Executive orders of magnitude: Trump’s day one

0:28The Economist We take two looks at what was said and what was signed, tapping first into the feeling in Washington and then an international view on what might shake the world order. And, not gonna lie, we thought you might like a little light relief after all that trumpery. So we're going to look into plushies. Young people in particular are kind of weirdly into stuffed animals these days, and boy are they willing to pay up to get some.

1:01First up, though, to Washington.

1:10And we're back. I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute. That I will faithfully execute. The office of President of the United States. The office of President of the United States. And will, to the best of my... You'll have heard Mr. Trump say these words before. In fact, you'll be hearing him repeat lots of things. Some said in his first term, some said on the campaign trail that, in effect, stretches all the way back to then. But it's not as if nothing has changed. Look at who got prime seats at the inauguration. Look at how few protesters were nearby. How few dissenting voices within the Republican Party were still around.

1:51And, and I'm not looking for symbolism here, I promise, but just look at the weather. Donald Trump was inaugurated inside the Capitol. It's very cold here in Washington, and so the ceremony unusually was held inside. John Priddo is our United States editor and hosts Checks and Balance, our subscriber-only sister show on American politics. It was a very formal ceremony, and that was quite a contrast with what was happening in that same space four years ago, when a mob of people who thought that Congress was going to steal the election result from Donald Trump broke into the rotunda and smashed it up.

2:32Perhaps the strangest thing about this inauguration then is how normal it felt. How so? I was in Washington, D.C. in January 2017 for Donald Trump's first inauguration. Nobody quite knew what was going to happen. He didn't have a background in politics. He didn't have a lot in the way of policy pledges. He didn't have a team ready to go. And he had had a norm-breaking presidential campaign. This time around, he's still radical in many ways, but people kind of know what they think they're going to get from Donald Trump. And yet we've all been looking forward to the inaugural address as a kind of bellwether for what we're actually going to get this time around.

3:13What was your take? The single line that stood out to me most from the speech was about the Panama Canal, which is quite a strange thing to stand out in an inaugural address. Totally violated American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form. He said about the Panama Canal, we will take it back. And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama and we're taking it back.

3:49And that is quite striking coming from an American president. I don't think Donald Trump means he's going to send in the 82nd Airborne, as George H.W. Bush did in the late 1980s to Panama to take it back by force. But that was kind of the impression that he got. And it was an impression reinforced in other parts of the speech where he talked about America's manifest destiny, which is an old 19th century theme in American history about conquering and taming the whole of the continent. The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.

4:31He talked about Manifest Destiny and said that one of the things that was important to him was that America should always be a growing nation. It should be expanding its territory now like it expanded its territory in the 19th century. Not to the same extent, perhaps, but the idea is the same. That is a very old idea of American greatness. It's really a throwback to William McKinley, who President Trump mentioned a couple of times favorably. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman. McKinley was president at the end of the 19th century, at a time when America's territory expanded.

5:17He was also extremely keen on tariffs and had backing from a lot of the wealthiest Americans in the Gilded Age. In McKinley's age, those wealthy entrepreneurs were people like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. In Donald Trump, the Golden Age, as he described it, his new golden age, There were people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom were at Trump's inauguration. There was another striking moment when he talked about going to Mars and planting the American flag on Mars. And at that moment, Elon Musk, whose own goal is to make mankind a multi-planetary species, was delighted and gave a double thumbs up.

5:59And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.

6:12Most people who ran big American businesses in 2016 and 2017 were opposed to Donald Trump. Silicon Valley's courting him this time around, and he seems to be really enjoying it. I want to move on to what I guess we could call the meat and potatoes of Trump's campaign themes culture war stuff like transgender issues DEI that kind of stuff were there nods to all of that that did come up in the inauguration speech it also came up in the executive orders that Donald Trump has signed executive orders are edicts issued by the White House about how the executive branch will interpret laws so Congress passes the laws and then the executive branch the presidency has to implement those laws, but it has some leeway in how it does so.

