Making Sense Out of the Chaos

A helpful guide to some of the worst of Trump's Day One actions

U.S. President Donald Trump takes part in a signing ceremony after his inauguration on January 20, 2025. Photo by Melina Mara-Pool/Getty Images.

Donald Trump had long promised that his first day in office would be filled with new orders, many designed to cause “shock and awe” within Washington D.C. and around the country, if not the world. Observers understood the basic contours of his plans: He would issue executive orders on immigration; reverse many Biden-era policies; announce his tariff plans; create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gut many federal programs; remove us from international cooperative agreements; fire or threaten to fire lifetime civil servants; and move against the LGBTQ+ community, just to name a few horrors.

He made good on his word, issuing a litany of orders as the press and political analysts scrambled to keep up. Many chose to turn off and sit out the news completely for the day, while those who did not were met with texts, emails, and breaking news alerts while they doomscrolled on platforms owned by the billionaire men who flanked Trump at his inauguration.

It can all be quite overwhelming, even for seasoned journalists and analysts.

But there’s a way to cut through the noise and clear out the smoke, a way to think about Trump’s actions on Day One and hereafter, that could prove useful not only as a parsing exercise but also for our collective peace of mind. Anxiety and cortisol levels can spike when our brains can’t make sense of a danger coming at us, and we could go into panic mode, which serves exactly no one.

So how can we make sense of the chaos that Trump has hurled our way? I divide it into three general buckets of “things that suck”: those that he’s within his rights to do; those in a gray area where he could see significant legal losses; and those that are outside the law, where he wants to score political points but likely will get shut down by the courts—at least initially.

Dividing the Trump actions into these three buckets also helps us, and the lawyers and civil rights groups defending our Republic on the front lines, understand how to respond. In some cases it will be to wait and see; in others it will be to organize politically; and in some it will be to take immediate legal action—some of which we’ve already seen in court filings yesterday and today.

Because there were so many actions by Trump on Monday, and many more that are forthcoming, I will only address a handful of the most headline-making ones. But I hope this sorting exercise will be useful in assessing his other actions, too, both from yesterday and in the weeks to come.

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Things within his rights

This first category includes many horrible acts by Trump on his first day (or soon to come) for which there is no strong, corrective legal remedy at hand because they fall under the purview of traditional presidential powers. It’s important to understand, however, that just because Democrats and civil rights activists can’t legally do anything about these moves doesn’t mean they can’t leverage them against Trump.

Before I dive in, a heads up. So much of what Trump does and says is about trying to “own the libs” and cause us to shed “liberal tears.” If we ignore his political trolling (“Gulf of America!”, “Greenland!”), there are still some clear limits to what he can do without pushback from the voters. Further, a dispassionate analysis, free of the noise he creates around it, reveals once again that the reasons he gives for his actions aren’t always the real impetus behind them—hardly surprising, but still worth reminding ourselves.

Pardons and clemency for the January 6 criminals

Yesterday, Trump made good on a campaign promise to pardon the insurrectionist rioters who had breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The president’s right to issue pardons and grant clemency does not have many meaningful restrictions on it, and Trump is within his rights here. But that doesn’t mean we need to accept this quietly, or that it isn’t a full assault upon legal norms.

For weeks, GOP leaders and Trump allies have been signaling that any actions around the January 6 defendants would be limited to non-violent offenders. But that’s not what happened. Trump’s sweeping pardons included some of the most violent criminals arrested after that day. These defendants assaulted officers, attacked the media, obstructed law enforcement and destroyed government property.

As CNN reported, the group of over 1,250 pardons included

Julian Khater, who assaulted US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick and later pled guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon; Devlyn Thompson, who hit a police officer with a metal baton; and Robert Palmer, a Florida man who attacked police with a fire extinguisher, a wooden plank and a pole.

