Mr. Trump's Classroom

What Democrats and Republicans can learn from President Trump's first three weeks in office.

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First Three Weeks

Donald Trump has been president for three weeks. Yes, only three weeks. If you’re like me, then it probably feels like he has been president for three months. Part of that is because he was president previously, but mostly it’s because Donald Trump has packed an immense amount of stuff into three weeks.

For example, President Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders in under three weeks (here is a page that tracks all of them). That’s more than any president has signed in their first one hundred days in office.

Just look at this chart:

Now, I want to be clear: that’s insane. Absolutely insane. In fact, I remember when conservatives lost their minds and called Barack Obama a dictator for ruling via executive order. We are long past those days.

The good news is that I think there are lessons from this flurry of executive orders that both Democrats and Republicans can learn. Whether they will… that’s entirely doubtful, but I’m going to try anyways.

Lesson for Democrats

Traditionally, Democrats have been significantly more in favor of the continued growth of the executive branch and the administrative state. This is because Democrats are much more willing to trust “experts” to design programs, departments, and systems that create a better society. This has been true since the real Godfather president of progressivism Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson believed, as many Progressives did at the time, that government needed to be “modernized” by “experts” who could optimize society by being unconstrained by the checks and balances that the framers included in the Constitution. This was largely due to the belief that as humans grew in their knowledge of the world, particularly scientific knowledge, they would grow ever more enlightened and the necessity of checks on power would decline.

Wilson’s vision of an expert-led Federal Government did not come to fruition in his time, but, through FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs, progressives and the Democratic Party continued marching in that direction. Administrative agency after administrative agency was created and packed with “experts” who created new laws without having to worry about those pesky things to stop them called elections.

The problem is that human nature doesn’t change- as conservatives have argued for decades. Humans don’t become more “enlightened” as they gain more knowledge. Instead, they are just as likely to abuse their “expertise” or assume that they know more than they actually do. Look no further for evidence of this than the public health establishment implementing onerous restrictions in March 2020 only to brush aside these regulations during the George Floyd riots a couple of months later.

When people in power begin to wield their power arbitrarily, there is guaranteed to be backlash.

At the same time, an unaccountable administrative bureaucracy of experts is nowhere in our Constitution. As a result, the myriads of agencies created by progressives have ended up in the executive branch which means the President has full authority over them- most importantly, the authority to revoke, rescind, and change policy.

This creates the conditions for someone like President Trump to come along and do exactly what he is doing. Unelected bureaucrats have proven themselves capricious with power which has provoked a backlash and given the President permission to use the immense power he has to shape executive branch policy as he sees fit.

And there’s very little progressives can do about it. In other words, the lesson here is: if you live by executive orders, then you will die by executive orders. If Democrats want to avoid another President Trump coming along and shaking things up like this, then I suggest they stop relying so much on executive orders to implement policies and start crafting legislation in Congress instead… as our system was designed in the first place.

Lesson for Republicans

On the flip side, Republicans need to see just how quickly the policies of a previous administration can be changed with the literal stroke of a pen. If President Trump can enact over 50 executive orders in less than three weeks, then that means the next Democratic president can as well. In order to have lasting impact, Republicans need to, just like Democrats, works towards passing legislation and not rely solely on executive orders that can be undone.

The temptation when you have power is to assume that you will always have power. I mean just look at the decisive win that President Trump had in 2024, surely there’s no way Democrats will be able to come back from that any time soon, right? Look at the demographic data- every demographic and geographic region in the United States moved right in 2024. There’s no way this can reverse in just four years, right?

By thinking this way, Republicans could be tempted to rule in ways that are more results oriented than process oriented. This is a distinction that I am constantly making because the Constitution is primarily focused on the process of how government should operate. As I’ve written before:

The Constitution provides the framework for the three branches of government, what power they have, who is eligible to be in each branch, how they are chosen, how long they can be in a position, the limitations of each branch, and how the other branches will “check” a branch that goes too far. The Constitution didn’t lay out what laws the government should pass but how the government would pass laws. The Constitution didn’t say who should occupy a particular office but how people were chosen to occupy various offices.

My fear is that Republicans will get so drunk on “their guy” being the one exerting power in ways they like that they will ignore how he goes about enacting these policies. This is a recipe for disaster the next time Democrats get power as they inevitably will. Whatever process Republicans use to achieve their ends, they are opening Pandora’s box for Democrats to use to achieve their ends.

So, every time that President Trump does something through executive order, it’s important for Republicans to remember that Democrats can immediately do the opposite once there is a Democratic president. Again, this is why Republicans need to prioritize passing legislation, not rely on President Trump’s executive orders.

Really, the lesson is the same for both Democrats and Republicans: make Congress do its job and stop passing responsibility over to the executive branch.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett