What Should We Expect From Donald Trump's 'Day One'?

Trump talked a big game with his Day One promises—it's time to deliver.

The U.S. flag is flown at half staff in honor of the late President Jimmy Carter on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) will be sworn in on January 20. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

As we approach Donald Trump’s second inauguration, it’s worth noting that Monday, January 20th is not just the date of his swearing-in. It is also his much vaunted “Day One,” the day on which he has promised to accomplish all manner of presidential feats.

For example, recall that Trump famously told Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator only “on Day One” in order to “close the border” and “drill drill drill.” To that end, Trump’s team is preparing more than 100 executive orders for his Day One agenda, according to The AP.

In addition, Trump told Time magazine that he would start pardoning January 6 rioters “in the first hour that I get into office.”

And just this week, he pledged to launch an “External Revenue Service” on Day One, “to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources.”

Of course, in what could prove to be a source of schadenfreude for Trump detractors, Monday will also mark the day his fantastical promises run headlong into the reality of what’s possible.

The president does have broad pardon powers as well as the power of the executive order pen, but it’s no accident that Team Trump has already been actively working to lower expectations and walk back certain Day One promises.

So, what will Day One likely actually look like on Monday? And how are his campaign promises likely to clash with political and logistical realities?

Pardoning The January 6 Rioters

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump referred to the criminals who stormed the Capitol and who were charged and sent to jail for their crimes as “January 6 hostages” and “patriots.” And he has pledged to pardon them as one of the first acts he does as president.

This is an interesting flex for the so-called “law and order” candidate: to absolve those who attacked and wounded law enforcement officials tasked with protecting Congress.

In May, Trump promised:

“...to pardon the peaceful January 6 protesters, or as I often call them, the hostages … a group of people treated so harshly or unfairly”

That promise has predictably evolved over time. Trump sent some bizarrely mixed messages as he began to acknowledge that not everyone who has been charged with crimes related to January 6, 2021 would receive the pardons he has been promising.

Here’s some of Trump’s patented word salad, per The Guardian:

…in December, Time magazine asked Trump if he had “decided yet whether you’re going to pardon all of the January 6 defendants”.

Trump said: “Yes.”

Oh really?

“I’m going to do case-by-case,” Trump said, “and if they were non-violent, I think they’ve been greatly punished.”

“The answer is I will be doing that, yeah, I’m going to look if there’s some that really were out of control.”

So…no, then.

“Well, we’re going to look at each individual case,” Trump said, “and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.”

This walk-back tracks with the message JD Vance was sent out to Fox News to convey this past weekend:

“If you protested peacefully on January the 6th…you should be pardoned,” Vance said on Fox News. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”

And let’s just say MAGA wasn’t happy about it.

As Philip Anderson, an insurrectionist who was arrested for misdemeanor charges connected to January 6, wrote on X:

And, let’s not forget Trump’s white nationalist buddy Nick Fuentes, who insisted:

Get that popcorn ready. Because, if we needed any more of a sense of how Trump intends to split the January 6 insurrectionist baby and only pardon the “peaceful ones,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is widely seen as holding the most vulnerable GOP Senate seat up in 2026, framed it this way during the confirmation hearing for Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi:

“I walked past a lot of law enforcement officers who were injured. I find it hard to believe that the President of the United States or you would look at facts that were used to convict the violent people on January the 6th and say it was just an intemperate moment.”

This flies in the face of everything Trump and his MAGA minions have been saying for the past year about January 6, of course, i.e., that it was a “day of love” and just a “tourist visit.” Has Tillis even met Trump?

But it is a sign that Team Trump and the Republican Party broadly see it as a political nonstarter for Trump to pardon those who were convicted of violence, particularly against law enforcement.

So how many pardons should we expect to see on Monday? Out of the 1,583 people who have been charged with federal crimes in connection with the riot, according to ABC News, “608 have faced charges for assaulting, resisting or interfering with law enforcement,” 174 of which “were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or otherwise causing serious injury to an officer.”

If Trump’s pardons number far fewer than the 1600 who are hoping for relief, we should expect MAGA to lash out. According to Reuters, John Pierce, a defense attorney who has represented more than 50 of the January 6 rioters, puts Trump’s dilemma this way:

"I expect he will be very quick and very broad in what he does.If he does not issue essentially a blanket pardon on day 1, I think he will face a lot of backlash."

Ending The Russia/Ukraine War

Trump made an audacious promise during his presidential campaign to end the war between Russia and Ukraine by Day One…or even before he took office.

As Reuters puts it:

In the run-up to his Nov. 5 election victory, Trump declared dozens of times that he would have a deal in place between Ukraine and Russia on his first day in office, if not before.

But like Homer backing into the bushes, Trump has predictably distanced himself from his own boastful words. Reuters notes,

In late October, however, he made a subtle shift in his rhetoric, and began saying he could solve the war "very quickly."

And:

Since the election, Trump has walked back his rhetoric further, often simply saying that he would "solve" the conflict, without offering a timeline.

Trump’s advisors now concede that any resolution to this conflict is months away, if not longer. It’s a concession that Reuters calls “a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise - to strike a peace deal on his first day in the White House.”

The sources of this information were Trump insiders:

Two Trump associates, who have discussed the war in Ukraine with the president-elect, told Reuters they were looking at a timeline of months to resolve the conflict, describing the Day One promises as a combination of campaign bluster and a lack of appreciation of the intractability of the conflict and the time it takes to staff up a new administration.

