduced their minimum recruitment standards.

Hegseth had also criticized Secretary Austin’s decision to discharge over 8,000 troops from the military, between 2001 and 2003, solely for refusing to be immunized with the Covid vaccine. This week, as he had promised during his inaugural address, and on the campaign trail, President Trump signed an executive order that offered to reinstate all of the troops “who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the Covid vaccine mandate, with full back pay.”

Trump and his supporters are now looking forward to the confirmation hearings of the rest of his nominated cabinet and agency heads, despite an apparent effort by Senate Democrats to delay the confirmation process and their subsequent implementation of Trump’s policies for as long as possible.

Two of the most controversial of Trump’s remaining nominees who are likely to draw significant resistance to their Senate confirmations are former Democrat congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was the only Democrat who tried to mount a serious challenge to Joe Biden’s presidential nomination bid before Biden’s campaign collapsed due to his disastrous debate performance against Trump last June. Gabbard, who shares Trump’s healthy skepticism for taking on new American military obligations abroad, has been named by Trump as the next director of the Office of National Intelligence, but like Trump, she has been accused by some Democrats of being too sympathetic towards Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, if he is confirmed, RFK Jr., a controversial environmental and health activist, will be in a position to revolutionize the American health establishment as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Long known for his criticism of the Covid policies advocated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and doubts about the safety of certain vaccines, RFK Jr. warned on X, two weeks before the November election, that, “FDA’s war on public health is about to end. … If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.” RFK Jr. also has warned for years about the danger to the IQ of children from the addition of fluoride to America’s drinking water, a concern which was recently confirmed by an article published by the JAMA Pediatrics journal. Trump picked him to be the next HHS secretary because he believes that RFK Jr. has the knowledge, experience, and determination needed to “Make America Healthy Again.”

COLOMBIA TEST CASE PROVES THAT TARIFF THREATS WORSE

Trump also got an opportunity over the weekend to demonstrate to the skeptics that his strategy of using tariff threats to bend foreign leaders to his will actually works. Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia was quick to backtrack on his initial refusal to accept two U.S. military planeloads of illegal aliens from Colombia who were deported from the U.S. on Trump’s orders.

At first, Petro wrote that the U.S. cannot “treat Colombian migrants as criminals. I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory,” and insisted that, “the United States must [first] establish a protocol for the dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them.”

Trump threatened to retaliate by imposing punitive 25% tariffs on all imports from Colombia, rising to 50% after the first week, as well as withholding U.S. visitor visas from all Colombian government officials. President Petro’s first reaction was to respond in kind by threatening to impose similar tariffs on U.S. exports to Colombia. But shortly after Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson responded with the threat of even more punitive “measures against those [countries] that do not fully cooperate or follow through on requirements to accept their citizens who are illegally in the United States,” the White House announced that President Petro had given in, and agreed to all of Trump’s terms, “including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.”

That was quickly confirmed by a statement issued in Spanish by the government of Colombia which offered U.S. immigration officials the use of President Petro’s own plane “to facilitate the dignified return of the compatriots who were going to arrive in the country coming on deportation flights.”

THE ART OF PROPERLY INTERPRETING TRUMP’S RHETORIC

While Trump continues to dominate the headlines and fulfill his campaign promises, one by one, Democrats and Trump’s enemies in the mainstream media continue to condemn him as a dangerous would-be dictator and a threat to American democracy and world peace. As proof, they cite Trump’s announced intentions to expand the United States through the annexation of Canada as the 51st state, taking back control of the Panama Canal, which President Jimmy Carter turned over to Panama in 1977, and buying the sparsely populated but strategically located island of Greenland from Denmark. But as veteran Washington Examiner reporter and columnist Saleno Zito has reminded us, and Trump’s followers well understand, such bombastic statements should be taken seriously, but not literally, because they are mostly meant as reflections of Trump’s aspiration to “Make America Great Again.”

Instead of having learned the lessons from the verdict of the voters on Trump in the November 5th election, rejecting repeated warnings, first from President Joe Biden, and then from Vice President Kamala Harris, that Trump could not be trusted with a second term as president and that his return to power would result in chaos, his political enemies keep pushing that failed message.

The Economist warns that because Trump is only interested in “amassing and exploiting power,” as president he will abandon the U.S. commitment to “to settled borders and universal values.” The Atlantic warns that under Trump the U.S. must “brace for foreign policy chaos.” The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, after refusing to endorse either Trump or Harris before the November election, are no longer leading the attacks on Trump as eagerly as they did during his first term as president. However, the editorial pages of the New York Times, as well as its news coverage, remain as hostile to Trump as ever.

THE ELITES ARE ANGRY AT TRUMP FOR KEEPING HIS PROMISES

On the other hand, independent investigative journalist and free speech advocate Glenn Greenwald said in a Fox News interview that “the establishment has both hated and feared Trump, because he doesn’t abide by the bipartisan consensus in Washington that has kept this country on that wrong track, according to most voters.

