President-elects pledges put him on course for major overhaul of federal government, representing tectonic shift for American society
President-elect Donald Trump's first day in office is shaping up to represent a tectonic shift in the direction of American society, at least if his public pronouncements are any indication.
Trump himself has pledged not to be a dictator “except for day one,” a reflection of his desire to carry out a major overhaul of the federal government via a broad array of unprecedented policies and the firing of potentially thousands of its employees. He has also vowed to authorize plans for mass deportations, step up fossil fuel extraction, pardon his supporters who were convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, put an end to a pair of federal cases against him, and bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table.
And that's just what he plans for his Day One.
“You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” Fox New host Sean Hannity asked Trump in December 2023.
“This guy, he says, ‘You're not going to be a dictator, are you?'” Trump said in response to Hannity. “I said, ‘No, no, no – other than Day One.' We're closing the border. And we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator.”
Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Trump would enact dozens of executive orders as soon as he is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.
"We know that he promised to sign an executive order to secure the southern border, something the Harris-Biden administration has refused to do," Leavitt said Sunday. "We know that on Day One he's going to launch the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants in American history."
But based on what Trump has said he would do, the list of his Day One priorities extends far beyond that.
- Firing thousands of feds
The incoming president has for nearly a decade loudly criticized the US federal workforce, accusing it of being a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy, and, at times, also of being a home for a group that has worked to undermine his agenda, a group he calls the “deep state.”
“We will demolish the deep state,” he said dozens of times during his 2024 reelection campaign.
In the last year of his first term, Trump enacted an executive order known as “Schedule F” to convert some nonpolitical civil service employees to political jobs, which would make it far easier to fire them. He could well attempt to revive the order after President Joe Biden rescinded it, which would put an estimated 50,000 employees squarely in the crosshairs.
But doing so all but guarantees that aggrieved workers and Democrats would launch legal challenges that could tie Trump up in court for years.
Union contacts that have been struck during the Biden administration, as well as a rule put into place in April by the Office of Personnel Management making it more difficult to reclassify public civil servants, and could further complicate any effort to purge the federal workforce, or at the very least, slow them down.
- Mass deportations
Trump has also vowed to launch the largest mass deportation of migrants in US history, and has selected a team of immigration hardliners to oversee his crackdown.
“On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out," he said during an October political rally in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden where a comedian called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” and made lewd comments about Latino and reproduction.
"I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible,” added Trump, striking an anti-immigrant chord he has stressed since the official beginning of his 2016 presidential run.
In order to carry out his crackdown, Trump has selected Tom Homan to be his next “border czar,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to be the next homeland security secretary, and longtime ally Stephen Miller as his White House deputy chief of staff for policy.
Miller and Homan are both veterans in immigration policy, having served in the first Trump administration. They were instrumental in Trump's “family separation” policy that removed migrant children from their parents, in a policy meant to instill fear among those mulling further illegal crossings of the US border, as well as other key immigration policies. Thousands of children separated from their parents under that policy reportedly still have yet to be reunited.
Noem, for her part, is a longtime Trump loyalist who has been a vocal proponent of immigration crackdowns, including her calls for so-called “sanctuary cities” that refused to cooperate on immigration during Trump's first term to be punished.
About 11 million people are believed to be currently living in the US illegally, down from a peak of roughly 12.2 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.
- Pardoning Jan. 6 rioters
Trump has long pledged to pardon many of those who have been convicted of crimes related to their actions on Jan. 6, 2021 when a drove of the president-elect's supporters overran the US Capitol, assaulting law enforcement as they smashed their way into the national legislature in an attempt to block President Joe Biden from assuming office.
The president-elect has refused to acknowledge the mayhem that unfolded that day, calling the rioters who sent lawmakers running for secure locations “great patriots,” and mischaracterizing the Jan. 6 attack, which the FBI has dubbed as an act of domestic terrorism, as “a day of love.”
“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” he said during an interview with CNN. “I can't say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”
As president, Trump will wield the power to pardon individuals of federal crimes they have been convicted of, or grant them commutations, effectively cutting short their prison sentences.
Over 1,500 people have been criminally charged for their actions that day, including 571 who were charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding police, and 164 who were charged with using a deadly weapon or seriously injuring a police officer, according to the latest figures from the US Attorney's Office in Washington, DC.
Over 940 people have pleaded guilty, and nearly 200 others were found guilty in court.
It is unclear who among the convicts Trump is considering for pardon.
- Putting an end to pair of federal cases against him
Trump has repeatedly bemoaned special counsel Jack Smith, and the pair of federal cases he is overseeing related to the president-elect's decision to keep classified records in his possession after leaving office in 2021, and later lying to investigators about them, as well as Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“It's so easy. I would fire him within two seconds. He'll be one of the first things addressed,” Trump said during an October interview with the Hugh Hewitt Show.
That may be moot under long-standing Justice Department policy, however, which prohibits a sitting president from facing indictment or prosecution while in office.
Moreover, CBS News reported that Smith is planning to resign before Trump assume office in January, and said his office has already begun the process to wind down the cases.
- Bringing Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table
Trump has made the rather bold claim that he could end Russia's nearly three-year war against Ukraine in one day, a suggestion met with skepticism in both Moscow and Kyiv.
“They're dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I'll have that done in 24 hours,” Trump said during a CNN town hall in 2023.
It is unclear how he would accomplish this. Leavitt, his spokesperson, said on Fox News last week that Trump would “on Day One” bring “Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end this war.”
Russia now controls about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, as Ukraine has gained a major foothold in Russia's Kursk region, in a move aimed at strengthening its hand in any potential negotiations to end the conflict.
Ukraine has insisted that any end to the war be based on the borders established by its 1991 declaration of independence, which includes the Crimean Peninsula, an area Russia has occupied since 2014 – a move called illegal by the UN General Assembly, the EU, Türkiye, the US, and many other countries. Russia has refused to entertain the idea of returning it, or the eastern Ukrainian provinces it also controls, to Kyiv.
- A promise made is not necessarily a promise kept
If Trump's first term is any indication, many of his "Day One" pledges will likely not be fulfilled, at least not immediately.
While he was able to enact a federal hiring freeze and withdraw from an Asia-Pacific trade pact on the first day of his first term, many of Trump's other promises were not immediately met, while others went unfulfilled throughout his first four years.
That includes Trump's effort to repeal former President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare law, which was never accomplished despite it being a rallying cry for Republicans since it went into effect in 2010, and survived a Supreme Court challenge two years later. So too did efforts to block federal funds from "sanctuary cities."
Trump was, however, able to secure not just one Supreme Court nominee, but three – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – during his first term, solidifying the court's powerful conservative majority, as well as re-negotiate the North American free trade pact known as NAFTA.
