Opinion | What I Learned About Trumps Second Term by Reading His First 100 Executive Orders

We’ve gotten used to seeing a president’s first 100 days as a gauge of progress and a benchmark for history.(Thanks, Franklin Roosevelt.) To understand the early days of President Trump’s second term, however, when so much has happened so quickly, there is an alternative milestone to consider.Last week, with more than a month to go before he will reach 100 days in office, Trump surpassed 100 executive orders.

Reading through them all lays bare the assumptions, obsessions and contradictions of the man signing them.The executive order is Trump’s preferred governing tool.Even with Republican congressional majorities, he favors the flourish of the order over the hassle of lawmaking.

Why bother assembling legislative coalitions when you can just write, “By the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered” and then tack on whatever you like?There’s a tension inherent in executive orders as an exercise of presidential power.For all their “because I say so” affectations, orders do not carry the same legitimacy or endurance of laws passed by Congress and can be revoked by future presidents.

(Some of Trump’s second-term executive orders simply undo some of President Joe Biden’s orders, which in turn rescinded orders from the first Trump term.) Still, these documents can prove enormously consequential, and some represent indelible moments, for good or ill, in American history.The Emancipation Proclamation, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the postwar desegregation of the U.S.

military all came about via executive order.In keeping with this administration’s management style, Trump’s first 107 orders, spanning some 300 pages, can be a bit of a mess.Some are specific in their instructions — whether setting tariff rates for certain countries or permitting only two possible sexes on government documents — and they fulfill promises Trump made b...