6:57And so Donald Trump on day one signed a lot of executive orders. Some of them do have a bearing on what he calls wokeness and reversing that. There was one about making it America's official government policy that there's only two genders. It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

7:25And of course, the meatiest of the campaigns, meat and potatoes, was immigration. What were the kind of opening moves on that? On immigration, there were several really specific executive orders that were signed. And I think you can put them in a couple of buckets, really. One is restoring policies as they were in his first term. So he declared an emergency at the southern border, which sounds like a sort of big, scary, alarming move. But in practice, what it does is make it easier for the executive branch to move money around. So it'll make it a bit easier for Donald Trump to fund further construction of the wall.

8:04All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. we will reinstate my remain in Mexico policy. Remain in Mexico will come back in the second term. That's a policy under which people who want to apply for asylum in the United States from the southern border have to have their cases processed in Mexico. Then there were some policies that were a bit more out there. So one of those I'd single out is trying to end birthright citizenship. This next order relates to the definition of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the United States.

8:50It's ridiculous. We're the only country in the world that does this with birthright, as you know. We have very good ground. People have wanted to do this for decades. I think that is very likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court. And there's already a lawsuit that's been filed to challenge that. But from Donald Trump's point of view, he'll be able to say, I made this promise to strike down birthright citizenship, and I've done it. Actually, John, there were a lot of day one promises, namely about some pretty serious tariffs, but we're going to come on to that later. What about the promise to pardon the people who were convicted of crimes related to the storming of the Capitol?

9:31After he was sworn in and gave his inauguration speech, he went off to the Capitol One arena where the Washington Wizards basketball team play. and he gave what was essentially a campaign speech. Thank you very much, everybody. Appreciate it. Thank you. But one feature of it, which was pretty extraordinary, he had the families of some of the people who had been held hostage by Hamas in Gaza and he talked about bringing them home. So now the work begins. We won, we won, but now the work begins. We have to bring them home. And then in that context, he also talked about bringing people convicted in those January 6 cases home.

10:15And, you know, tonight I'm going to be signing on the J6 hostages' pardons to get them out. And as soon as I leave, I'm going to the Oval Office and we'll be signing pardons for a lot of people, a lot of people. drawing an analogy, I think, between those who've been imprisoned by Hamas and the January 6ers. I guess the high-level question here is how much of this is political theatre, promises kept, job done, that kind of thing, and how much of it is actual policy that'll stick, a meaningful sign of what's to come. Right now, Donald Trump is at the peak of his power. He has never been above 50 % on his approval ratings, either when he was in office or when and he was out of office now.

11:08He's as close as he's ever been, so his approval rating is the highest it's ever been. He dominates the Republican Party to an extraordinary degree. That said, to make enduring change in America, you have to pass legislation rather than issue executive orders. Many of Donald Trump's executive orders issued yesterday overturned Joe Biden's executive orders, which in turn, back in 2020 on day one, were overturning Donald Trump executive orders. So executive orders come and go, but to really change the country, you need to pass legislation. Republicans have the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives since the 1930s and a small majority in the Senate.

11:46It's going to be quite hard to make really big changes. John, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Jason. I had a lot more questions for John. There's a lot of tea leaf reading to be done here. But as he reminded me, he'll be talking all about the inauguration and the first couple of days of the new administration on this week's episode of Checks and Balance, so make sure to catch that. For a view that was more outside looking into day one of Trump too, I asked Edward Carr, the Economist's deputy editor, what he made of the inaugural address. I think in this speech, Trump sent two very contradictory messages.

12:28The first was that he wanted to be a peacemaker and very much an embrace of that view that through American strength, peace comes. But the other was this language about taking the Panama Canal and knocking aside anybody who got in his way. There's a real tension between those two images. In one sense, it's reassuring that America's going out to try and make the world a more peaceful place. It's not going to start wars. But another is it's quite disconcerting because there will be no rules. Do you think that was Mr. Trump just trying to nod to the tradition of a moment of unity in American politics, but then sort of reverting to form?

