‘Your head will spin’: What Trump will do on ‘Day One’

They used to talk about the first 100 days, the period of time over which an incoming US president should initially be judged. By 100 days, the reasoning went, the president has their appointees ensconced in key posts, they have communicated their priorities, made their first diplomatic forays and fought their first legislative battles in Congress.

“It’s an arbitrary cut-off that was established historically as a way to evaluate whether the incoming administration was able to make good on the promises that it made during the campaign,” says Heath Brown, an expert on presidential transitions at the City University of New York. “Everyone counts down the days to see how many new policies, how many new actions, how many appointees have been sworn in as of that day.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, acknowledged as the 100-day benchmark, used his window in 1933 to wind back prohibition, impose an eight-day bank holiday that stopped a potentially disastrous run on deposits and pass laws to help the unemployed. Barack Obama used his three-and-a-bit months to expand healthcare coverage to 11 million children, lift restrictions on funding of embryonic stem cell research and add 2 million acres (809,000 hectares) to the national wilderness protection program.

Donald Trump, however, is not talking about 100 days. Rather, his focus is on “Day One”: what he plans to do immediately once he is inaugurated on January 20. He has already half-joked that he’ll be a “dictator for a day”, that he’ll be “drill, drill, drilling” (a reference to lifting environmental restraints and expanding oil and gas exploration) and the speed of his reforms will be such that “your head will spin when you see what’s going to happen”.

He has promised to, among other things, close the border with Mexico, deport millions of undocumented migrants, wind back the Biden administration’s environmental programs, pardon rioters who stormed the Capitol in the 2021 insurrection and end the war in Ukraine (if not on day one itself then, certainly, within 24 hours of intervening). “On day one of the Trump presidency,” he said at one campaign rally last year, “I’m restoring the travel ban, suspending refugee admissions, and keeping terrorists the hell out of our country, like I had it before.”

So far, he’s made 41 promises for Day One action, by The Washington Post’s count; US news site Axios says it’s closer to 100. Either way, if Trump follows through on even half of his many election pledges, his actions on his first days in office will be likely unprecedented in speed and scale.

What can he actually get done? What will “Day One” say about Trump’s agenda for the following 99 days? And what does he really have in store for Greenland, Canada and Panama?

What are Trump’s immediate priorities?

There is a sense of urgency that wasn’t apparent when Trump moved into the White House for his first term in 2017. (Trump is almost unique among two-term presidents, Grover Cleveland the only other to successfully land a second term, in 1893, after a period out of office).

First time around, Trump did what new presidents traditionally do: get inaugurated, throw a few parties, order new curtains and sofas for the Oval Office (the Trumps spent $2.5 million refreshing White House decor and furnishings; famously, Trump had a desktop button that summoned a butler bearing Diet Coke) and then, eventually, get down to business.

On his first day in 2017, Trump did issue an executive order (scaling back parts of Barack Obama’s health act, formally known as the Affordable Care Act but widely known as Obamacare), and he signed a bill to allow retired Marine Corps general James Mattis to become secretary of defence, but both actions were, essentially, pieces of housekeeping.

Trump is likely to go tit-for-tat with Biden on his first day, too.

It was his successor, Joe Biden, who upped the ante on first-day showboating. On the day of his inauguration, Biden signed 15 executive orders, many of which reversed initiatives of Trump. Biden rejoined the Paris climate accord, which Trump had abandoned, removed the travel ban Trump had placed on some Muslim-majority nations, halted construction of Trump’s wall along the border with Mexico and rejoined the World Health Organisation, which Trump had left. “One, in particular, was around racial justice,” notes Heath Brown. “An early executive order tried to set up racial equity and justice as federal priorities, to try to embed them in the work of federal agencies.”

Trump is likely to go tit-for-tat with Biden on his first day, too. We might expect him to reverse some of Biden’s orders, particularly regarding climate: a cut in support for electric vehicles, a rollback of emission standards and reductions to clean energy tax credits. Trump has also flagged he will undo changes made by Biden to the federally funded family planning program Title X, and that he is likely to once again withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement.

“Biden issued a ton of executive orders reversing Trump’s policies,” says John Hart, an emeritus professor of American politics at ANU, “particularly in the environmental protection area. Trump will simply undo all that again through executive orders. They can be prepared by his White House staff. They’re probably doing that now, and all it requires is his signature on day one. And I think he’ll make a big thing about that.”

Another Day One priority is expected to be Trump’s promise to deport hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undocumented migrants living and working in the US. “He will prioritise that as an issue because of how well it played during the campaign, how much focus there’s been on it recently, and because it is a highly symbolic and kind of made-for-TV move for him to make,” says Emma Shortis, a senior researcher at think tank the Australia Institute.

