Welcome to 538’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
tia.yang (Tia Yang, senior editor): President Donald Trump’s second term began on Monday, and he’s already taken a record number of executive actions. A lot has happened this week, so today we thought we’d debrief and discuss what mattered most (or least), what it tells us about how Trump is approaching his second presidency and what we might expect moving forward.
So, what stood out to you all the most this week?
meredithconroy (Meredith Conroy, political scientist at California State University, San Bernardino and 538 contributor): Right out of the gate, the Trump administration is testing the degree to which the other branches are willing to exercise their constitutional obligation to check executive power and authority with the flurry of executive orders he issued.
As we noted earlier this week, in terms of sheer number of executive orders, it’s more than any modern president has issued on their first day, and in one of those orders he rescinded 78 that were signed by former President Joe Biden. Executive orders can run the gamut from what are effectively toothless press releases to major policies that are quickly actionable, and it looks like there is a mix of that among Trump’s. Notably, a few are obviously unconstitutional or conflict with existing statutes (e.g. the law banning TikTok), so the extent to which the newly GOP-controlled Congress or this Supreme Court, which has been friendly to Trump on a number of issues, are open to ceding their power is being immediately tested.
tia.yang: Right, already just yesterday a court halted one of those actions — the one ending birthright citizenship, a right that’s been guaranteed by the Constitution for over a century. That means that, at least for now, the order won’t have immediate effects and could be DOA. But what happens next could tell us something important about Trump’s continuing relationship with the courts. In his first term, he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, as well as a significant share of those serving on lower courts (some of whom could be vying for a future Supreme Court nomination from him).
meredithconroy: On birthright citizenship and how that challenges interbranch power dynamics, Adam Serwer at The Atlantic put it this way: “Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship is an early test of the federal judiciary, and of the extent to which Republican-appointed judges and justices are willing to amend the Constitution from the bench just to give Trump what he wants.”
Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): Yes, I expect there to be so many legal challenges to nearly everything. But I think part of that is the point. Some legal ground will seem, or actually will be, unsettled because he is challenging centuries– and decades-old laws. It’ll open businesses and governments up to lawsuits potentially no matter what they do.
The other thing I would say is that he has threatened to investigate local government officials and prosecutors who don’t enact his policy desires, so it’s setting up battles up and down the government.
gelliottmorris (G. Elliott Morris, editorial director of data analytics): Jamelle Bouie over at The New York Times also has a good point about this. His most recent column talks about an influential right-wing commentator, codenamed Mencius Moldbug, who has argued for a dictator-president (he calls his ideal form of government a monarchy via CEO-king) and is very popular with the types of Silicon Valley conservatives who are increasingly gaining power in Trump’s circles. To them, and to Trump, testing the limits of power is the whole point.
To Tia’s initial question, aside from the sheer breadth of Trump’s interpretation of executive powers (which Meredith rightly points out will not result in immediate policy outputs for many of the executive orders he has signed), what stood out to me was how little Trump has focused on or even mentioned the one issue of his 2024 campaign that arguably did the most to get him elected: the economy.
You can see this if you look through that long list of Trump’s first-week executive orders. The only ones that even mention the economy substantively* are primarily focused on energy: his declaration of a national energy emergency, which says high energy prices have “devastated” low-income Americans, and his broader order on domestic energy production, which aims to bolster oil and gas drilling. But economists say this will have little impact on prices of everyday goods and services.
(By the way, gasoline as a share of average income is approaching a decade-long low.)
Beyond this, Trump has dedicated almost all of his initial efforts to immigration. He suspended refugee resettlement and stopped flights of immigrants already cleared to land in America, canceled appointments for asylum and, of course, there’s his attempt to upend birthright citizenship.
I feel like this is the key theme worth watching moving forward. Trump won in 2024 in large part because people were upset about prices. Where do they go from here, especially if he pursues aggressive tariffs which many economists (and the Congressional Budget Office) believe will be inflationary?
Monica Potts: To Elliott’s point about the economy: An AP-NORC poll from a few days ago showed that many voters are skeptical that Trump will be able to fulfill his promises on lowering prices, so they seem to acknowledge that that is really beyond a president’s power. But you’re right, many voters chose Trump because they remained upset about high prices and the affordability crisis across the board. What they likely want to see is more money in their pockets and more economic security, and I don’t think many of Trump’s actions so far were directly designed to do that.
