Donald Trump’s return to power and a Republican-controlled Congress are set to mark a new era in US political history, one steeped in rule-breaking, authoritarian tendencies, and an overwhelming hostility to long-established civic institutions.
And, according to the president-elect, a herculean portion of this agenda will kick into gear immediately after he is inaugurated, with over 100 executive orders expected to drop on Day One. That list is likely to include brutal immigration policies, environmental rollbacks, travel bans, and steep cuts to public education.
Of course, like nearly everything with the incoming president, a man preternaturally inclined to bravado and bewildering rhetoric, it’s anyone’s guess which Day One promises actually will get implemented. (Trump’s vice president former Ohio Sen. JD Vance, for instance, has already objected to pardoning every January 6 rioter.) But his pledges alone offer a startling look into MAGA’s ambitions, as well the contours for what is certain to exact profound harm on large swaths of the US population.
Below, our reporters catalog some of the most consequential actions that could take place, if not on Day One then in the weeks ahead.—Inae Oh
Immigration
In keeping with a signature campaign promise, Trump has vowed to kickstart the largest deportation operation in US history on Day One. He has floated the possibility of invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century war-time law last used during World War II, to circumvent due process protections and fast-track the deportation of suspected criminals. As a part of his crackdown on immigration, Trump has also promised to sign a day-one executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Although birthright citizenship is guaranteed in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, Trump said he would instruct federal agencies to stop issuing passports and Social Security numbers to US-born children unless at least one of the parents is an American citizen or legal permanent resident.—Isabela Dias
Tariffs
During his presidential campaign, Trump called tariffs “the most beautiful word in the entire dictionary.” He’s promised to sign an executive order on his first day in office that would impose a 25 percent tariff on goods imported from Canada and Mexico, and a 10 percent tariff on imports from China. This would wreak havoc on the US economy, especially in industries that make up about half of America’s trade across these borders—automobiles, energy, medical equipment, and agriculture. Prices in those sectors could skyrocket as companies are faced with an extra 25 percent in costs each time items cross the border, likely causing layoffs in those industries and upending household finances as items like cars and food grow to untold heights.—Hannah Levintova
Pardons and criminal justice
On Day One, Trump plans to issue “major pardons” to the MAGA rioters who stormed the Capitol four years ago on January 6, people he’s referred to as “unbelievable patriots.” While he lets them off the hook, he wants to crack down on progressive district attorneys whom he’s accused of being too lenient on other criminals. Trump said he’ll ask the Department of Justice to investigate these locally elected liberal prosecutors. Trump has also pledged to quickly reduce crime (already falling under Biden), and though any president’s power to dictate crime trends is dubious, he’s signaled he’ll take a tougher stance by “vigorously” pursuing the death penalty and giving the police more power to use force.—Samantha Michaels
Trans rights
Trump has vowed to wield the presidency as a cudgel against the transgender community, to great applause from his supporters. He has promised to implement an “official policy of the US government that there are only two genders, male and female,” and, on Day One, to order “every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age.” That will mean kicking openly trans people out of military service and attempting to block gender-affirming medical treatments under Medicaid, Medicare, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (roughly 1 in 5 trans adults is on Medicaid). Trump is also widely expected to reinterpret federal civil rights laws in ways that not only allow discrimination against trans people in healthcare and education, but perhaps even require it, using threats to cut off Medicaid and Medicare for hospitals and healthcare providers if they offer gender-affirming care to minors, or to withhold federal funding to schools if they support transgender students.—Madison Pauly
TikTok
Trump is casting about for a way to spare TikTok under a law passed last year that requires the China-based ByteDance to sell US-based TikTok or face a ban. The Supreme Court upheld the law on Friday. Trump, who initially saw TikTok as a national security threat, has decided instead to save the popular platform, which he now sees as politically beneficial to him. He is now reportedly mulling an executive order to put the law on hold—a legally dubious maneuver unlikely to maintain access to the platform. But in the following weeks, he is likely to try to broker a sale or deal to keep TikTok in the US. As a show of support, the CEO of TikTok will have a prominent seat at Trump’s inauguration Monday.—Pema Levy
Environment
We don’t have to do much guesswork to decipher Trump’s plans for the environment. At a rally in Phoenix last month, Trump laid out his “Day One” energy agenda, including ending “all Biden restrictions on energy production,” overturning what he calls the “electric vehicle mandate”—that is, the Biden EPA’s carbon-cutting tailpipe emission standards—reversing Biden’s pause on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export permits, reopening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and declaring a “national energy emergency,” presumably, to boost fossil fuel production. He’s also promised to “immediately” reverse Biden’s historic move to protect 625 million acres of coastal waters from offshore drilling and put a swift end to offshore wind projects, an energy source he’s criticized as being “ugly” and “horrible.”—Jackie Flynn Mogensen
Voting rights
Trump’s lies about voting formed the core of his MAGA agenda and he will seek to institutionalize his anti-voting agenda when he returns to the presidency. On Day One, he’s almost certain to repeal Biden’s executive order expanding voter registration opportunities at federal agencies. But he won’t stop there. His administration will weaponize core government functions, including by likely attempting to re-add a question about citizenship to the 2030 census and potentially trying to privatize the Postal Service. His Department of Justice is set to roll back voting rights enforcement and could launch bogus probes into false claims of voter fraud. Meanwhile, his allies in Congress are fast-tracking a bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote even though they’ve uncovered no significant evidence of non-citizen voting, which could disenfranchise more than 20 million Americans.—Ari Berman
Taxes
Just this week, Trump announced that he will create an “External Revenue Service” to start collecting revenue tariffs on Day One. The Republican Party is famously hostile to the Internal Revenue Service, which brings in $5 to $9, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, for every buck it spends on tax enforcement. Indeed, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) recently reintroduced a bill to abolish the IRS and replace the federal income tax with a regressive flat tax. Trump—who has been implicated (though never, unlike his company, charged and convicted) for tax fraud—is also talking about abolishing the income tax and instead funding the government with across-the-board tariffs on foreign imports. Collecting those tariffs would be the job of the ERS, which would likely fall under Treasury’s purview. The problem is that tariffs cannot possibly raise enough cash to replace the income tax. What’s more, as JP Morgan recently cautioned investors, other nations will likely retaliate, “exacerbating the negative shock to global trade,” and Trump’s tariffs “are likely to lead to higher inflation without corresponding economic growth.” Because low-middle-income Americans spend a far greater share of their earnings than high-income people do on the kinds of goods tariffs will make more expensive, Trump’s plan would replace one of our few progressive taxes with another regressive one. With that, we’re back to the late 1800s, an era of robber barons and labor unrest that historians fondly refer to as the Gilded Age.—Michael Mechanic
Public education
Trump has repeatedly promised to dismantle the Department of Education. That’s unlikely because such a move probably wouldn’t pass the Senate. But he has promised to cut funding to schools that his administration finds are “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content to our beautiful children,” on the first day of his return.—Kiera Butler
Supreme Court
Trump has promised to reinstate the “travel ban” he imposed during his first term, which blocked people from mostly Muslim countries from entering the United States. In September, Trump said he would expand it to include Palestinian refugees, calling the besieged region “infested” with terrorists. “I will ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban,” he said. The Supreme Court greenlit Trump’s travel ban in June 2018, despite evidence that it was targeted at Muslims, so, likely, a second iteration would ultimately go into effect again.—Pema Levy
