With Executive Order Avalanche, Trump Continues Trend Toward a Monarchical Presidency
Well before President Donald Trump returned to office, his supporters boasted that he would start the second term with a flurry of executive actions. The new president exceeded expectations with an avalanche of pardons, orders, and edicts on matters great and small. Some should be welcomed by anybody hoping for more respect for liberty by government employees. Others extend state power in ways that are worrisome or even illegitimate. All continue the troubling trend over the course of decades and administrations from both parties for the president to assume the role of an elected monarch.
From an Interoffice Memo to ‘Shock and Awe’
“When President Trump takes office next Monday, there is going to be shock and awe with executive orders,” Sen. John Barrasso (R–Wyo.) predicted last week.
The president signed some of those orders as he bantered in the Oval Office with members of the press, engaging in more interaction than we saw from his predecessor over months. Wide-ranging in their scope, Trump’s orders “encompassed sweeping moves to reimagine the country’s relationship with immigration, its economy, global health, the environment and even gender roles,” noted USA Today.
Executive orders, which made up the bulk of Trump’s actions (he also pardoned and commuted the sentences of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot), are basically interoffice memos from the boss to executive branch agencies. “The President of the United States manages the operations of the Executive branch of Government through Executive orders,” according to the Office of the Federal Register of the National Archives and Records Administration.
That doesn’t sound like much—and at first, it wasn’t. Executive orders as we know them evolved into their modern form from notes and directives sent by the president to members of the cabinet and other executive branch officials. Nobody tried to catalog them until 1907.
But because executive branch officials interpret and enforce thickets of laws and administrative rules under which we try to live, guidance from the boss is powerful. Interpreted one way, a rule regulating unfinished gun parts leaves people free to pursue their hobbies; interpreted another, and those owning the parts are suddenly felons. The president can push interpretations either way.
They Can Be Used Correctly, or Abusively
So, some of Trump’s executive orders are very welcome, indeed, for those of us horrified by federal agencies pushing the boundaries of their power.
“The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our gover
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