That being said, a point I will hit on constantly is that presidents don’t have a huge effect on the economy one way or another, at least not directly or quickly. Inflation had already returned to almost normal by the time Biden left office, and Americans will also just become used to some things costing more. I don’t think they’ll directly hold Trump accountable whatever happens, unless the economy is a mess in four years’ time and they’re deciding whether to keep Republicans in power or to change course.
gelliottmorris: To that point, Monica, I’d note just how confusing it is to credit any given leader or policy with overall economic growth: My modal expectation for Trump is that he will get some credit for the economic growth that happened in the last few years of Biden’s presidency. As inflation in the 2021-2023 period fades from peoples’ minds, Trump will get credit for prices coming down and economic activity restarting post-pandemic. Look at the boom in building development in Austin, Texas, for example. Rents there have gone down by more than 10 percent over the last year. Biden obviously didn’t get credit for that. Trump could.
tia.yang: As you point out, Elliott, immigration seems to be where Trump has directed most of his focus — I want to get at why that is. Of the issues he’s tackled so far, immigration seems to easily be the issue area where the public is most on his side. Do you think Trump has focused so heavily on immigration to score some easy points? And has he scored some easy points? After all, immigration consistently ranked as the other big issue that Trump and Republicans won on this fall, and is an area that presidents can have more immediate and direct impacts on than the economy.
Monica Potts: I do think that a lot of the moves will score points with voters who feel that he is doing something on immigration. Polls showed that many voters did want Trump to get what they believe to be a border crisis under control.
But when asked about or pressed on some of the consequences of a tough border policy, like the potential to lose foreign workers, which will have economic effects, or splitting families apart, voters were less keen on some of those ideas. And it’s hard to forget how Trump’s border policies were a lightning rod for opposition during his first term, spawning massive protests and backlash. So he might get early points from some voters on that, but we’ll have to see if and how these actions are enforced to truly understand how voters feel. I suspect many of these actions will prove unpopular in the long run.
gelliottmorris: Tia, I think you’re right about why Trump’s administration is focusing executive action where they are. At the start of a term, a president wants to score big wins where he can and as fast as possible. Think about Biden’s early executive orders and the policies he pushed to pass in Congress, including an extra pandemic stimulus package that was popular (and arguably inflationary).
But rhetoric is another matter entirely. Talk is cheap, and Trump could have gone big on all the things he will do to fix the economy. Instead, he went big on immigration, tariffs and good-old-fashioned American hegemony in his inaugural address and speeches later that day. When it comes to the economy, he promised a “golden age” for America … but that was pretty much it.
Of course, maybe that’s the point. Inflation is firmly in the Federal Reserve’s target range now. The job market is appropriately tight (putting less pressure on wages to rise, which increases prices). Overall labor force participation is high, and unemployment is at or near historic lows every month we get new data. The economy, broadly speaking, is on a tear and has been for about a year. It’s likely that Trump’s team knows they extracted proper political power out of Americans’ dissatisfaction with high inflation during last year’s election, and now as a president inheriting a good economy, they shouldn’t rock the boat.
meredithconroy: The immigration issue checks a lot of boxes for the Trump administration. MAGA Republicanism has a narrow vision of what it means to be an American, and it goes part and parcel with their efforts to “restore” the United States as a country that is dominant, powerful and defined by a singular, exclusionary identity that many of his more vocal supporters endorse. For example, “replacement theory” — a conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being brought into the U.S. to replace white voters and support Democrats — was regularly discussed on Fox News, so it was approaching a mainstream conservative view by the election.
Monica Potts: Yes, Meredith, I agree with that. It’s very important to MAGA Republicans and so this is where their focus will be.
tia.yang: I’d also emphasize, though, that these immigration moves aren’t just something that will appeal to Trump’s base — the public has come around to Trump’s anti-immigration policies in a big way since his first presidency. That’s especially true of his party as a whole.
For one, I thought it was pretty striking that the Senate passed a GOP-backed bill to require the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with crimes, on the very day of Trump’s inauguration. That bill is similar to some provisions of an executive order Trump signed later that day, and is named after Laken Riley, whose murder became a major rallying point for GOP anger over immigration throughout the 2024 election. It had already picked up some support from Democrats last year and has now passed both chambers with modest bipartisan support. It’s presumably going to be the first bill Trump signs into law in his second term.
The new GOP majority scheduling that vote on Trump’s first day was a powerful sign of unity behind the new president from the upper chamber, which has generally been less “Trumpy” than the House. I got a push alert about the Senate vote literally as I was watching the inaugural parade. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean new Majority Leader John Thune, who is more of an establishment than MAGA figure, will line up behind Trump on every issue, but the message on day one was unity behind the MAGA agenda.
meredithconroy: Yeah, that’s a good point, Tia. The Trump administration was successful at elevating episodic crimes committed by undocumented immigrants or migrants during his first term, too, to garner public support for stricter immigration policies. The rapid spread of baseless claims that migrants in Ohio were eating pets, amplified by Trump during the September presidential debate, is a more recent example.