The pardons and grants of clemency also included the leaders of the right-wing militias who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Remarked CNN’s Marshall Cohen:

The clemency for people convicted of seditious conspiracy is a stunning move. Those defendants were seen as among the “worst of the worst,” largely because prosecutors proved that – unlike many of the other Trump supporters who breached the Capitol that day – these people had a specific plan to violently subvert the government.

The commutations covered Oath Keepers associate Thomas Caldwell, who was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but found guilty of obstructing an official proceeding for stashing weapons at a nearby Virginia hotel for his allies to potentially use on January 6. Kelly Meggs, leader of the group’s Florida chapter, was sentenced to a decade in prison for his seditious conspiracy conviction. And Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs will also be released from prison, where he’s serving his seditious conspiracy sentence for leading a throng of Proud Boys into the Capitol.

There could and should be political consequences for releasing violent criminals back into our society and using lies and rewritten history to justify it. One poll found that 59 percent of respondents oppose pardons for anyone who “forced their way into the Capitol.” The number is even higher for anyone actually convicted for their part in the attack.

If the public comes to understand that Trump let the most violent offenders and those who actually plotted to overthrow the government through force go free, it will be easier for Democrats to argue that Trump is actually on the side of these right-wing militias and always has been. That may be obvious to readers here, but the broader American public often dismisses Trump’s words as mere bravado. It will be harder for them to dismiss his actions. In other words, “Stand back and stand by” was never some off-the-cuff remark; it was a clear signal that he would have their backs.

Because there is no legal mechanism to stop the release of these violent offenders, the pardons can become a political rallying point for Democrats, who can point to the fact that Trump let criminals who beat police officers, some who later lost their lives, out of prison. As Craig Sicknick, the brother of the late Officer Brian Sicknick, said in a recent message just before the news:

“Donald Trump and his loyalists not only celebrate the deadly mob that killed my brother — they are determined to pardon those responsible. It is a betrayal to not only the families and loved ones of those who were injured and killed but to all Americans.”

Few believed that Trump would actually go so far in his pardons. But he did, and it’s our collective responsibility to not ever let that fact go.

Halting refugee resettlement

The President has broad power over U.S. immigration policy including the number and status of refugees seeking entry to our country. One of the most heartbreaking and cruel acts by Trump on his first day was the immediate halting of refugee resettlement in the U.S.

He did this by suspending the Refugee Admissions Program. The suspension put the lives of tens of thousands of those seeking safety in the U.S. in limbo, including thousands who have already made it through a rigorous vetting process that can last years. To get this far only to be turned away is shattering news for thousands of desperate people.

“The policy implications are not abstract by any means,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, who heads up Global Refuge, one of the nation’s oldest and largest resettlement organizations. “Persecuted people who have patiently waited for their chance at protection are poised to languish in legal limbo. Family reunifications are likely to be delayed for the foreseeable future, if not derailed entirely. Employers will lose access to a key talent pool they desperately need amid nationwide labor shortages. And communities that have come to rely on newcomers for revitalizing their economies and tax bases face impactful economic loss.”

It’s hard to fully capture the extent of suffering and misery Trump’s policy change will cause. So it’s important to bring context and real human terms to this, as Reuters did in its reporting on Monday:

Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the U.S. government to resettle in the U.S., including family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel, are having their flights canceled under President Donald Trump's order suspending U.S. refugee programs, a U.S. official and a leading refugee resettlement advocate said on Monday.

The group includes unaccompanied minors awaiting reunification with their families in the U.S. as well as Afghans at risk of Taliban retribution because they fought for the former U.S.-backed Afghan government, said Shawn VanDiver, head of the #AfghanEvac coalition of U.S. veterans and advocacy groups and the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Because legal challenges to Trump’s policy shift on refugees would likely go nowhere, given the broad latitude the Executive has in controlling refugee admissions, it is important to highlight the plight of those who will be most impacted and to pressure Congress to act. This is especially true where Trump’s actions will harm U.S. friends and allies who helped fight a common enemy, all in a long war we started and finally ended. In this limited area, it may still be possible to find bipartisan agreement.

