Donald Trump jumped back into action Jan. 20 with a flurry of lies, executive orders and presidential pardons designed to show he was back, and badder than ever. He also violated his “solemn” oath to uphold the Constitution on the first day, when he announced that he would ignore the 14th Amendment provision of birthright citizenship when it interferes with his deportation of migrants’ children born in the United States.
Daniel Dale of CNN noted that Trump made only a smattering of false claims in his inaugural address, but later “he embarked on a lying spree” and finished the day with more than 20 lies.
In a second speech to supporters in the US Capitol Visitor Center, Trump made false claims about elections, immigration and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, among other subjects, Dale noted. Trump then made additional false claims in a freewheeling third speech at Washington’s Capital One Arena and again to reporters as he signed executive orders in the Oval Office.
President Trump’s barrage of 28 executive orders in the first three days may seem familiar to anyone who paged through the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Avery Lotz noted at Axios. During the campaign, Trump distanced himself from the right-wing blueprint to expand executive power and reshape American life, but his new administration already seems to have taken whole sections from it.
Several of Trump’s Cabinet and agency picks, including Brendan Carr and Russ Vought, wrote parts of Project 2025 or contributed to the text. Tom Homan, John Ratcliffe and Pete Hoekstra are listed among the dozens of Project 2025 contributors who aided in “development and writing.”
A review of Trump’s early executive orders shows clear parallels with Project 2025 on key proposals, such as dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; loosening environmental regulations; and ending certain international agreements.
Among the executive orders was one to rescind a 1965 order by President Lyndon Johnson that barred federal contractors from employment discrimination and required them to take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity “based on race, color, religion, and national origin.”
Continuing the Big Lie Party’s obsession with transgender issues, Trump signed an executive order declaring there are “two sexes, male and female” and that “sex” is not a synonym for gender identity — echoing a section of the Heritage Foundation’s plan. He also rescinded Biden-era protections allowing transgender Americans to serve in the military, a throwback to his first term that Project 2025 also called for.
To fulfill his promise to “Drill, Baby, Drill,” Trump signed an order promoting the use of “Alaska’s vast lands and resources” for oil production on his first day in office. He also eliminated what he called Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate,” which actually amounted to incentives to buy electric vehicles, and rescinded a Biden executive order promoting wind energy development, as Trump halted wind turbine leases in federal land and waters and ordered review of existing leases.
Trump declared a national emergency to send active-duty US military as well as National Guardsman to the Southern border to assist in arrests along the border. He also suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions program for Afghan refugees who worked for the US.
Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., dared to speak truth to power in a 15-minute sermon at the Washington National Cathedral the morning after the inauguration. With Trump and his family sitting in the front row, she issued a plea directly for him to “Have mercy” on “the people in our country who are scared now,” and she specifically held up the fears felt by many LGTBQ+ people and immigrants at the start of Trump’s second term.
Budde, in her sermon, did not criticize any specific policy promoted by Trump. Rather, she invoked familiar Christian themes of compassion, respect for human dignity, and welcoming the stranger, David Paulsen noted in The Christian Century.
“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here,” Budde said. “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”
Later, Trump told reporters he “didn’t think it was a good service.” Then, in an early morning social media post, he demanded Budde and “her church” apologize. Without using Budde’s name, the president labeled her “a so-called bishop” and a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” whose sermon was “ungracious” and “nasty in tone.”
Imagine that. How could an Episcopal bishop, in her study of the Gospels, get the idea that it is appropriate to ask a leader to “show mercy”?
Trump’s response shows he has neither mercy, nor compassion. If anything, he sees those traits as a sign of weakness.
As Bishop Budde spoke, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan already was deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers nationwide to conduct raids seeking to locate and arrest undocumented immigrants. In one such raid, at a seafood shop in Newark, N.J., ICE agents arrested at least one U.S. citizen, a Puerto Rican native who did not have a driver’s license but produced a US military veteran’s ID, which ICE agents rejected, as he and two other Latino employees were arrested. The store owner noted that White employees were not required to produce IDs.
Immigration raids across the country included multiple federal agencies and resulted in arrests of more than 3,500 people in the week after Trump’s inauguration, according to ICE.
During the Biden administration, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations conducted 113,431 administrative arrests in the fiscal year that ended October 2024, the agency reported. That’s about 310 arrests a day, CNN noted.
Homan has said ICE would focus on rounding up criminal migrants and not conduct mass workplace raids. But that was before Trump told ICE officials to increase numbers of arrests. Immigrant communities clearly expect mass raids, which are likely to catch “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, as well as native Latino Americans, in the dragnet.
“We are already seeing people are not showing up for work. They’re not sending their children to school,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told Texas Public Radio.
The California Farm Bureau said fears of raids in the Central Valley led to migrant farmworkers not showing up for work, which virtually halted the area’s citrus harvest. Immigrants also are a large portion of workers at meat-packing plants around the country. Their departures could lead to much higher food prices to come.
In Trump 2.0 there is no mercy for consumers, either. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2025
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