Monica Potts: Right, he’s been on the national stage for a decade now, and being anti-immigration was arguably how he started his presidential career. So he has probably brought some voters over to his side on this and remade the political landscape to some extent.
gelliottmorris: At the same time, it’s hard to know exactly what public opinion is (and what it has been previously) on some of these executive orders. That’s because they are in some cases especially narrow policy proposals, with the meaning of the order turning on specific wording that doesn’t always make it into polls. An AP-NORC poll conducted earlier this month found supermajority support for deporting immigrants “who have been convicted of a violent crime” — with higher support for immigrants who are here illegally (83 percent) versus those that are here legally (69 percent). But punishing criminals, I reckon, is probably pretty popular despite immigration status: I bet you’d also get a large percentage of Americans saying we should deport citizens who have been convicted of violent crimes.
There are a couple wrinkles here, though: First, the executive order Trump signed, and his subsequent plans for mass deportation, calls for detaining and then deporting immigrants who are arrested for, not convicted of, crimes. That is, a jury of your peers does not need to say you are guilty of a crime for the federal government to deport you, according to the new EO. That is different from the language used in the poll specifying convicted criminals and has already raised legal challenges over due process, so support for Trump’s more expansive policy may be lower. (At the same time, that immigration law that just passed Congress gives state and federal immigration officials the power to deport immigrants accused of crimes, so maybe Trump will have political cover here.)
And secondly, I could not find any poll that asks about deporting criminal undocumented immigrants from before 2024. So, we have no idea how popular this was before Trump campaigned on it last year/signed an executive order on it this year. It’s possible — perhaps even likely — that this was always popular with voters, despite higher resistance to mass deportations in the recent past.
tia.yang: Beyond immigration, Trump also took a load of actions that were, safe to say, not bipartisan. Many of them had to do with his plans to consolidate executive power, including by firing political opponents and installing loyalists throughout the government — seeming to make good on his campaign promises to enact “retribution” on his political enemies.
Our colleague Nathaniel Rakich wrote on Monday about how Trump’s planned actions could weaken democracy, or already have. Have we already seen him take some of those steps this week? Are they likely to succeed?
Monica Potts: Oh absolutely. The pardons for Jan. 6 defendants are probably the top example of that. These are folks who were motivated by Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election to try to overturn the results of a democratic election on Trump’s behalf, who were fairly tried in our criminal justice system, and who Trump has now pardoned. That is a blatant disregard for the rule of law, even though pardons are within the purview of the president and something he is technically allowed to do. That weakens democracy and absolves the political violence that occurred four years ago.
Speaking of pardons, Republicans have criticized some of Biden’s preemptive pardons issued before just leaving office, which included officials involved in COVID-19 policies like Dr. Anthony Fauci, officials involved in the Jan. 6 investigation like former Rep. Liz Cheney, and members of his own family. But Biden made these unprecedented pardons in direct response to Trump’s promises to investigate and prosecute political enemies, so they are really part and parcel with how Trump had already eroded Democratic norms, by normalizing the targeting of government officials and public figures for political reasons. (Trump, of course, claims the Jan. 6 prosecutions and related legal cases against him were politically motivated, though experts disagree.)
gelliottmorris: Yeah, pardoning people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and committed violent crimes along the way is decidedly not popular.
So, there’s the bigger point about democratic backsliding here, but also that it represents a counter-majoritarian action by the president. This was the expected balance of Trump’s actions when he was elected in 2016 by winning the Electoral College and losing the popular vote, but perhaps more surprising when he won both in 2024 and could, in theory, keep popular support by doing things that the majority of people who voted for him actually want, as opposed to taking actions that appeal primarily to his base.
I’m not sure if y’all saw this in his press conference on Wednesday, but it actually looks like Trump may have been unaware that we has pardoning violent offenders when he issued those pardons — which speaks to a couple dynamics in the White House, including about the breadth of actors exerting influence on him.
Or maybe it was a calculated move, and he was just lying in that press conference.
meredithconroy: I did see that, Elliott! I am not sure what to make of it. The political fallout for the administration will probably be minimal. But some of these violent offenders are people who have said they want retribution against their political enemies and may turn to political violence — so it could be a consequential mistake, if it was one.
tia.yang: Elliott, I was thinking about that counter-majoritarian streak as well when you mentioned earlier what Trump notably did not address in his inauguration day speeches. In addition to big swings on the economy, we’re used to hearing certain unifying rhetoric from new presidents: appeals to the opposite side, messages of hope for the country, aspirational plans.