"Afghans and advocates are panicking," VanDiver told Reuters. "I've had to recharge my phone four times already today because so many are calling me. "We warned [the Trump transition team] that this was going to happen, but they did it anyway. We hope they will reconsider.”

Pulling us out of the Climate Agreement

As expected, and as he did when he took office in his first term, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement. That leaves the U.S. in a very small and embarrassing group of nations. As the New York Times reported,

By withdrawing, the United States will join Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only four countries not party to the agreement, under which nations work together to keep global warming below levels that could lead to environmental catastrophe.

The move is part of Trump’s larger anti-climate agenda, which includes a moratorium on new wind power projects on federal lands and undoing Biden-era initiatives to limit greenhouse gas emissions, restrict offshore drilling, and protect Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But both climate activists and the rest of the world are used to this by now from Trump. It may have been a shock when he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement the first time around, but the country was still bound by many of the rules of that agreement and it took nearly four years to exit completely—only for President Biden to order us back in upon taking office.

Trump’s move on Monday was largely expected but will still take a year to fully implement. Yet it could have a negative impact upon the U.S. economy. As a non-party, the U.S. would be sidelined from certain clean energy and green tech markets and would see reduced leverage on climate issues with other countries. Many leaders shrugged at Trump shooting his own country in the foot and consider the U.S. only a part of the full global climate equation.

“Trump’s irresponsibility is no surprise,” Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, told the Times. “In time, Trump will not be around but history will point to him and his fossil fuel friends with no pardon.”

Indeed, with climate change-amplified wildfires and hurricanes ravaging various parts of the country, Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” anti-climate trolling could come to haunt him as the severity and cost of such disasters continue to mount over his term. The coming fight over emergency aid to fire-stricken Southern California will underscore Trump’s callous and cavalier attitude on the devastating effects of climate change, and that could begin to erode his popularity as he plays politics with emergency funding.

Imposing tariffs on our trading partners

Another area where Trump has more or less a free hand—though he could in theory face international legal challenges—is on tariff policy. Trump has long promised to impose high tariffs on our major trading partners including Canada, Mexico, and China. Many view his threats as mere saber-rattling to gain a better negotiating position, while others take him at his word and are preparing for the economic shock that would accompany such tariffs.

On Monday, Trump reiterated his intent to impose 25 percent tariffs on all goods coming in from Canada and Mexico. Yes, this is economic madness: It will immediately raise prices on things like gas, food, and construction materials, not to mention the effect retaliatory tariffs will have on U.S. exporters.

Right now, tariffs remain just a stated intent. According to Trump, when asked by a reporter directly during his executive order signing session Monday night, the new tariffs would go into effect on February 1, just 10 days from now:

It’s important to note that this is a big punt. Trump had pledged during the campaign he would impose big tariffs on Day One, but for now, the tariffs are more than a week off. And a lot can happen in that week.

In fact, the EO that Trump signed on Monday talks about further investigations and determinations by his advisors rather than a rush toward tariffs. As CNN reported,

The executive action signed Monday directed the secretaries of Commerce and Treasury and the United States Trade Representative to investigate the causes of America’s trade deficits with foreign nations, to determine how to build an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariffs, to identify unfair trade practices and to review existing trade agreements for potential improvements.

It also directs the government agencies to analyze how the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (the USMCA) signed by Trump in his first term is affecting American workers and businesses — and whether America should remain in the free trade agreement. Trump’s action requires agencies to assess whether stricter US trade policy could successfully restrict the flow of fentanyl and the flow of undocumented migrants into the United States.

This leaves Trump a lot of wiggle room over when and how to impose his promised tariffs and more time for opponents of such policy changes to voice their concerns. Indeed, on the question of universal tariffs, Trump also punted the question entirely, saying “we’re not ready for that just yet.”

So what’s really going on here? For starters, there is apparently an ideological debate still happening within the Trump camp over how aggressively to roll out Trump’s promised tariffs. It remains uncertain which side will ultimately prevail.

