Few presidential clichés are wearier than “Day One.” Preparing for his 2009 inauguration, then-President-elect Barack Obama vowed to work for Middle East peace from “Day One” of his administration. In 2016, Donald Trump pledged for his own first day a whole suite of executive actions, ranging from regulatory changes to a declaration that China manipulates currency.
Candidate Joe Biden, Day One’s irrepressible king, promised nearly more than a single sentence can contain: to “get COVID under control,” reenter the Paris climate accord, “make smart infrastructure investments,” send an immigration bill to Congress, rescind the “Muslim travel ban,” reform government ethics, address “systemic” racism, and begin appointing a federal workforce that “look[s] like the country” — all in his first 24 hours on the job. Perhaps chastened by her boss’s malarkey, Vice President Kamala Harris made only one first-day pledge during her ill-fated campaign. Alas, it promised an action, reducing degree requirements for federal workers, that the Trump and Biden administrations had mostly taken care of already.
“Day One” is the “First 100 Days” for an age of hyperpartisanship. It is Rooseveltism for Dummies, absurd yet sadly necessary. Whereas previous presidents could count on three months of goodwill before the trapdoor opened beneath them, contemporary executives have no such luxury and know it. On Monday, Jan. 20, Trump will take his second oath of office and bask in the soul-warming glow of triumph. On the 21st, he will wake to a fractious Congress and press that wish he were dead. Perhaps save a few Monday night hours for governing?
It wasn’t always like this. Assuming office on a cloudy 1953 Tuesday, Dwight Eisenhower spent his opening hours watching the inaugural parade and hosting 57 guests for a White House tea. Jimmy Carter barely had time to add Yasser Arafat to the Oval Office speed dial before whisking away to luncheons and balls. Though Ronald Reagan instituted a Day One hiring freeze for the executive branch, his most immediate successors largely waited until later in the week to flex their presidential muscles. George H.W. Bush’s first executive order came on Jan. 25 and established the President’s Commission on Federal Ethics Law Reform. (Be still, my wonkish heart.) If the Clinton Digital Library is to be believed, Ol’ Bill did almost nothing until the afternoon of the 21st, having stayed up, in characteristic style, until 3:05 the previous morning.
If Day One is a moment in time, it is also a governing ideology, brought about by the slow-motion collapse of our constitutional order. For a season, America was a nation of laws, ordered by statutes duly passed and signed. Today, we are a nation of men and, increasingly, of regulatory interpretation. Take, for example, the political football that is federal Title IX guidance for universities. What Obama commanded, pronoun and locker-room insanity for the transgendered, Trump reversed, and Biden attempted to restore. If the courts don’t beat him to the punch, our incoming president will surely withdraw the relevant Biden-era “rule,” thus kicking the ball once more into the other team’s territory. That may not happen on the afternoon of Jan. 20, but it will certainly occur.
To embrace “Day One” thinking is to advance an ideological narrative: So obscene has been the previous president’s work that our man can’t lose a moment setting the dynamite. When, mere hours before the 2020 election, Biden promised Day One rules concerning masking and social distancing, he had in mind not COVID-19’s diminishment but his opponent’s. It hardly mattered what words filled in the policy blanks. The point was to endorse what Democrats wanted: the utter erasure of the 45th president’s fingerprints from American life.
Looked at in this context, Trump’s vow to be a Day One “dictator” is simply an acknowledgment of new norms. A troll of world-historical ability, the former president must have known that Democrats would shriek as if set afire upon hearing that pledge. Yet he also knew he was sending his supporters an important signal. So critical is the business of repairing the Left’s damage that it can’t wait for a “Grand Bargain” that may never come. Rather, the president will give orders, and the courts will rein him in if they must. Blame the Obama administration if you dislike this state of affairs. (Obama aide Daniel Pfeiffer: “When Congress won’t act, this president will.”) Or blame the Supreme Court for allowing such executive branch abominations as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to stand. Whomever one faults, this is how the political system now works. What Obama and Biden started, Trump must continue. Unilateral disarmament is no way to win a fight. Nor does the path to political compromise run through surrender.
This is not a call for lawlessness. Were Trump to order, say, that the IRS collect no income taxes, he would be damaging both Republicans and the republic, setting his party up for cataclysmic retaliation even as he fed still more of the Constitution into the shredder. It is, however, a call for Day One maximalism. Cliché or not, Trump’s first afternoon should be a ruthlessly efficient operation, gamed out weeks beforehand and as scripted as network TV. Gather up the attorneys. Put ink in the president’s favorite pen. To the extent that a half-day’s work can overturn the ruinous Biden administration, it ought to be given a chance to do so.
In part, Trump’s own campaign promises will be a useful guide. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the president will likely sign on Day One a pre-drafted order directing the relevant Cabinet agencies to deport illegal immigrants. Other pledged actions include the pardoning of nonviolent Jan. 6 prisoners and the firing of special counsel Jack Smith, the face of the Democratic lawfare machine. Still, others include the re-withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate accord, the aforementioned Title IX reversal, and the dismissal “of any general involved in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Needless to say, these orders must be airtight, pre-lawyered, and as politically defensible as possible. An example of the latter is already being floated in some sectors of the Right. In addition to pardoning most Jan. 6ers, Trump should relieve New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a high-profile Democrat who, in any case, will never see the inside of a jail cell. Had the outgoing president not done the job already, a pardon for Hunter Biden would have been in keeping with this strategy.
Between bites of their Christmas dinner, Trump’s advisers should be combing the outgoing administration’s archives, looking for executive actions to undo. In February 2023, Biden signed an order advancing a “whole-of-government approach to racial equity” and further nourishing the cancer that is diversity, equity, and inclusion. Kill it. When the next pandemic hits, Executive Order 13995, “Ensuring an Equitable Pandemic Response and Recovery,” will be used to justify prioritizing the treatment of nonwhite people. Wipe that sneeze off the books. The same goes for orders concerning privately operated prisons (EO 14006), the climate “crisis” (EO 14008), electric vehicle production (EO 14037), and abortion (EO 14076). All are liberal fantasies, dredged up from the muck of far-left policy shops. If President Trump allows them to survive past his first bedtime, he will have gotten off to a lazy start.
And what about Project 2025, that great repository of Trump Revival tactics and priorities? Unsurprisingly, the Heritage Foundation’s book-length manual uses “Day One” and its derivations more than 30 times, a clear warning that the second Trump administration’s clock will be ticking from the start. Among Heritage’s recommendations for that first day are the elimination of the federal government’s “counter-mis/disinformation efforts” (i.e., its online censorship), the renegotiation of the Remain in Mexico policy, and the steering of foreign aid agencies away from Biden-era priorities, such as those emphasizing abortion and gender radicalism. Elsewhere, the manual urges the incoming president to begin reforming the increasingly unaccountable Environmental Protection Agency, to commence vetting the 2030 census’s planning and budgeting, and to order the Department of Health and Human Services to preserve doctors’ “sacred rights of conscience.”
Some conservatives would like to see Trump go further still. As I write these words, reports are emerging that the president-elect may act quickly to remove all transgender troops from the U.S. military. Trump himself has just doubled down on his protectionist pledge, vowing to institute an immediate 25% tariff on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Right-of-center observers can disagree with these moves. (I’m a “no” to the latter and a strong “yes” to the former.) The point is that Congress and the Constitution have given the chief executive the authority in question. Perhaps the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 was a mistake. (The president may “adjust the imports” that “impair the national security.”) Or perhaps the Constitution’s commander in chief clause is overly broad. We shouldn’t, however, expect Trump to hold back on these or any other Day One possibilities while he holds the power to do otherwise. A President Harris certainly wouldn’t.
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There is, finally, a strategic reason to fill Day One to its very brim. The New York Times can fit only so much outrage above the A1 fold. MSNBC has only so much airtime. Given today’s media environment, it is just good politics to govern by fire hose rather than sprinkler. Keep your opponents off balance, overwhelm them with action, and let the courts sort it out as they will. That isn’t the America the Founding Fathers envisioned. It’s just the one we’ve got.
The Right’s task at present is not just conserving the nation but restoring it, a business that will inevitably be time-consuming, controversial, and hard. On Day One, having scraped and clawed his way back to office, Trump should resume that work.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.