Trump’s First Moves: Toward More War, Nothing for Workers
Donald Trump’s first executive orders should dispel any fantasy of him as either a noninterventionist or an economic populist.
President Donald Trump during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. (Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Monday was, as hard as this may be to remember, Martin Luther King Jr Day. An enormous number of schools all around the country were either closed or had assemblies where students heard about the life and accomplishments of the martyred civil rights crusader.
It was also the first day of Donald Trump’s second administration, and Trump signed an unprecedented number (twenty-six) of executive orders. Some were merely silly, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Others are vastly more ominous, like the order mandating far more aggressive use of the death penalty.
The worst of the lot attempts to deny citizenship to people born in the United States whose parents aren’t American citizens. While this isn’t a homogeneous group, a large majority is presumably composed of the children of people from Mexico and Central America, hence the long-standing hostility to “birthright” citizenship by immigration hawks who seek to reduce this population.
The legal ground on which Trump stands on this issue could hardly be any shakier. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution baldly states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That seems fairly clear.
The White House is trying to find legal wiggle room within the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but this makes no sense on its face (as well as contradicting more than a century of consistent legal precedents). It’s not as if either noncitizen immigrants or their American-born children have diplomatic immunity. A Mexican immigrant, with or without a green card, who’s accused of a non-immigration-related crime in the United States will definitely be treated by the police and the courts as “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” If Trump got his way and the estimated 150,000 children born in the United States to noncitizen parents every year were deprived of American citizenship, nothing would change in this regard.
The courts will almost certainly slap down this attempt to totally remake the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment by presidential fiat. Indeed, by Tuesday, twenty-two states were suing the president (in two separate lawsuits) to block the order. But it says everything about the Trump White House’s ugly plans for the next four years that one of the first acts of the newly sworn-in president was to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr Day by attempting to take away citizenship from millions of members of a racial and ethnic minority group.
A Grim Vision of the Next Four Years
Trump’s defenders often paint him as (a) an “anti-interventionist” in foreign policy and (b) an economic “populist” who sides with the working class (or at least the nonimmigrant portion of the working class) against “elites.” His track record during his first years in office is hard to square with either half of that picture, but many observers have let themselves dream that this time will be different. The day-one executive orders should dash this fantasy into a million pieces.
One order authorizes the domestic use of the military to stop the “invasion” of immigrants illegally crossing the US-Mexico border (although such crossings recently sunk to a four-year low). Even more ominously, another designates Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.” This could set the stage for exactly the kind of military intervention in Mexico that Trump has long contemplated in private and in public. Many of his most fervent supporters in the “MAGA wing” of the conservative movement make a big point of differentiating themselves from “neocons” and claiming to have learned from George W. Bush’s disastrous wars in the Middle East. Yet here, to a chorus of their cheers, we have President Trump repeating the basic Bush-era pattern of waving around the magic word “terrorism” to open up the door to military adventurism.
Another order canceled Joe Biden’s sanctions on the most violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who are apparently not “terrorists” despite their violent and politically motivated attacks on civilians. He also seems to be laying the legal groundwork to carry out his campaign promise to deport foreign students who participated in antiwar protests as Israel systematically drove millions of Gazans from their homes and killed more children in that tiny territory than had died in all the war zones in the world for years before.
Oh, and he restored the nonsensical designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” which Biden had lifted at the end of the term. No one has bothered to explain what “terrorism” Cuba is responsible for, but no explanation is necessary. Like his rambling in his inauguration speech about taking back the Panama Canal and his appointment of the extremely hawkish Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, it’s a sign that Trump plans to ferociously pursue American dominance of the empire’s historic “sphere of influence” in Latin America.
And if the orders make a mockery of “Trump the dove,” the same is true of “Trump the pro-worker populist.” America is the only country in the developed world and one of the only countries, period, that doesn’t mandate that bosses provide even one lousy day of paid time off. Our regime of labor laws is, by global standards, bizarrely unfavorable to workers trying to band together and organize for better wages and working conditions, and we accordingly have a staggeringly low rate of private sector unionization. But the only obviously labor-related executive order in that very large pile was one to . . . force federal employees whose bosses currently allow them to work remotely to return to the office full time.
Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and one of Trump’s closest associates, crowed on the social media platform he owns that this is “about fairness” since most workers in the private sector (even ones whose job tasks could easily be done this way) aren’t allowed to telecommute. The thought that fairness could be achieved by giving private sector workers more rather than public sector workers less is presumably unthinkable to Musk. “Fairness,” it seems, means a billionaire president tightening the screws on people who actually have to work for a living.
If these twenty-six orders are a good indication of what’s coming, and there’s no reason to think they’re not, we’re in for a grim four years.