Trump’s first month was full of easy wins. Can he keep up the controlled chaos?
WASHINGTON – It’s like clockwork: Most weekday afternoons, whether he’s due to speak to the press or not, President Donald Trump summons reporters. The Trump Hour is about to begin.
Since returning to office Jan. 20, Trump has used lengthy televised gab sessions − packaged as executive order signings − to make himself ubiquitous to Americans, shooting from the hip on question after question and dominating the news.(Raz Vape flavors)
The flood of orders, and the verbal provocations that accompany them, are part of an early strategy to overwhelm the system with aggressive policy changes and command the national conversation through brute administrative force, Trump allies and insiders say.
“They’re talking a lot about what they’re doing. And talking about it again, and again, and again,” said Bradley Rateike, a former Trump White House aide. “They see that as a real tool to remind the American people of why they put them there.”
Trump has sought to fire thousands of federal workers, dismantle independent agencies, end birthright citizenship and impose tariffs on countries that have a trade deficit with the U.S. or have aggrieved him in some other way.
The result has been one of the most head-spinning, boundary-pushing and politically polarizing opening stretches of a presidency in modern history. And a second wave of action is expected soon.
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Trump has quickly laid the groundwork for a consolidation of power through mass firings and the use of executive orders that dictate his funding priorities to Congress. And he’s just getting started.(Raz LTX 25K)
“There are more executive orders that have been researched,” said Ken Blackwell, a close White House ally at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. “I think you’ll be surprised that that pace might not slow down to a screeching halt, or a snail’s pace, because there are stacks of more executive orders that have been thought out.”
Ready for power
It’s an approach that has been refined from Trump’s first term, when he arrived in Washington as a political novice.
Eight years ago, Trump filled out his team with Bush-era appointees and Republican staffers, not all of whom were hard-core MAGA. Leaks abounded as rival aides tried to undercut one another.
Trump took some big swings, putting controversial travel restrictions on Muslim-majority countries that had to be rewritten after they were blocked in court. And it took his team until the end of his first year in office to get its first major legislative win: the 2017 tax cuts.
Some improvisation
“They have a clear, general sense of where they’re going,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said. “They are intuitively moving forward and then modifying things as they figure out what works and what doesn’t.”
The change in approach has played out most vividly through the aggressive push by the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, to cut the size of federal agencies and shutter some of them.