But one inescapable fact is this: Industries likely to be hit hardest by the tariffs will be working overtime to seek to escape the worst of them. This will give Trump the kind of leverage he craves as his administration hands out exemptions, just as it did the last time around.

Seen in this light, tariffs are another kind of power play to force corporate America to bend to Trump’s will. As deployed by Trump, the tariffs and exemptions from them undermine the rule of law by creating a pay-to-play incentive system for big corporations. They understand that Trump holds all of the cards when it comes to import taxes. And that means they had better pony up.

This remains a highly underreported aspect of the tariff game Trump is playing, but it is something the American public deserves to know about and understand.

Things in a legal gray area

Many of Trump’s first-day moves seek to push the boundaries of executive power and herald a new “Project 2025” driven era where the president has king-like powers and all members of “his” government must prove their fealty or be removed. They also seek to expand the president’s “emergency powers,” to target the most vulnerable communities, and to defy both Congress and the Supreme Court on recently passed legislation.

Trump threw a lot of ketchup at the wall, but not all of it will leave a permanent stain.

Politicizing the federal workforce, slashing it through DOGE

On top of ordering federal workers back to in-person work, Trump reinstated a policy from his first term that aims to strip employment protections from federal workers by reclassifying them as something called “Schedule F” employees. This move effectively puts such workers in a less-protected employment class where it is easier to dismiss them for any perceived political disloyalty.

Specifically, the order reclassifies tens of thousands of federal workers as “political appointees,” targeting any whose jobs are "of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character." While the order states that such workers are not required to support the president politically, “[t]hey are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability.” The order goes on to say, “Failure to do so is grounds for dismissal.”

This move aligns with an express recommendation from Project 2025’s authors to politicize the federal workforce and ensure that only loyalists remain in core positions.

Another memo released Monday takes aim at “career senior executives” in the federal government who themselves are not political appointees but whom they want to see “optimally aligned to implement” Trump’s agenda.

“This unprecedented assertion of executive power will create an army of sycophants beholden only to Donald Trump, not the Constitution or the American people,” said the American Federation of Government Employees in a statement. “The integrity of the entire federal government could be irreparably harmed if this is not stopped.”

If this sounds illegal and un-American, you aren’t alone and the unions agree. In fact, there is already a legal battle underway. Right after Trump signed the order, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) representing workers from 37 federal agencies filed a lawsuit, claiming the order is “contrary to congressional intent.”

Trump’s order “is about administering political loyalty tests to everyday employees in the federal workforce who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and serve their country,” the NTEU said in a statement.

On top of moving against tens of thousands of federal workers, on Monday Trump also formally established DOGE. That department, tasked with slashing federal spending by the trillions, will be headed by Elon Musk, who will have an office in the White House. Gone is Musk’s sidekick, Vivek Ramaswamy, who apparently had worn out his welcome in the project and who probably did himself no favors over the H-1B visa brouhaha of a few weeks ago. (Yes, the first job cut made by DOGE was one of its co-chairs.)

But the ink on that order establishing DOGE was not dry before no fewer than three lawsuits landed challenging DOGE’s lack of transparency in disclosures, hiring, and other practices. As a “federal advisory committee,” one of the suits claims DOGE is required to have “fairly balanced” representation, record meeting minutes, allow the public to attend, and file a charter with Congress—steps that DOGE did not take.

Much as Musk would love to get started on slashing costs so that the billionaire class can receive an extension of the Trump tax cuts, the massive undertaking may not be so easy to get off the ground, especially given Musk’s utter lack of experience running government departments.

Declaring a “national emergency” at the border

Trump’s campaign was steeped in anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his new executive orders reflect that. As part of his radical agenda, Trump wants the military to build more parts of his border wall, to support operations to stop border crossings, and to station its troops at the border to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” as he said in his inaugural address.

