A tsunami is a gigantic tidal wave that you know is coming but are powerless to stop or alleviate. The best you can do is gird your loins and run for the hills. That is the position in which Democrats find themselves these days as the Trump executive tsunami consumes everything in its wake. The Dems are huddled together in the disintegrating shelter of the DC Swamp, decrying the inevitable but realizing they will get swept away and that the damage to their way of life will be incalculable. It is something to behold.
The volume of measures imposed by Donald Trump is so numerous that it will likely be incomplete by the time you read this because the president is ordering systemic reforms every day of his nascent second term. But let’s take a breath and attempt to recap the full scope of his first three-and-a-half historic weeks in the Oval Office. In sum, his actions represent arguably the most sweeping reforms since the New Deal or even the post-Civil War Reconstruction.
Catching Our Breath
Where to begin? Well, following the president’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, illegal crossings there have dropped by some 90%. Thousands of illegal aliens, most with criminal records, have been rounded up and deported by Border Czar Tom Homan, with the number reportedly expected to reach 25,000 in Trump’s first month in office. The president also ordered the construction of a facility in Guantanamo Bay, used to imprison terror suspects following 9/11, to hold up to 30,000 illegal immigrants who will not be returned to their native lands. He also greatly expanded the scope of enforcement by signing into law the Laken Riley Act, requiring the Department of Homeland Security to detain illegal aliens arrested for theft and related offenses.
The 47th president has done everything in his power to reverse the cultural trends of the George Floyd/Joe Biden era. He ordered the dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs throughout the federal government and dismissed all DEI-related personnel. He has issued an edict requiring federal agencies to withhold funding to facilities that perform transgender surgeries for those under 19 years old. And he ordered an end to government funding for schools that permit people classified as men at birth to compete in women’s sports.
Emptying the Swamp
Pursuant to his decade-long promise to “Drain the Swamp,” the president offered buyouts to hundreds of thousands of federal bureaucrats, roughly 75,000 of whom have accepted. Many others will be subject to the president’s reinstitution of Schedule F, stripping ironclad protections from untold numbers of federal employees. He has removed several members of the board at Washington’s famed Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which he has attacked for holding “drag shows specifically targeting our youth,” and named himself Chairman. And he has reinstated some 8,000 members of the military who were fired or quit because they refused Biden’s order to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
He ordered the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, who reports that bloated, wasteful, redundant, or fraudulent expenditures uncovered by DOGE in just over two weeks amount to $36 billion. And Musk is just getting started. The president has ordered DOGE to reduce the federal workforce with the requirement that four government workers be let go for every new one that’s hired.
Many of those hidden and wasted dollars come from USAID, which Trump has shut down and consolidated into the State Department, sparking a particularly high level of outrage from his enemies. He has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization as he did during his first term. He has also ceased to fund and withdrawn the US from two United Nations agencies and ordered a review of our participation in two others. He sanctioned the International Criminal Court following its issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He secured the release of almost a dozen hostages or detainees – six from Venezuela, three from Gaza, and one each from Russia and Belarus. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and ordered that Mount Denali, so named by President Obama, be restored to its previous name, Mount McKinley.
The Trump Tariffs
President Trump has imposed a variety of tariffs designed to wipe out trade deficits with allies – Mexico, Canada, Japan, and South Korea – and our most powerful adversary, China. The tariffs are particularly severe (25%) on imported goods from Mexico and Canada and on all steel and aluminum imports. He has also established a federal Sovereign Wealth Fund to gather funding that could be used, among other things, to preserve TikTok’s presence in the US. He is considering a Department of External Revenue in charge of collecting tariffs, though no such official action is yet in place.
The president issued pardons for all but 14 of those arrested in the wake of the January 6 Capitol Riot, with the remainder receiving commutations. And he is following through on a campaign promise to declassify all remaining files pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
In the digital realm, he revoked many of Joe Biden’s orders limiting the development of artificial intelligence (AI), brokered the creation of a consortium of wealthy corporate heads to accelerate domestic development of AI, and loosened regulations for cryptocurrency.
Of course, our list would not be complete without the commander-in-chief’s wildly speculative ventures. He has called publicly for the US to re-take control of the Panama Canal, purchase Greenland, and annex Canada, turning it into the 51st state. Plus, he has just as bodaciously proposed that the US take control of Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Finally, we come to perhaps the most overwhelmingly popular action yet taken by the president, likely supported by almost everyone in the country except environmental extremists: banning those endlessly irritating paper straws. The ban started in federal buildings, with a national strategy to be developed to end their use within 45 days. Viva plastic straws!
Love him or hate him, the 47th president of the United States has arguably accomplished more in less than a month than he was able to in the entirety of his first administration, which was plagued by concocted scandals and impeachment. And just as arguably, he has spoken publicly more than Joe Biden did during his four years in office. The whirlwind of his presidency has 47 months left, so there is no telling what the country will look like when the Trump tsunami finally subsides.
Tim Donner is a radio talk show host, former candidate for the US Senate, and longtime entrepreneur, conservative policy advocate, and broadcast journalist. This article was first published HERE
2 comments:
Incorrect a "tsunami" is not "big tidal wave". A tsunami is its own natural phenomenon. Tides are caused by the gravitational effects of the moon as it orbits earth.
Tsunami is caused by the displacement of a large body of water usually through endogenic forces like an erupting volcano or tectonic activity resulting in massive fault movements or slips.
And they are a destructive force.
Many would also argue that to compare Trump to a destructive force is quite a poor analogy.
He's merely trying to clean up the mess and debris from previous Biden / Harris administration who were the real vandals
I am sure our PM is watching Trump’s performance very closely. With luck, Luxon will imitate absolutely everything he sees.
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