“But if you’re the people who. . . voted for Donald Trump because you knew Washington wasn’t working and you wanted someone to go in. . . with great speed and assertiveness and not be constrained by these artificial rules they create to safeguard the status quo, then I think you’re very happy. It’s really the first time [in decades] I’ve seen an election where a candidate stands up and makes a whole slew of promises about what they’re going to do once they win. . . and start doing exactly what they said they were going to do…

“What [Trump’s critics] are angry and upset about,” Greenwald adds, “is that he’s using [the power of the presidency] for the purposes that he said he would. . . namely to place America first. [He has] stopped worrying so much about [the] elites in European capitals. . . [and] instead [is] starting to think about what’s best for the United States, even if that means breaking [the] rules.”

But Trump’s critics who fear that his presidency will lead to the end of the post-Cold War “rules-based liberal world order” ignore the fact that the period during which the U.S. was the world’s only remaining superpower was marked by its own series of bloody wars: the First Persian Gulf War; the religious-ethnic wars which tore Yugoslavia apart; the 9-11 terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland; the extended wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; the Syrian Civil War; the rise of ISIS and eventually the revival of Russian imperialism. This was the disappointing reality of U.S. foreign policy before Trump.

MISPLACED NOSTALGIA FOR THE POST-COLD WAR PERIOD

The 25-year post-Cold War period was neither as prosperous, nor as peaceful, nor as well-ordered for most Americans as the privileged members of the entrenched liberal-elite foreign policy establishment, who flourished during this period, would now have the rest of us believe.

It was a time during which the American manufacturing economy was being gradually hollowed out. Millions of high-paying middle-class jobs, which had enabled the American working class to prosper, were being sacrificed in the name of promoting global free trade and maximizing multinational corporate profits. After years of growing frustration and slow economic decline, many American voters lost their respect for and trust in their traditional Democrat and Republican elected leaders, because they had been captured by the world of inside-the-Beltway Washington power politics, a.k.a. “the Swamp,” and largely lost sight of the everyday needs and priorities of the grassroots people who voted them into office, election after election.

Trump was able to rise to power, first in the 2016 election, and again this past November, because he recognized the sources of this rising tide of voter discontent. He promised to give voice to their frustrations, address their needs and priorities, and make his rise to power their ultimate revenge on the elected leaders who had abandoned them.

Trump is also promising to quickly deliver another round of deep federal tax cuts in addition to passing legislation making permanent the business tax cuts that he delivered in 2017 that jump-started a surge in the American economy. In recent days Trump has re-committed himself to his campaign promises to end federal taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits, combined with border reforms in one giant legislative package that he intends to pass without the need for any Democrat support under the special congressional budget reconciliation rules.

WHY DEMOCRATS REMAIN POLITICALLY HAMSTRUNG

Congressional Democrats have been quick to raise loud objections to Trump’s legislative plans. But they still find themselves politically hamstrung by their continued identification with the extreme socialist, racist, gender-based, and anti-American positions dictated to them by the liberal elite. The Democrat policy agenda has been effectively hijacked by radical socialists and liberal progressives led by Senator Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and fellow members of her progressive, antisemitic squad.

This phenomenon has prompted longtime Democrat strategist and political demographic expert Ruy Teixeira to conclude in despair in his latest essay, published by his Liberal Patriot digital newsletter, that while “the left isn’t dead yet, it’s getting there.”

The fundamental problem for today’s mainstream Democrats seeking an effective response to the continuing surge in Trump’s popularity, Teixeira writes, is the radical re-definition by the college-educated liberal elite, of what it means to be a Democrat today. Instead of deciding to compete with Trump for the allegiance of the plurality of mainstream American voters who elected him last November, the Democrats still find themselves bound to the liberal elites who would rather go down to defeat once again by Trump and his working-class supporters than surrender their allegiance to three losing issues:

  1. The open border policies that resulted in a massive wave of illegal immigration;
  2. The identity politics that has separated the traditional Democrat voter base into warring racial, ethnic, gender, and other special interest groups who are actively competing with one another for a larger piece of the shrinking American leftist political power pie;
  3. The dogmatic and increasingly unpopular politics of the doom-saying leftist climate change, anti-fossil fuel ideology, which threatens to cripple and ultimately bankrupt the American economy.

As long as the liberal elites dictating Democrat policies are willing to go down to defeat fighting for these positions, which have been clearly rejected by a fast-growing segment of the working-class voters who used to make up the core of the Democrat voter base, Donald Trump’s popularity is likely to continue growing. Meanwhile, according to Teixeira, “the left is likely to [continue being] decisively defeated as they expend vast amounts of money and effort defending the indefensible and kneecapping the ability of the [Democrats] to come up with an alternative that can actually compete with Trump and his party.

“Such is the nature of today’s left — divorced from the working class but intimately connected to the leftist strongholds of the professional class. The latter connection,” Teixeira concludes, “has kept them blissfully unaware of how far outside of the public opinion mainstream their current commitments are.”

Trump’s stunning return to power and still rising level of support from the voters, just four years after most political observers believed that the outcome of the 2020 election, followed by the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, had ended his political career, has plunged confused and despairing Democrats deep into the political wilderness, with no easy way out in sight.

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