13:10I don't really. I mean, I think he showed some restraint, as was clear when he went down and gave other speeches later on that day. He said he'd taken out various lines at the behest of JD and Melania because he didn't want to upset people. But really, that wasn't a graceful speech. As Biden and Harris were sitting there next to him, he was absolutely rubbishing. everything they've done and calling them to betrayal. So I don't think really one looks to Trump for niceties and traditions. When he says he doesn't want to start wars and send troops abroad, I think he really means it. That's what his base wants.

13:43But when he says America's going to be strong and no one had better get in his way and its way, then I think he means that too. Very striking, isn't it? That when Kennedy talked about the space program, obviously within the context of the space race with Russia, but he talked about the manifest destiny of the whole of humanity. With Trump, he felt this was very much a national project. And getting away from the broad brushstroke stuff and down to the nitty gritty, what we didn't hear about and what we didn't see in the first slew of executive orders was anything on tariffs, something we talked quite a lot about before the election.

14:16What do you make of that and what do you still expect? Yeah, that was interesting, wasn't it? He made it clear, talking about this new way of accounting for external revenue, the new Department of External Revenue, he made it clear that he expects tariffs to raise a lot of money. So he didn't back down from that. But he'd been threatening to have universal tariffs from day one. And indeed, later on that day, he did talk about imposing tariffs of 25 % on Canada and Mexico. And sure enough, the peso and the Canadian dollar reacted strongly to that news. But at the same time, he also set up this group to study the nature of trade and the consequences.

14:54So what do you conclude from that? I think you conclude that tariffs are still coming. Perhaps he didn't introduce them because he didn't want to unsettle markets on the day of his inauguration and he wants to wait a bit. Perhaps it's a sign that he wants to use tariffs as leverage rather than to impose them blanket, which is possibly a good sign. But of course, if you use something for leverage enough, then at a certain point, you do actually have to introduce them. So there will be something going on there. So to me, it means there will possibly quite soon be movement on tariffs, but he didn't want to get into it for various cosmetic reasons and reasons to maximise his leverage.

15:33I suppose one of the surprising things that didn't show up was the notion of China, which has been such a focus in the first administration. Yes, it was very interesting that China barely featured in this address. And all the more surprising because this was an address that really was more like a State of the Union occasion where the president goes through various policy areas and says how brilliant he is. It was like that, rather than the kind of classic inaugural address where you try and date out some guiding philosophy. So it was surprising that China wasn't mentioned more. The only time it really came up with some passion, actually, was in the passage about the Panama Canal, where President Trump said he was furious that China seemed to be running the canal and getting a good deal.

16:15Never mind about the details. That was the only place. But I think we shouldn't conclude from that that he doesn't care about China. I think underneath all of this is his whole approach to foreign policy is this belief that through strength comes peace, that America has for too long been struggling in the world with one hand tied behind its back. He's going to go to maximise American power. American power will show China that it shouldn't be aggressive in the world, and that is the way to avoid what he himself and people around him have been talking about, the imminent threat of a third world war.

16:50If one of the abiding themes here is American power and what that can do unto itself in the world, what do you make of the idea that day one priorities did get ticked off, like leaving the WHO, like committing to leave the Paris Climate Agreement? Well, I think that's quite consistent. My personal view is that that is not something I think serves America well. There are two reasons for that. One is that there are genuinely global problems like climate change, like pandemics, in which a coordinating body is really useful and vital. But the other is that China and Russia understand that fact and they will want to try and warp those bodies towards their own purposes.

17:34I personally think it's surrendering ground that America's opponents will gladly occupy, and then that these institutions will start to serve China's purposes more than America's. So if you're a world leader anywhere outside of America, what do you read from yesterday's events in Toto? For me, the really striking thing about this inaugural speech compared with 2017 was how completely in control Trump seemed. In 2017, he was still a bit of an outsider. He was still a bit uncertain. There was resentment there. He seemed to resent Washington. Here, he was utterly dominant and clear about what he wants to do.

18:14And if I was a world leader, I think that's an alarming prospect. Edward, thanks very much for your time. Thanks very much, Jason.

