The New Yorker:

The effect of the President’s executive orders was to convey an open season, in which virtually nothing—including who gets to be an American citizen—is guaranteed.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Cold bedevils Presidential Inaugurations, Washington, D.C., tending to be chilly the third week in January. The New Yorker’scorrespondent in 1965 (Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural) donned “red-white-and-blue thermal underwear”; the magazine’s dispatch from 1977 (Jimmy Carter’s) noted “shining white ice everywhere.” Anticipating frigidity, the organizers of the 2025 iteration (Donald Trump’s, reprise) moved the event indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda, whose limited capacity of six hundred people helpfully delineated who was in and who was on the outs. In: the First Family, seated behind the President, and punctuated visually by the six-foot-seven-inch, eighteen-year-old Barron Trump. In, too, were the billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar Pichai, seated in the next row, and co-ideologues from abroad: Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Argentina’s Javier Milei. Out—consigned to the Capitol Visitor Center—was Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, who at this point in 2023 enjoyed influence in the Republican Party broadly equivalent to Trump’s, and whose sidelining was a reminder of what an extraordinarily long time two years is in politics.

Eight years is even longer. In the Rotunda, Trump said that, since his first election, “I have been tested and challenged more than any President in our two-hundred-and-fifty-year history. And I’ve learned a lot along the way.” Perhaps more important was what his movement had learned: the virtue of preparation. Detailed policy and hiring programs had been negotiated and assembled. “For American citizens,” Trump said, “January 20, 2025, is Liberation Day.”

It was, if not that, Executive Order Day. Papers flowed. At the Resolute desk, an aide handed Trump orders for signing from a tall stack of navy-blue binders. Within a few hours, the United States was pulling out of not only the Paris climate accord but also the World Health Organization, which it had helped to found, in 1948. On immigration, the President reinstated his Remain in Mexico policy, and cancelled interviews for asylum applicants; in a Latino neighborhood in Detroit, ice agents were reportedly going door to door. Federal diversity programs, some dating back to an executive order signed by L.B.J. in 1965, were eliminated. Offshore wind projects were paused, restrictions on drilling lifted. Fifteen hundred people were pardoned for their roles in January 6th, including some of the most violent actors; Politico speculated that many would soon run for office themselves.

Go to link