In December, Trump pledged at a rally in Phoenix: “On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign a historic slate of executive orders to close our border to illegal aliens and stop the invasion of our country. And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.” In October, he had told another rally, in New York: “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”

Detail is still thin on how this improbable round-up might be achieved, but Trump’s team has indicated it would focus on deporting violent criminals, would establish detention facilities and could call on the National Guard to assist. Tom Homan, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and is now tasked with the deportation project as Trump’s “border tsar”, is reportedly planning to send immigration officials into prisons to target undocumented migrants ahead of subsequent deportation.

Homan has also pledged to squeeze federal funding to states that do not co-operate, such as California, Illinois, New Mexico and Arizona, which have already vowed to push back. Trump has also threatened to target Canada and Mexico with tariffs, saying he would inform Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum “on Day One or sooner” that unless she stopped “this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country”, he would impose a 25 per cent tariff “on everything they send into the US”.

Also targeted for Day One are two of Trump’s particular cultural bugbears: the spread of “woke” inclusivity programs, which he has vowed to ban across the federal government, and gender transition. He has pledged to ban trans women from competing in women’s sports, telling a rally in December: “We will keep men out of women’s sports” and “it will be the policy of the United States that there are only two genders: men and women.” He has also promised: “On Day One, I will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age. They’re not going to do it any more.”

‘We’ll be looking at the whole thing, but I’ll be making major pardons, yes.’

Other Day One pledges are vague, such as his campaign promises, chronicled by Axios, to immediately turn the country around, reverse every Biden-Harris “disaster”, end all Biden policies that are harmful to workers, reduce violent crime and end troubles for Hispanic Americans. Also sketchy are his pledges to pardon many of the 1000-plus rioters who were convicted after they stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent Biden being formally declared president. “I am inclined to pardon many of them,” he said in 2023. “Oh, absolutely I would,” he repeated last July. “If they’re innocent, I would pardon them … they were convicted by a very tough system.”

After his election win, he told Time magazine: “We’re going to look at each individual case, and we’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.” This week, however, he declined to commit to specifics beyond telling reporters, “Well, we’re looking at it … We’ll be looking at the whole thing, but I’ll be making major pardons, yes.”

What does Trump want with Greenland and Panama?

Beyond Day One, Trump’s agenda stretches from tweaking the business of everyday governance – he wants to cut back government spending, rein in inflation and make it easier to fire public servants – to his apparently serious desire to expand US territory. He has said many times the US should buy or annex Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, for “national security purposes”; that it should consider occupying the Panama Canal zone (controlled by its host country, Panama, since 1977); that the Gulf of Mexico should be renamed the “Gulf of America”; and that Canada should consider becoming the 51st state of the US. “You get rid of that artificially drawn line, and you take a look at what that looks like, and it would also be much better for national security,” Trump said at a press conference at his Florida Mar-a-Lago home in early January.

Leaders of those countries have been nonplussed (not to mention ordinary Canadians). When Trump first flagged buying Greenland in 2019, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, called it “absurd”. This time, she reiterated that Greenland “is not for sale” but, noting that Trump apparently isn’t actually joking: “We have a clear interest that it’s the US that plays a large role in that region and not, for example, Rus­sia.”

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said: “The canal is Panamanian and belongs to Panamanians. There’s no possibility of opening any kind of conversation around this reality.” Outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there wasn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” of Canada merging with the US. Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, meanwhile, responded to Trump by standing in front of a historical map and proposing that North America should be renamed “América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America”, as it had once been described.

The New York Times described Trump’s rambling demands as a return to the “chaotic stream-of-consciousness presidency” we saw in his last term. But former and current Trump advisers told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s ideas shouldn’t be taken at face value; instead, they were bluster to pressure Canada ahead of trade negotiations, to secure lower prices for US ships sailing through Panama, and to gain access to rare minerals in Greenland and deny them to China.

Trump has also already attempted to intervene in Gaza and Ukraine. He sent envoy Steve Witkoff to negotiate a ceasefire deal in Gaza and warned Hamas there would be “all hell to pay” if the group did not release the remaining Israeli hostages taken during its October 7, 2023, attack by the day of Trump’s inauguration. Trump has also said he will broker a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine, although it is unclear whether he means he will do it on Day One or if he believes that it would only take him 24 hours once he made the undertaking. “[It is] one of the things I want to do, and quickly. And President [Vladimir] Putin said that he wants to meet with me as soon as possible,” Trump said in December.

“The other question is tariffs, and how quickly he’s prepared to move on that,” says John Hart. During the election campaign, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Chinese imports in excess of 60 per cent and to tax virtually all other imports in an attempt to repatriate manufacturing jobs to the US, a strategy he tried during his last term in office that was largely ineffectual. Again, it might be all a negotiation strategy: in early January, Trump said he and Chinese leader Xi Jinping had been speaking through representatives “and I think we will probably get along very well, I predict”.

