Washington Although his first week in office is not yet finished, President Donald Trump has carried out his plan to overwhelm the region with executive measures intended to usher in his second term and erase the Biden era.
Americans shouldn’t be shocked if they’re experiencing the sensation of shock and awe that Trump’s advisors claim they wanted to instill. As he sought a historic return to the Oval Office after his 2020 expulsion, Trump’s campaign program mostly contained these moves, which ranged from starting the process of deporting illegal immigrants to pardoning political friends and reversing scores of Biden’s executive orders. To put it briefly, Trump is using new initiatives to appease his supporters and make amends.
In a phone interview with NBC News, White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich stated, “Everyone has a little bit of a chip on our shoulder, but no one is bigger than him.”
However, the low-hanging fruit was represented by the Week 1 acts, which included the mass pardons of the Jan. 6 criminals and anti-abortion campaigners. Trump is also beginning to recognize the difficulties in carrying out his plan, even if he is dedicated to directing the narrative of his presidency by dominating attention at all times.
This week, a federal judge declared that a Trump order that would have redefined the 14th Amendment’s grant of citizenship to anyone born in the United States was clearly illegal and temporarily stopped it. According to two defense officials and a third person with knowledge of the matter, Mexico refused to grant landing privileges to a U.S. military aircraft carrying deportees on Thursday. It was “an administrative issue and was quickly rectified,” according to a White House official.
Trump has yet to actually start his highly regarded Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official entity. Vivek Ramaswamy, one of its co-chairs, is leaving to run for governor of Ohio. Elon Musk, the multibillionaire CEO of SpaceX, has publicly argued with other Trump supporters over turf, policy, and personal grievances.
Musk criticized the proposal when Trump unveiled his Stargate initiative to draw in private capital to construct artificial intelligence infrastructure, which led to a social media altercation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Regarding Softbank, OpenAI’s partner in the Stargate project, Musk stated on his social media site, X, that “they don’t actually have the money.” The Grok feature on X is in competition with OpenAI and its ChatGPT.
Altman retorted: I understand that what is best for your businesses isn’t always what is best for the nation.
Trump was forced to comment on the altercation, but he played it down as Musk fighting someone he despises.
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Musk has been headed in the wrong path in the early days of the administration, according to Steve Bannon, who promoted the idea of drastically reorganizing government and dismantling the administrative state, as he refers to it.
Bannon, who has also slammed Musk’s preference for the highly skilled H-1B visa program as being inconsistent with Trump’s America First policy, said, “You don’t bring a Silicon Valley feud between two tech bros to the Roosevelt Room, which is five feet from the Oval Office and on the global stage.” Either you tell him in private or you keep it to yourself.
Bannon added that Musk should continue to focus on the enormous task of removing the federal footprint.
Everyone wants DOGE to win, but you need to deliver. “You need something like DOGE in combination with [the Office of Management and Budget] to deconstruct the administrative state and drastically cut government spending,” Bannon stated. We must deliver now, and I fear that we are burning daylight.
Nonetheless, Trump’s supporters and advisers are happy with what they say has been a very successful start to the presidency, which they attribute to the president’s urgency and his team’s preparedness during the transition period. The fact that Trump, the second president ever elected to nonconsecutive terms, is ineligible to run for reelection serves as its basis.
According to one senior White House official, the president knew exactly what he wanted to do and when he wanted to do it. Our policy is based on an action-oriented mindset that is unambiguous. In the past, some have moderated in ways they believed to be more sustainable. However, the president must face the fact that we are running out of time to take action.
One Trump friend familiar with his intentions for the president stated that part of Trump’s strategy is to “overburden the zone with actions that make it difficult for any individual move to receive the scrutiny it might get under normal circumstances.”
A Republican-led Congress that is favorably stacked has given him some assistance in that regard. Next week, the confirmation hearings for three of his most contentious nominees will take place simultaneously: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services; Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence; and Kash Patel for head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Revocation of security details for a number of former federal officials was one of his actions of retaliation.
Trump is already drastically reorganizing the government workforce. Trump wants to make sure that only loyalists are around him, so this week, dozens of national security officials were sent home from their White House duties. On his first day in office, he issued an order reimplementing his Schedule F plan, which facilitates the termination of thousands of government employees. He stated on Friday that he was thinking of closing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a decision that would need approval from Congress.
“I think we’ll rely on them and we’ll continue to do eye-catching and exciting things,” the White House official stated. “the Cabinet will also be ready with the same activity level, the same motivation to go and deliver.” We’ll search for methods that effectively convey the policy in action and provide a visual representation of all we’re attempting to achieve.
According to the ally with knowledge of Trump’s transition strategy, the evidence thus far points to Trump and his staff believing they have a mandate to carry out his whole agenda.
The ally stated that you don’t pardon 1,600 J6 inmates unless you believe you won’t face any negative consequences from which you won’t be able to bounce back.