Oh, ya don’t say.

Shutting Down The Border And Deporting Millions of Undocumented Immigrants

According to Time magazine, at a campaign rally in July, Donald Trump made the following pledge about his plans for immigration:

“On Day One of the Trump presidency, I will restore the travel ban, suspend refugee admissions, stop the resettlement and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country.”

In October, during his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump put it this way:

"On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible."

And last month, immigration hardliner and Trump homeland security advisor Stephen Miller told Fox Trump would seek to “seal the border shut and begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”

How big is this proposed operation? Trump told Time magazine in December that he expected “probably 15 and maybe as many as 20 million” undocumented people would be living in the U.S. by the time he took office.

But how would he accomplish this mass deportation? This is where Trump’s “dictator” executive orders would come in. One such proposed order, which was laid out in Trump’s “Agenda 47,” is designed to end birthright citizenship, again, on Day One.

- On Day One, President Trump will sign an Executive Order to stop federal agencies from granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.

- It will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment, that U.S. Citizenship extends only to those both born in AND “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

While this would appear to be the longest shot of all his immigration promises, since it presumes that a simple executive order would be able to instantly amend the constitution, Trump did confirm during his Meet The Press interview last month that he still intends to end birthright citizenship on Day One. But if he issues such an order, many expect it to be stayed or even reversed by the courts.

Another potential tactic that Trump could take is to declare “a national emergency” to allow for extraordinary measures to be taken against undocumented immigrants, something Trump confirmed after the election was in fact his intention.

This would enable Trump to utilize the military to assist in the removal of undocumented people living in the U.S.

And while Trump would like his base to think he really intends to deport all 20 million undocumented immigrants, NPR took a look at how Trump might actually initiate these efforts.

Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, said Trump's mass deportation plan could begin with the removal of hundreds of thousands of new arrivals admitted under programs instituted by President Biden.

"The first thing we know he will almost certainly do is cancel humanitarian parole for people that received it, people who came through CBP One, this app that people use to schedule an appointment to come across the border," Selee said.

Additionally:

He also pointed to the possibility of Trump going after people with Temporary Protected Status, a limited status offered to people displaced from their home countries by extreme circumstances, and people admitted under a program offered to Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.

Selee also said Trump could change deportation guidelines for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement so that the agency can arrest and put undocumented immigrants in deportation proceedings more freely.

Indeed, Trump’s own incoming border czar is already throwing water on the grandest plans of his future boss. Per CNN:

President-elect Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has privately told Republican lawmakers to temper their expectations for the incoming administration’s initial deportation operation, citing limited resources, according to multiple sources involved in the conversations.

“We are not having a discussion about 20 million (deportations). We are having a discussion about an order, and priority, and expectation,” GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, who was in one of the meetings with Homan, told CNN.

Trump has a knack for getting credit from his supporters for trying, even when he fails to accomplish his promises. But the extent to which Trump will likely fall short on the mass deportation issue during even his first week in office is likely to rankle many in his MAGA base.

Slapping On Those Tariffs

Trump will have broad discretion as the chief executive over the imposition of tariffs, which is Trump’s favorite economic tool. His notion of tariffs as something other countries pay us is famously wrongheaded, of course. Nevertheless, Trump’s latest idea, per CNN, is to “[declare] a national economic emergency to provide legal justification for a large swath of universal tariffs on allies and adversaries.”

The declaration would allow Trump to construct a new tariff program by using the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, known as “IEEPA,” which unilaterally authorizes a president to manage imports during a national emergency.

While Trump and his team are still undecided on whether to declare an economic emergency,

Trump’s advisers are evaluating the possibility of using section 338 of US trade law, which allows a president to impose “new or additional duties” against countries deemed to be discriminating against the commerce of the United States.

And according to Brookings, he may be able to unilaterally follow through on at least some of his harshest tariff threats:

President-elect Trump has suggested that he will impose a wide range of tariffs when he takes office, including a blanket tariff of 10–20% on all imported goods, an additional tariff between 60 and 100% on Chinese goods, a 100% tariff on countries within the BRICS alliance if they attempt to undermine the U.S. dollar’s status as a global reserve currency, and a 25% tariff on all products imported from Mexico and Canada. Notably, he wants to impose at least some of these tariffs on day one. Can he impose tariffs that quickly? Potentially, yes.

But what of Trump’s latest ploy to create an “External Revenue Service” to bring in “foreign sources of revenue”? Or as he put it on Truth Social Tuesday:

to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service.

But will it though?

First of all, as Newsweek puts it, “such a service essentially already exists, and is run by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

And secondly, as political analyst Arieh Kovler said succinctly on X:

In other words, as Michael Fahey, CEO and founder of Fahey Communications, told Newsweek:

"This proposal appears to be part of Trump's more extensive strategy to portray tariffs on foreign imports as a means of offsetting costs for his policy agenda and, at the same time, to appeal to his base with trade-related tough talk.”

Which is pretty much Trump’s entire M.O. and certainly what we likely should expect to see on Monday: the illusion of Day One progress to satisfy his MAGA base—which actually believed Trump’s most fantastical claims—but far short of what he promised to deliver.

Ultimately, of course, the bigger the gap between what he said he would do on Day One and what he actually accomplishes, the better for all of us as a nation.

In his first term, Trump was able to keep just 23% of his campaign promises outright while he failed to deliver 53%. Let’s hope that in his second term, he is able to keep even fewer.