What’s the deal with Elon Musk?

Trump has been characteristically unconventional in his plans to cut government spending. He has taken on two advisers, billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran in the Republican presidential primaries before endorsing Trump, to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a proposed presidential advisory commission that Trump says “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies”. Exactly how this will happen is unknown, as is the extent of the influence that Musk will exert on the president in what analysts say is an extremely unusual arrangement. Musk is believed to have spent nearly $500 million to help elect Trump, and in recent weeks has been living at Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-lago, where he has been helping to orchestrate the president-elect’s transition to power.

“I don’t think we really have, in recent history, any outsider with as public and prominent a role during this transition period,” says Heath Brown, who co-authored Roadblocked: Joe Biden’s Rocky Transition to the Presidency. “It makes the role that he is playing a huge departure from anything that we have seen in this country in a long, long time.”

‘He’s busy inserting himself into politics mostly in line with what we might loosely call Trump’s ideology, but I think there’s an inevitable ego clash there to watch for.’

Trump’s relationship with Musk may not survive too many disagreements once the honeymoon period is over. “The role Musk will play in this administration is very unclear,” says Emma Shortis of the Australia Institute. “Everybody else in Trump’s inner circle owes their career and allegiance entirely to Trump. They’re completely beholden to him. Musk has a level of independence: independent wealth and, probably more importantly, the kind of independent political power base that is X [the social media network]. He’s busy inserting himself into politics mostly in line with what we might loosely call Trump’s ideology, but I think there’s an inevitable ego clash there to watch for.”

Musk, says Tim Lynch, a professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne, “is playing a role of enforcer of Trumpism. But I don’t think either would agree on what Trumpism is. I suspect lots of commentators are making this claim, but agree that these personalities are just too big and too different for it to be a comfortable alliance for very much longer.”

What practical hurdles will Trump have to overcome?

Any US president has special powers that allow them to make executive orders without having to gain the approval of Congress. Barack Obama used his to commit to climate change initiatives, cap student loan payments and tighten rules around some gun sales, among other things, bypassing legislation. In recent weeks, Biden has made a flurry of orders apparently designed to frustrate Trump, including memorandums to block future oil and gas drilling across more than 253 million hectares of federal waters.

However, these special powers do not allow a president to behave as a “dictator”: their use can be challenged in court if they are believed to be unconstitutional. “Once the president crosses the line from housekeeping or, you know, revoking prior presidents’ directives to try to make new policy that’s going to affect people on the street – that’s where you see the line between what’s easy to accomplish on Day One and what could very often end up in court,” Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck told the NPR public radio network.

Then there are the practicalities of turning an off-the-cuff idea into reality, such as the wall across the US border with Mexico that was a key policy in Trump’s first presidential campaign but that quietly slipped off the radar when constructing it turned out to be prohibitively expensive and difficult. “The first campaign was all about building the wall, and very little of the wall in any meaningful sense got built, which is why it’s been so porous over the last four years,” says Lynch. This time, watch for the “inevitable legal challenges” over any mass deportation plans, says Shortis.

‘He rather likes having a cabinet that disagrees with itself, that’s full of oddballs and weirdos and different backgrounds and genders and races.’

There will be internal concerns over some of Trump’s picks for cabinet, too, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr, expected to be health secretary, whose fringe views on vaccinations and “raw” milk may not be widely shared. “The thing to watch, for me, is that Trump has assembled a really loose ideological coalition that has united behind him but doesn’t share values,” says Shortis. “There are quite deep divisions amongst some of those cabinet positions, particularly about the United States’ role in the world.” Says Lynch: “He rather likes having a cabinet that disagrees with itself, that’s full of oddballs and weirdos and different backgrounds and genders and races. I mean, this is probably to his credit that he likes to see tension and turmoil – creative tension,I think he might claim it is.”

It is not, however, inevitable that the Senate will approve all of Trump’s team, even though it is held by a Republican majority. New presidents have 4000 political appointments to make, more than 1200 of which require a rubber stamp from the Senate. Many high-profile appointments must be confirmed following a series of committee hearings in which lawmakers have the opportunity to question candidates on their background and policy positions.

“He’s picked loyalists,” says John Hart of ANU. “He doesn’t want people inside the White House or the cabinet checking and balancing him; he wants them to do what he wants to do.”

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, has been criticised for her links to recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s first choice for attorney-general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration when it became clear he was highly unlikely to pass muster following allegations in a House ethics committee report that he had broken multiple state laws and had paid a minor for sex. Bottom line, though, says Hart, “Trump has got the Republican Party under his thumb now. It’s a cult that is there to support its leader.”

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