Trump signing slew of executive orders shows hes learned how to truly hit the ground running

Donald Trump is doing it differently this time.In 2017, Trump hit Washington like a tornado, overturning and scattering things in his path — but much of what he attempted never got done.Proposals that were rushed out half-baked didn’t make it through Congress or survive bad press or challenges in the courts.Investigations hobbled Trump’s White House.The wall didn’t get built.Trump gave Paul Ryan his tax bill and Mitch McConnell his judges, but he wasn’t prepared to put a lot of his own ideas into practice.Monday, Trump hit the ground running.He issued a battery of executive orders that his team had been preparing for months, expected to sign 100 or more within the first day.He even set up a desk in the Capital One arena to do ceremonial signings in front of the crowd.Most of the orders weren’t secret, even if Democrats were so obsessed with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that they ignored Trump’s own “Agenda 47” campaign promises.Some of the things Trump discussed in his inaugural address will require support in Congress, but the executive orders are largely focused on things the president can do himself.That’s a contrast to Joe Biden, who often ignored the president’s job as commander-in-chief and top law-enforcement officer and instead used executive orders to do things that Congress or the states are supposed to decide, such as spending money on student-loan forgiveness, stopping evictions or mandating vaccines in the workplace.It all starts with immigration.

There’s no issue on which Trump has such a clear mandate to break with his predecessors.Declaring a national emergency at the border, Trump pledged not only to restore his previous, successful policies such as “Remain in Mexico” (which required asylum-seekers to wait outside the country) but also to deploy the military to the southern border and halt catch-and-release and refugee resettlement into the country.He’ll target Mexican cartels by designating them as foreign...