Circus Back in Town

True to form, the day Trump took over, he announced a slew of executive orders.

 

One executive order reclassifies thousands of government employees as political hires. This will make it easier to fire those employees. And make that entire category of employees have their employment tied to who the President of the day happens to be. Trump had done this during his first term, Biden rescinded it, now Trump reinstates it.

 

Take the decision to withdraw the US from the 2015 climate change agreement. Wait, didn’t Trump already do that in his first term? Yes, he did and then Biden un-did it, and Trump is now re-doing it, dismissing Biden’s policies on clean energy as “the new green scam”.

 

Related to that, Trump has declared a “national energy emergency”. What does that really mean? It will allow the government to fast-track energy fossil-fuel projects.

 

On similar lines, he revoked Biden’s (non-binding) order to have half of US vehicles go electric by 2030. This one is surprising – isn’t one of his biggest backers Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, the electric car company?

 

Trump also passed an order about the Mexico border, though it is not clear how that problem can be solved at all. At the same time, he intends to pardon many of those charged with the revolt that happened after the last election, which Trump had lost. (I guess Biden opened the door on that one by pardoning his son for past crimes and future indictments).

 

Strangely, for a man who is anti-China on everything, who tried to ban TikTok in the US, he has given a 75-day reprieve wrt banning it. His opponents wonder whether that’s because he himself is so popular on TikTok?

 

Another order is to cater to his right-wing vote bank – with Biden, America recognized all kinds of gender identities. To be clear, it was highly confusing to almost everyone else on the planet. Trump revoked all that and announced “only two genders, male and female”.

 

But fear not. Trump announced he would evoke such dictatorial powers (not really – he exercised constitutionally given powers) only on Day 1:

“After that, I’m not a dictator,” he said.”

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