WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s first week in office isn’t yet over, but he fulfilled his plan to “flood the zone” with a deluge of executive actions designed to sweep in his second term and wash away the Biden era.
If Americans are feeling the sense of “shock and awe” Trump advisers say they hoped to instill, they should not be surprised. These actions — from beginning the process of deporting undocumented immigrants to pardoning political supporters and repealing dozens of Biden’s executive orders — were largely included in Trump’s campaign agenda as he sought a historic return to the Oval Office following his 2020 ouster. In short, Trump is serving his political base and settling old scores with new policies.
“We all have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder, no one bigger than him,” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich said in a telephone interview with NBC News.
But the Week 1 actions, which included mass pardons of the Jan. 6 convicts and anti-abortion activists, represented the low-hanging fruit. And while Trump is committed to controlling the narrative of his presidency by commanding attention at all times, he is already starting to see the challenges of implementing his agenda.
A federal judge this week temporarily blocked a first-day Trump order redefining the 14th Amendment’s grant of citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” On Thursday, Mexico refused to provide landing rights to a U.S. military plane loaded with deportees, according to two defense officials and a third person familiar with the situation. (A White House official said it was “an administrative issue and was quickly rectified.)
Trump’s prized Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official agency, has yet to really launch. One of its co-chairs, Vivek Ramaswamy, is departing to launch a gubernatorial bid in Ohio. The other, billionaire SpaceX chief Elon Musk, has spent time publicly fighting with other Trump supporters over policy, turf and personal differences.
When Trump announced his “Stargate” project for attracting private investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, Musk attacked the plan, sparking a social media fight with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, in reference to Softbank, which is OpenAI’s partner in the Stargate project. OpenAI and its ChatGPT compete with the Grok function on X.
Altman countered: “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies.”
The fracas forced Trump to weigh in, and he downplayed it as Musk battling “one of the people he happens to hate.”
Steve Bannon, who popularized the idea of radically restructuring government — “deconstructing the administrative state,” as he calls it — said Musk has been focused in the wrong direction in the early days of the administration.
“You don’t bring a Silicon Valley feud between two tech bros to the Roosevelt Room, which is 5 feet from the Oval Office and on the global stage,” said Bannon, who has also criticized Musk’s affinity for the high-skilled H-1B visa program as out of step with Trump’s “America First” platform. “You either keep it to yourself or tell it to him privately.”
Musk should keep his eyes on the massive assignment of cutting the down the federal footprint, Bannon added.
“We all want DOGE to win, but you gotta show results. To deconstruct the administrative state and to radically slash government spending, you need something like DOGE in combination with [the Office of Management and Budget],” Bannon said. “Now we have to deliver, and I’m afraid we’re burning daylight.”
Still, Trump’s aides and allies are pleased with what they describe as a highly successful opening to the presidency that owes to the president’s urgency and his team’s preparation during the presidential transition period. It’s informed by the fact that Trump, the second president ever elected to nonconsecutive terms, is not eligible to seek re-election.
“The president knew exactly what he wanted to do and when he wanted to do it,” said one senior White House official. “There is a philosophy of action and unequivocating on our policy. … Some in the past have moderated in a way that they thought was more sustainable. But the reality for the president is we’re on a time crunch for action.”
Part of Trump’s plan is to “flood the zone” with actions that make it difficult for any individual move to receive the scrutiny it might get under normal circumstances, said one Trump ally familiar with his plans going into the presidency.
He has gotten some help in that from a favorably stacked, Republican-led Congress. Three of his most controversial nominees will all have their confirmation hearings at the same time next week: Kash Patel for director of the FBI; Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services.
Among his acts of retribution: revoking security details for several former federal officials.
Trump is already restructuring the federal workforce in dramatic fashion. Dozens of national security officials were sent home from White House jobs this week as Trump seeks to ensure that only loyalists are in his proximity. He signed an order on his first day in office reimplementing his “Schedule F” plan, which makes it easier to fire thousands of federal workers. On Friday, he said he was considering shutting down the Federal Emergency Management Agency — a move that would require congressional action.
“As the Cabinet fills out, they will also be ready with the same activity level, same motivation to go and deliver, and so I think we’ll lean on them and we’ll continue to do eye-catching and exciting things,” the White House official said. “We’re going to look for ways that really capture the policy in events and a visual to everything that we’re trying to accomplish.”
The ally familiar with Trump’s transition planning said the evidence so far suggests that Trump and his team believe they have a mandate to enact his full agenda.
“You don’t pardon 1,600 J6 prisoners unless you feel that you won’t get any backlash that you cannot recover from,” the ally said.
