Trump cuts chaotic path in first weeks

Standing before a mourning nation following a tragic commercial airline crash that killed nearly 70 people in Washington, D.C., President Trump offered his somber condolences and said everyone was “searching for answers.”

He then insinuated, without evidence, that diversity hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration — and the politics of his Democratic predecessors — were to blame.

“I signed something last week that was an executive order, very powerful one, restoring the high standards of air traffic controllers — and others by the way,” Trump said. “We have to have our smartest people. It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are.”

In an instant, Trump had gone from consoling leader to partisan firebrand and turned a national tragedy into one more opportunity to push his favorite political narrative — that diversity-minded, “woke” liberalism is ruining the country and that he alone can end it, namely through unilateral executive orders from the Oval Office.

It was a breach of presidential decorum — and right in line with the rest of his tumultuous first two weeks back in the White House.

In that time, Trump has repeatedly bucked the Constitution and other legal limits on executive power, pursuing a conservative agenda aligned with his own campaign promises but also the Project 2025 blueprint he assiduously distanced himself from in the lead-up to the election.

Among other things, Trump has targeted the rights and protections for immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, fired government watchdogs and other career civil servants he perceived as insufficiently loyal, and tried to freeze an array of federal funding already appropriated by Congress for some of the nation’s — and the world’s — poorest and most vulnerable people.

He also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people who stormed the U.S. Capitol to hold him illegitimately in power in 2021, joked about again holding on to power into a third term despite being constitutionally precluded from doing so, and announced plans to put 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

Trump began issuing edicts immediately upon taking office Jan. 20 and has kept up a steady stream since, the result of years of prep work by him and his team — including several architects of Project 2025 — to hit the ground running in his second term, unlike his first.

“They had a very clear plan and they’ve executed on it very quickly,” said Ben Olinsky, senior vice president of structural reform and governance at the liberal Center for American Progress. “They wanted to proceed with the ‘shock and awe’ approach.”

The strategy — outlined in dozens of unilateral executive orders, many with vague parameters and unclear reach — sparked widespread fear, confusion and anger among average Americans, local and state leaders, federal program managers and entire industries and nonprofit networks, leaving chaos in its wake.

In one example, the White House budget office on Tuesday issued a directive purporting to halt federal funding for a slew of government programs nationwide, causing immediate disruptions. States reported being shut out of their Medicaid reimbursement systems and problems with Head Start and child development block grants, among other issues.

The uproar came from red and blue states alike, though Democrats were particularly apoplectic. In a letter to House members, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) dubbed the plan the “Republican Ripoff” and said it was an “unprecedented assault” that would hurt average Americans financially.

“Republicans are ripping off hardworking Americans by stealing taxpayer dollars, grants and financial assistance as part of their corrupt scheme to pay off billionaire donors and wealthy corporations,” Jeffries wrote.

California and other states sued to block the order. The week before, they had sued to block another order purporting to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants — a policy Trump said he had “no apologies” for despite a federal judge declaring it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

On Wednesday, the administration swiftly walked back the funding freeze, issuing a second order rescinding the first. However, the confusion persisted after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X that the second order was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze” outlined in the first — just a way to “end any confusion” caused by a court order that nonprofit organizations had won the evening prior to bar the first directive from taking effect.

Attorneys for the coalition of states promptly cited Leavitt’s post to win a second court order temporarily halting the freeze.

The administration also partially walked back a separate order halting foreign aid, after similar uproar mounted overseas, including over the abrupt cancellation of lifesaving HIV treatments for people in developing nations, including children.

Trump has praised his start back in office, claiming to have made swift progress on immigration in particular, which he recently told a meeting of Republicans was his top campaign priority — more so than inflation and the economy. He has also expressed frustration with the Senate’s pace in confirming his Cabinet appointees, and resistance among Democrats to some of his picks.

“We want fast confirmations,” he said Thursday. “They’ve taken too long.”

Many Republicans have backed Trump through his first weeks, and on some of his more controversial orders — including the funding freeze.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said it was “not unusual for an administration to pause funding and to take a hard look and scrub of how these programs are being spent,” and he gave the administration credit for having “taken certain things off the table” and added “clarity” to their orders as discussions over funding and budget priorities have continued with conservative lawmakers.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called Trump’s freeze “a common application of common sense” and said, “I fully support it.”

Many of Trump’s followers have rejoiced in the changes, too, praising him for making good on his campaign promises. Some reveled online in the fact that Trump’s pronouncements seemed to be overwhelming Democrats, the media and the liberal activist networks that have so often tried to thwart his plans in the past.