What we heard instead was exactly the opposite — something that sounded a lot like Trump’s campaign speeches — directly attacking his predecessor and his other political opponents and leaning into issues that appeal most to his base.
Monica Potts: Recent polls have shown that few voters thought Trump did a good job trying to unify the country or reach out to Harris supporters after the election, even though many say it’s important he do so. And only a third expected him to “heal political divisions” in his second term. So he’s living up to expectations on that score.
tia.yang: Another note on Trump’s enemies: The inauguration being held inside the Capitol (due to cold weather) really drove home the message, visually, “I belong here” and “I’m the head of the government.” This feels sort of superficial, but images like this do matter and can significantly influence how people perceive and remember events (see: that old chestnut about Richard Nixon losing the debate because he looked sickly on TV).
One enduring image of the inauguration this year will be Trump lambasting Biden and Democrats, with many of those Democrats packed into the Capitol and even sitting in frame for his entire speech. It was a huge contrast from four years ago, when he lost the election and his supporters stormed the same building — some violently, as we’ve discussed — threatening some of those same lawmakers sitting feet away from Trump this time around.
gelliottmorris: Tia: The message conveyed here was not only “I’m the head of government” and “I belong here,” but also “and the people in this room are who I choose to give power to.” Mega-billionaire tech executives and ultra-right-wing donors are not who put Trump in the White House, swing voters are. I’m not convinced (and polls back this up) that the elevation of these powerful elites is what they really wanted. Speaking literally, people voted for Trump, not for the people he has surrounded himself with.
meredithconroy: Yes, I am glad you brought up the billionaires in the front row at the inauguration. Couple this with the Trump meme coin and you don’t really have the symbolism of a man of the people.
Monica Potts: Right? People are really unhappy with CEOs, corporate greed, etc. And here were the richest people in the world lined up with Trump. I wonder how many of his voters, or swing voters, will square that with Trump’s populist, anti-status-quo rhetoric.
tia.yang: Yeah, Monica and I were just looking at some polling yesterday (which we will be covering soon!) about how one big thing driving Trump voters across the spectrum is that they’re angry. They’re angry at what they see as the government “establishment” — but they’re also angry at big corporations. Trump replacing the traditional political establishment with tech and industry elites isn’t what most mean when they say “drain the swamp.”
gelliottmorris: I’ll just note that a YouGov/The Economist poll released Wednesday has Mark Zuckerberg’s personal favorability rating underwater by 30 points, and net-negative among Republicans as well as Democrats. I think those pictures of Trump surrounded by people worth over $1.5 trillion probably won’t play well if grocery prices go up 20 percent again (eggs, anyone?).
Monica Potts: This has always been part of the paradoxical thing about his appeal, though, right? A New York businessman born with a silver spoon in his mouth and head of the party that has always represented wealthy business interests has somehow managed to pitch himself as a champion of “the forgotten man.” It’s … something.
meredithconroy: That’s true — Trump positioning himself as a channel for that populist anger is probably why he gets away with surrounding himself with wealthy people at the inauguration, and growing his business’ wealth as president.
gelliottmorris: I’m reminded that most Americans think political leaders do not represent their interests. That is true for Trump, too. So while he benefited from anger and resentment in 2024, that doesn’t mean he will in the future. For example, to me it is indisputable that Trump benefited from economic conditions being bad after COVID-19 and a broader anti-incumbent wave that has swept the globe since 2021. But in two years, if people still feel the system is “rigged” and what-not, who do they point to? Probably the guy in charge.
Putting this a different way: People did vote for change in 2024. But a negative signal against the incumbent party, against a status quo that has left people behind, etc. is not an affirmative signal for everything the opposition is offering. (The Labour government in Britain is figuring this out the hard way right now.) If Trump’s team misunderstands his victory as an affirmative vote for unpopular policies and decisions that he has wrapped up in his more appealing anti-elitist, populist veneer, then, well, his second term will probably take a similar trajectory to his first.
Footnotes
*Trump did sign a symbolic memorandum ordering heads of executive agencies to decrease prices for food and healthcare, but it included no specifics and the government does not have the power to lower prices. Trump also signed an executive order eliminating a Biden-era program that was studying implementing out-of-pocket maximums for generic pharmaceutical drugs.
This post was originally published on here