18:39Hi, I'm Nicole Phan and I have a confession to make. I write about culture and other things, but recently I've also started collecting soft toys. And I can see you brought some along with you today, Nicole. Introduce me to your friends. Yes, sure. Well, Rosie, these aren't just any soft toys either. They're actually soft toys with huge cult followings. So this little rabbit here is a Mephi, and this little impishielding creature is a Labubu. Now, I know it might seem slightly weird for someone in her 20s to be owning these, but trust me, soft toys, also known as plushies, are the latest rage, especially amongst Gen Zs and millennials.

19:24I was going to ask what's going on there, Nicole, because I also brought some along with me today. You can meet my panda and my sheep and my favourite, my mini, Bai Cai, my cabbage. But I had to raid my kids' rooms to get these. And I have the feeling that's not the case with you, Nicole, right? So what's going on? Yeah, you're completely right. I fully and proudly own these by myself. It's become a huge trend, plush toys. So on TikTok, videos tagged plushies have amassed around 8 billion views. Stampedes have broken out outside malls. Thefts have even been committed. And I know while all this fuss might seem quite childish, it's actually mainly adults rather than kids who are buying up all these expensive toys.

20:10Nicole, I have to confess that my hand has hovered over a plushy avocado once, but I was put off by the price. I mean, they're really expensive. Yeah, they're really costly. You're right. And the prices of these toys can vary quite widely, but they're generally not cheap, especially because fans just don't stop at buying one. So take Squishmallows, for example. These plum egg-shaped stuffed animals are global best sellers and people can spend hundreds of dollars just building up their collections. So now while the normal Squishmallows cost around$10 to$30, limited editions are extremely pricey.

20:48Like there's this really rare black cat one that's sold on the secondhand market for over$1 ,000. And that kind of demand reflects a much bigger market. Off the back of a surge in sales, Plush Toys brought in nearly$12 billion globally in 2023. And the industry is growing really fast, projected to expand by 8 % annually in the next five years. Even investors like Warren Buffett have taken note. He added the parent company of Squishmallows to his business empire, calling it a money-making gem. So a limited edition Squishmallow costing$1 ,000 seems to be out of the reach of most 20-somethings. Well, you're right.

21:29So grown-ups account for around a quarter of toy sales globally, and they even surpassed preschoolers as the biggest buyers for the first time last year. And if anything, the steep prices aren't putting them off, but only making it more enticing. It's like getting a coveted concert ticket or a really rare trading card. having a popular plushie, no matter how expensive it costs, means owning a piece of the hype, especially because celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Blackpink's Lisa have also amplified the trend. And because more adults defer or decide against having children, many have found themselves with more money to indulge in these little luxuries instead that they claim are sort of healing their inner child and helping them to reconnect with their younger selves.

22:15And companies are really leaning into this, aren't they? I mean, I'm thinking about the fluffy cabbage I showed you just now. And actually, dare I show you a fluffy onion as well. Who knew that a soft toy onion was a thing? But it's no longer just teddy bears and kittens, right? You can buy all manner of things as a plush soft toy. That's completely true. And I don't know if you've seen this, but the jelly cat craze has also really taken over around the world. So jelly cats are these really cute stuffed animals. They started off as stuffed animals, but now they've expanded into things like, as you mentioned, your avocado, your sao bai cai, and your onions.

22:58And basically in these little pop-up stores around the world, they started pretending to even cook these items. And people really love it and have been snapping it up. So it's become a real experience that just goes beyond the teddy bears to things like stuffed fish and chips or stuffed macaroons. So where does any of this end up, Nicole? Are we going to have bring your stuffed toy to work day or walk your stuffed toy? Where's it going? Possibly. If we could all lobby for that, I'd very much be happy to have that. But I think for right now, people have just been really loving tooting them around on their bags or showing them off online.

23:39On one level, plushies really offer them a form of emotional comfort and emotional joy. And it really makes sense if you think about where the whole trend really started. It kind of kicked off during the pandemic when people were stuck at home and sort of navigating feelings of uncertainty and in some cases distress. But also it's become a bit of a luxury good and a luxury item for people to show off. So the toys are essentially little status symbols, albeit really slightly strange but very cute ones. Thank you so much, Nicole. I wish you and your growing family much happiness. Same to you, Rosie.

24:18I'll tell you when I next add another Miffy to my collection.

24:39That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.