President
Trump's first day: climate deal and immigration could be initial
targets
His
repeated promise during the campaign to bring change to Washington
means he will want to provide a spectacular display of strength right
from the start
Ed
Pilkington in New York
Thursday
10 November 2016 19.17 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/10/president-donald-trump-first-day-immigration-climate
On the morning of 21
January, after a long night of celebrations to mark his swearing-in
as president, Donald Trump will take his seat at the Resolute Desk
inside the Oval Office, pick up his pen, and launch into day one of
his administration.
Predicting how he
will act that first day is fraught with risk, given the mass of
colourful and often vague promises the president-elect has made over
the past 18 months on the campaign trail. Many of his most audacious
pledges, including his much-vaunted plan to build a wall along the
Mexican border and to scrap Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act,
would require the involvement of Congress and as such, are likely to
be slower burns.
But given the
unorthodox nature of Trump’s insurgent assault on the White House,
and his vow that he will bring change to Washington, he will want to
provide a spectacular show of strength for the American people right
from the start. To underline the point, his transition team has been
preparing what it calls the First Day Project.
It would be in
keeping with the tone of Trump’s campaign were he to focus the
First Day Project on terrorizing some of the must vulnerable and
powerless people in America: the undocumented immigrants. He has said
that “on day one” – in his first hour, in fact – he would
begin to expel “criminal illegal immigrants”.
The plans Trump
outlined in a policy speech in September would target at least 5
million and perhaps as many as 6.5 million people for immediate
deportation. To achieve this, Trump has said that he would triple the
size of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and set up a
deportation taskforce, which a Washington Post analysis said would
cost between $51.2bn and $66.9bn over five years.
What will be the
first actions Trump takes as president?
Though it will take
time to carry out Trump’s full threat of deporting all 11 million
undocumented immigrants, if it is ever doable, he could instantly
wield his power by slashing two of Obama’s signature executive
orders. The so-called Daca provision, which gave legal status and
work permission to millions of young undocumented “Dreamers”, and
Dapa, which promised to extend those rights to their parents before
it was blocked in the courts.
Trump might also
instruct immigration officials on day one to step up scrutiny at the
ports over new arrivals from certain countries such as Egypt, Syria
and Saudi Arabia – a ruse to bypass any constitutional legal
challenges to his contentious promise to ban all Muslims from
entering the country. Another eye-catching gambit would be to cancel
the program to resettle refugees from the Syrian war in the US, which
would be a thinly veiled stab at his rival Hillary Clinton, who had
promised to expand the scheme.
An added benefit of
many of these first-day actions, from Trump’s perspective, is that
they would not only show that he means business, they would also
strike at the heart of the Obama legacy. Expect to see several other
key Obama initiatives bite the dust on 21 January as Trump has said
that “on my first day, we’re going to immediately terminate every
single unconstitutional executive order signed by President Obama”.
One possible target
of such slash-and-burn tactics will be Obama’s efforts to combat
climate change. The most incendiary move would be for Trump to tear
up on day one the Paris climate deal that was signed and ratified by
Obama without the approval of the US Senate, rendering it vulnerable
to the newcomer’s axe.
The president-elect
has similarly threatened to act swiftly to unpick the Clean Power
Plan that promotes sustainable energy sources and restricts the
development of carbon-based energy. He might also revive the idea of
the Keystone pipeline as a way of poking environmentalists in the
eye.
As a further dig at
his predecessor, Trump may be tempted to announce on day one the
expansion of Guantánamo Bay, the US military base on Cuba that Obama
struggled and failed to close. The optics of such a move would be
pleasing to the new occupant of the White House, as Obama spent his
first day there in 2009 signing an order to shut the extrajudicial
detention center down.
It is likely to take
the president-elect more than his first day to initiate his threat to
“bomb the hell out of Isis”. But Trump will want to stand tough
on the world stage, and to do so he could issue an order to military
generals to prepare their own detailed plans on how to crush Islamic
state through armed intervention.
One final flourish
might appeal to the rookie president. An announcement of his pick to
fill the vacant seat of the ninth US supreme court justice would be
an excellent way of pleasing his supporters while sending an icy
chill down the spines of liberals.
Trump has already
issued a shortlist of potential choices, drawn exclusively from the
conservative wing of jurisprudence. Many of the candidates are
virulently anti-abortion, signalling that the new president really
does intend to overturn Roe v Wade, the ruling that legalised a
woman’s right to termination.
One of those on the
shortlist, William Pryor, has called Roe v Wade “the worst
abomination in the history of constitutional law”. If Trump
nominates him for the supreme court on day one, that would make an
impact.
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