But to do this, Trump needs to justify the use of the U.S. military, which is not supposed to serve any domestic police function. His answer is to declare a “national emergency” at the border—even though border crossings are at a four-year low. Trump proclaimed that the current condition at the border with Mexico is an “invasion” under Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution and, using this pretense, Trump ordered the suspension of physical entry of “aliens engaged in the invasion” and for his Cabinet to “take all appropriate action to repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged in the invasion.”

These actions are vulnerable to legal challenge. You may recall that Trump lost in federal court in 2019 when he tried to claim a national emergency in order to redirect military funds toward building his border wall. As Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center told Time Magazine, Trump is overreaching again on the question of “emergency powers” when the number of crossings has actually been in decline in recent months. “This is an abuse of emergency powers for the same reason it was before,” Goitein said, “Emergency powers are not meant to address long-standing problems that Congress has the power to solve.”

Trump’s orders also expressly revoke the ability of migrants to claim asylum upon reaching the U.S. But this is a right guaranteed by both domestic and international law, so his order could be enjoined by the federal courts. In fact, when Trump tried similar moves in his first term, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit and stopped him with a succession of court victories.

Eliminating federal protections for the LGBTQ+ community

In keeping with his persistent attacks on sexual minorities, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to revoke President Biden’s policies that made it easier for trans people to update their gender markers on federal identification; to require trans women to be housed with men in federal prisons; and to exclude transgender people from consideration by federal agencies when enforcing laws on sex discrimination.

The deliberate targeting of a small and politically vulnerable minority to score political points is reprehensible. But it may also be illegal. There are laws on the books that the order violates on its face, such as the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which permits incarcerated trans people a say in where they are housed if their safety is threatened.

And the requirement of a binary choice between male and female on all federal identification runs smack into a prior case where the Tenth Circuit ordered the State Department to consider intersex people when issuing passports. The “X” option emerged in 2022 as a result of that case, and it comports with international treaties that there be three options on a passport: M, F, and X.

In short, merely issuing an executive order does not make it so. Departments and agencies have to try and comply with that order, and their efforts are subject to challenge in court.

Things where he’s outside the law as it stands

There are two executive orders where I consider the chances of stopping Trump to be good: his reversal of President Biden’s bans on offshore and arctic drilling and his “reinterpretation” of birthright citizenship.

I say the chances are “good” even if it’s possible he ultimately could prevail before SCOTUS because we simply don’t know how much further afield this radicalized Court will go on his behalf. We should always keep that in mind. That said, we do know two things: First, it takes time for cases to wind their way up to the Supreme Court, so an injunction against an order today may take years to resolve. Second, the Court can only grant review of a small number of cases, so even if it wanted to put its finger on the Trump scale again, it is limited in its ability to affect every pending case.

Reversing Biden’s ban on offshore drilling

Trump initially dismissed Biden’s eleventh-hour moves to protect our coastlines from further offshore drilling, saying he would simply come in and undo them. But it will likely not be so simple.

To understand why, we first need to look at what Biden did. On January 6, 2025, President Biden invoked his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) to withdraw all federal waters off the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska from further oil and gas drilling. It was a huge move that infuriated the oil industry and oil-producing state leaders in places like Texas, who filed two lawsuits against the action.

Trump came in on Monday and declared that withdrawal ineffective. But to offshore drilling advocates, this was a familiar pas de deux. Back in 2017, when Trump came into office the first time around, he issued an executive order purporting to undo President Obama’s designation of the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea as off-limits to oil leasing, along with a large swath of Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. East Coast.

Environmental protection groups sued to invalidate Trump’s order. Trump argued that language in OCSLA stating that a president may "from time to time" withdraw unleased lands meant he had authority to revise prior withdrawal decisions. But a federal judge in Anchorage disagreed, ruling Trump's order was unlawful: "Had Congress intended to grant the President revocation authority, it could have done so explicitly, as it had previously done in several (but not all) of its previously enacted upland laws," the judge wrote.

