What will Trump do on day one?

During campaigns that last as long as 18 months, presidential candidates frequently promise action on various issues "on day one." When he is inaugurated for his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, President-elect Donald Trump will have to sort through his robust file of campaign trail pledges and decide which merit immediate action and which can wait.

Day one promises are typically executive orders. While the new Congress will be sworn in more than two weeks before Trump, there is unlikely to be a pile of substantive new legislation sitting on his desk in the Oval Office on his first day back. The first bill that President Joe Biden signed into law was on Jan. 21, 2021, and it involved renaming a federal building in Memphis, Tennessee. But he signed nine executive orders into law on Jan. 20, the day of his inauguration, including one that required employees and contractors to wear masks in federal buildings and on federal lands.

What did the commentators say?

Throughout his campaign, Trump made 41 promises for day one action, said The Washington Post, including that he'd declare a national emergency to begin the process of his promised mass deportations, revoke job security from roughly 50,000 federal employees, roll back protections for transgender students in schools and withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords. He also pledged to re-impose the ban on entry into the United States from a number of Muslim-majority countries plus North Korea and Venezuela, revoke birthright citizenship, fire special counsel Jack Smith, rescind Biden administration policies on energy and drilling and pardon Jan. 6 insurrection participants. "Your head will spin when you see what's going to happen," Trump said in October about the scope of action planned on his first day.

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"Some 'day one' commitments are simply not possible," said Bryan Metzger and Brent D. Griffiths at Business Insider, especially his plans to tackle inflation and his pledge to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime work. "But much of his signature promises can be set into motion via executive orders." Trump could "make use of the discretionary powers available to the executive branch for dictatorial purposes," said Federico Finchelstein and Emmanuel Guerisoli at The New Republic, including instructing the Department of Justice to begin targeting the president's enemies. These informal maneuvers would not require public executive action. "But even a strongman may discover that there are limits to what he can do," said Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times. That means that even on day one, Trump will need to weigh both the legal and political consequences of his actions. "A lot but not all of what Trump says he wants to do on day one is going to be illegal or impractical," said Steve Vladeck at The Washington Post, including the plan to abolish birthright citizenship.

What next?

One thing about which there can be no doubt is that opponents of these plans will file a flurry of lawsuits the minute they see Trump's signature on his day one executive orders, as was the case in 2017. "Many of Mr. Trump's orders were quickly challenged in court, held up for months or even years by judges who deemed them unlawful efforts to get around the will of Congress," said Theodore Schleifer at The New York Times. Some of these challenges will come from private actors like advocacy groups or even individuals, while others will be part of a collaboration between blue-state attorneys general.

In his first term, Trump faced 160 multistate legal filings, 94 of which were successful. "Some of the victories were fleeting," said Geoff Mulvihill at The Associated Press, including an injunction against Trump's travel ban that was ultimately lifted by the Supreme Court after the administration modified it. Leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) are already making extensive preparations to fight Trump's agenda in their heavily Democratic states. Newsom called a special session of the state legislature to "Trump-proof" the state of California.