Donald Trump is president, and he’s letting everyone know it with a flood of executive orders. Some of these "actions" are just plans to make plans; others are really important, though sometimes not in the way you think. Others are bait for legal challenges.

At the Prospect, we are dedicated to contextualizing and explaining, clearly and succinctly, what Trump is doing and who really benefits. On Tuesday, we began compiling a rolling tally of the most important executive orders and their meaning. We continue that work today. Keep checking back for updates throughout the day.

The executive orders from Trump, with several exceptions, fall into three buckets: rooting out and punishing domestic enemies inside the government, expanding American fossil fuel energy, and closing the southern border. For the last two, he has actually declared an emergency, and a lot of focus has been on the absurdity of the energy "emergency" at a time when U.S. energy production is at an all-time high. But while most people won’t say it, the border "emergency" is out of step with reality too.

Illegal immigration is actually down by substantial numbers over the last year, and Trump enters office with fewer border-crossers than at any point in the Biden administration, and below the average level of Trump’s first term. Proclaiming an emergency based on the dying embers in your brain is not enough; you actually have to demonstrate the scope of the crisis, and not just through random Fox News anecdotes. Much of this is due to a Biden executive order around asylum, but more so to cooperation with Mexico and a softer job market, which historically has been the dominant driver of immigration to the U.S.

But Trump disrupted the orderly process for immigration, creating the emergency he wants to dragoon the military into managing. He terminated the CBP One border app that was making asylum far more orderly. He wants to restore the "Remain in Mexico" policy to force asylum seekers to wait, but that requires cooperation with a Mexican government that doesn’t want this to happen. All this will only force desperate migrants to cross, providing images of crisis that are wholly self-created.

Trump wants to deploy the military for this "emergency" (a demand he had to buttress with a second executive order justifying its use), resume border wall construction (also buttressed with a second order), and build detention facilities as way stations for eventual deportation. It seems the latter two are the real goal, and I’m sure there are lots of suppliers of wall materials and private prison companies that are pleased by the news.

The humanitarian parole policies that let migrants from four countries into the U.S. will be terminated as well, and that’s where you see the human toll. We are damaging this country’s historical role as a vibrant location for human flourishing. But given that many Democrats are fully committed to collaboration on these points, I don’t suspect this will end soon, or well. –David Dayen

The new president’s executive order "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" is obviously in line with the evil genius of his campaign against Kamala Harris, promising that Trump would be for "you," the presumptively cisgender audience member, while Harris would only represent "they/them," because she once filled out a questionnaire saying that she favored transition medical care for federal prisoners.
The order starts by stating that by speaking of gender rather than, or in addition to, sex, something "corrosive" happens to women and to "the validity of the entire American system." Therefore, the administration offers that U.S. government policy shall henceforth be that there are two sexes, male and female. It sounds deeply anti-modernist, imbued with a general fear of that which is chosen by oneself as core to one’s identity, although I suppose that the immediate context is the effort to conjure anxieties about sexual violence and vulnerability in the shifting, nonobjective life of gender.

Most concretely, in Section 3, it directs the heads of the relevant federal agencies to stop issuing or revising passports, visas, and Global Entry cards to conform with the holder’s perceived gender, and to instead revert to sex assigned at birth. It directs the director of the Office of Personnel Management to do the same for all federal employees. These changes might seem small but are in fact very significant, deeply violating thousands of people’s sense of identity and often leaving people with official documents that are so far from representing who they are and how they appear in public as to make the documents useless. Inaccurate official documents can make moments at which they must be produced occasions for possible abuse and terrible anxiety. (I have been thinking about these issues for a long time but was alerted to the importance of this piece of the puzzle by Erin Reed, aka "Erin in the Morning.")

In Section 4, "Privacy in Intimate Spaces," it denies transgender federal prisoners access to incarceration in spaces appropriate to their gender—in its words, keeping "males" out of "women’s prisons." It also deprives federal prisoners access to "any medical procedure, treatment, or drug" related to gender transition, a policy that seems likely to result in forced detransitioning for those who receive hormone therapies on a regular basis.

The Orwellian Section 5, "Protecting Rights," promises to defend the "freedom to express the binary nature of sex" by directing federal agencies to prioritize "investigations and litigation" in service of binary gender. As we all fear who and what might be investigated under a Trump B-side FBI, we should also follow closely who and what will be targeted for their openness to transgender and nonbinary gender expression.

The order dissolves the White House Gender Policy Council and ends with directives to the Department of Education to rescind a long list of advisory documents, e.g., on "Supporting LGBTQI+ Youth and Families in School" and "Supporting Intersex Students," which just left me sad.

Within 120 days, each federal agency will need to submit an update on its progress along these lines, so I guess executive administrative agencies will last at least that long and have at least that important role to fulfill. The president has asked, too, for proposed legislation within 30 days.

As a cisgender woman and a feminist, I feel safer already. –Felicia Kornbluh

An oddly worded executive order directs the Treasury secretary and other officials to withdraw the U.S. from what the order calls the OECD "Global Tax Deal." It is unusual for presidents to use slang in executive orders, but then this is Trump. The order presumably refers to an agreement called the global minimum tax (GMT).

The GMT was agreed to in 2021 after extensive negotiations under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It is intended mainly to reduce corporate tax-shifting to very low-tax jurisdictions, which costs nations with reasonable rates a lot of revenue.

The GMT commits signatory nations to a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent. Some 135 nations have agreed to the GMT, including the U.S., though U.S. participation was never formally ratified.

In 2022, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. complied with the spirit of the GMT by including in the IRA a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion. This provision is a very small offset to the 2017 Trump-sponsored Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, reducing revenue by $919 billion over ten years. The 2022 measure is projected to raise $222 billion over ten years.

The 2022 law is on the books until Congress changes it, and can’t be rescinded by an executive order. But this certainly shows that it’s in the crosshairs on the next tax deal. And it signals a willingness to fight for multinationals that want to engage in continued tax evasion. Without U.S. cooperation, expect slippage on the global minimum tax, and free rein for the oligarchy to find wider pockets to park their cash. –Robert Kuttner

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