This case was on appeal to the Ninth Circuit when Biden won the election and revoked Trump’s order, so the case was moot and went away. All this is to say, Trump’s order will likely face a similar path, with environmental groups able to pick a court in the 9th Circuit again as their venue of choice. Assuming they obtain a preliminary injunction, by the time this case gets decided we may have a new administration.

Ending birthright citizenship

As I was writing this, a breaking news alert flashed across my screen noting that 18 states have now sued the Trump administration to stop enforcement of his executive order banning “birthright citizenship.”

Since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, people born in the United States have been entitled to automatic citizenship. The language of the Amendment is clear:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

The Amendment overrode the Dred Scot decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 that held that African Americans could never be citizens.

And in an important piece of Asian American history, in 1898 the Supreme Court decided the case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, holding that birthright citizenship applies to the children of immigrants, including U.S.-born children who leave the country and are being denied reentry because of their race, in Wong’s case under the Chinese Exclusion Act. After going through a long and frankly boring review of English and other law on birthright citizenship, the Court said of the passage in question:

As appears upon the face of the amendment, as well as from the history of the times, this was not intended to impose any new restrictions upon citizenship, or to prevent any persons from becoming citizens by the fact of birth within the United States who would thereby have become citizens according to the law existing before its adoption. It is declaratory in form, and enabling and extending in effect. Its main purpose doubtless was, as has been often recognized by this court, to establish the citizenship of free negroes, which had been denied in the opinion delivered by Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford . . . and to put it beyond doubt that all blacks, as well as whites, born or naturalized within the jurisdiction of the United States are citizens of the United States.

In short, this is settled law. But the Trump administration now argues that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that the children of undocumented migrants somehow don’t count. But as the Wong Kim Ark opinion noted, that clause is not meant to impose a new restriction, and in any event that’s not what the clause is there to clarify. The Court in 1898 in fact made a point of stating that Wong’s parents were “not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China”—meaning they were in fact subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. and not somehow excluded by treaty. Therefore the Fourteenth Amendment applied, Wong was born on U.S. soil, so Wong was a citizen.

Trump’s team also wants to claim that you’re not a citizen unless one of your parents was a permanent legal resident at the time of your birth. This condition is also nowhere in the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the President isn’t free to amend it at will.

Of course, there is always the hope by right-wing extremists that the Supreme Court will ignore precedent again and get rid of birthright citizenship, despite the amendment’s plain language and unchallenged precedent. I’m pretty sure that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett aren’t particularly keen to do this. But in any event, it’s clear that Trump’s executive order can be (and has already been) challenged as unconstitutional, and that under binding precedent under Wong Kim Ark, it will be enjoined.

Courting success

The barrage of executive orders is designed to confuse and dispirit the left, even while the right celebrates what it assumes is great progress on Day One. But beyond the politically fraught orders and pardons Trump is permitted by virtue of his position as president to issue, the rest will need to be settled in the courts.

It is telling that even with a Congress, Supreme Court, and the White House controlled by the GOP, Trump is operating by executive order to get things done. While this may in part be to satisfy his own ego, it also speaks volumes about the precarious hold on power the GOP actually has, given their threadbare majority in the House and the occasional smackdown from the two less extreme justices on the bench.

Trump’s team has been preparing for weeks for yesterday, but so too have Democrats, unions, and civil and environmental rights groups. And while the judicial system was ultimately unable to hold Trump accountable for many of his crimes, there were some notable judgments and convictions. Now a second test looms: Can the court system help us hold the line against the imperial presidency, even with the shadow of the Supreme Court looming?

I wouldn’t count the judiciary out. They proved resilient in Trump’s first term, knocking back much of the worst of his excesses. And there were many fine examples of courage in recent years. Think of Judges Merchan, Engoron, Mehta, Howell, and Chutkin, just to name a few.

Trump may be out of the gate quickly with scores of horrific orders. But even his lawyers know that much of this is just for show. The true battles have only just begun in our nation’s courts, where the rule of law may still yet shine brightly.