Public polling indicated Americans generally have mixed feelings — and “aren’t ideologues,” said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow emeritus at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Rather, they have nuanced thoughts about political issues that don’t always match up perfectly with either of the two major political parties.

Many Americans are in favor of strengthening border security and ramping up immigration enforcement, for example, but majorities opposed Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists and his decision to leave the Paris climate accord, recent polling has indicated. Americans support efforts to rein in federal spending, but a majority opposed replacing career civil servants with loyalists, according to a recent AP-NORC poll.

They also believe it’s a bad idea for the president to rely on billionaires for advice.

A danger for Trump is if Americans start to feel that his actions are too extreme, or that he is “overreaching,” Bowman said. At the same time, many Americans “want to get things done” after a decade or more of sluggish legislative progress in Congress, and that could go in his favor as he purports to take bold action, she said.

“Perhaps he’s getting a lot done. Perhaps he’s going too far,” Bowman said. “Its going to take a while to see where things settle — as it always does.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have kept up their attacks. On Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she was pleased the budget freeze had been rescinded — and blocked in court — but that Trump’s raft of other executive orders were still holding up billions in funding for critical infrastructure and other projects.

“There is still far too much chaos on the ground,” she said.

Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), one of Trump’s most vocal critics during his first term, blasted him for his Jan. 6 pardons, said his firing of inspectors general without giving notice to Congress broke the law, and condemned several of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Kash Patel for FBI director and Pam Bondi for attorney general.

After Leavitt’s X post added confusion to the federal funding freeze debate, Schiff said he didn’t know what her post meant and didn’t believe the Trump administration understood, either.

“The chaos isn’t a design flaw — it’s the goal — to sow confusion, and never mind the impact on fire victims, small businesses or seniors,” he said.

California Sen. Adam B. Schiff, shown at a hearing Thursday, says the chaos “is the goal — to sow confusion.”

(Ben Curtis / Associated Press)

Experts in federal governance and constitutional law agreed the swift rollout of so many new policies by the Trump administration was no accident, but in line with a broader strategy to “flood the zone” with many major policy moves at once, in part to spread thin any potential resistance.

Mitchel Sollenberger, a political science professor at University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of several books on executive powers, said Trump’s early wave of executive orders was not an “anomaly” historically, as other presidents have done the same.

However, Sollenberger said he had to “marvel” at the sophistication and sweep of the Trump administration’s approach, which he said advanced old Republican ideas about executive power and even immigration in new and startling ways.

“I don’t think you’ve seen anything this wide-ranging — in terms of the policy areas being touched, and I would say the level of sophistication with the policy objections trying to be reached here — coming from a president so early in the term,” Sollenberger said.

He said he would be watching closely to see how the courts interpret Trump’s power grabs, and how they view his administration’s framing of immigration as an “invasion” and a national security issue.

Deborah Pearlstein, a professor of constitutional law and director of the Program in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University, said Trump and his team came into the White House with a plan to overwhelm the opposition and seize more power — one “authoritarian regimes all over the world have used.”

“It was clear from everything he said, the campaign said, the campaign documents said, as he was running for office and campaigning for office, that there was a plan or a desire to systematically undo all the checks, legal and otherwise, that exist in the American system to constrain the president,” Pearlstein said.

The administration is trying to “put that plan into effect” now, she said — though they are running into “two giant problems.”

The first, she said, is that they are “trying to do too much too fast with people who don’t have, some of them, a huge amount of expertise or experience with any of this,” which has led to sloppy orders that have confused and riled average Americans.

The second problem for the administration — and a good thing for American democracy, Pearlstein said — is that “there are laws and rules and institutions responsible for enforcing them that prohibit some of what they want to do.”

As evidenced by the reaction to the funding freeze, pushback from those institutions — from states, Congress, courts and nonprofit organizations — and from the wider American public has clearly begun and can be effective, she said. But “whether and how those institutions continue to push back is a huge question.”

Pearlstein said she worries the most about moves by Trump to consolidate power, including by pulling the federal purse strings away from Congress and clearing career civil servants out of the government in favor of his own loyalists, and will be watching how the courts handle those issues carefully.

She said the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has an expansive view of executive powers, particularly in foreign affairs and national security, but has not always ruled in Trump’s favor and may still be an important constraint.

She said others must watch for and speak out on oversteps by the Trump administration in their own fields of expertise.

“Every person can’t chase every ball, so you have to find ways of prioritizing and distributing the social democratic work of pushing back,” she said. “That’s where I think civil society can be particularly effective.”