Opinion | On day one, President Donald Trump is already daring the Supreme Court to stop him
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States who overcame two impeachments, a jury’s finding of sexual abuse and a felony conviction to win the second-most votes in any American election ever, cemented the greatest political comeback of all time on Monday to be sworn in as the 47th.
He came out swinging in his inaugural address, calling Jan. 20, 2025, “Liberation Day,” and vowing sweeping changes via a series of executive actions with no parallel in history.
Call Trump what he is: the comeback king. And call the country what it is: his.
For now. This is politics, so the clock is already ticking to see how much he will remake the nation over four years.
He certainly didn’t wait to make history on the first day of his second term.
“We stand on the verge of the four greatest years of American history,” he said.
Trump is taking office at the height of his extensive political and cultural powers. In issuing a historic number of executive actions Monday, he is wasting no time shaking up a system of checks and balances that our founding fathers put in place to prevent a man from becoming a monarch.
Contrary to his repeated claims, Trump didn’t win a second term by a landslide, but Democrats look awfully foolish when they say he doesn’t have a mandate and Americans who plugged out or didn’t watch the inaugural Monday just look petty. Trump won 49.9% of the popular vote, and if landslide goes too far, mandate does not.
Already, he is doing things that supporters will love, that detractors will hate and that boggle the mind as he solidifies power at a time when most Americans agree with his agenda of cracking down on illegal immigration, ramping up energy production and slashing regulations.
He is making political adversaries so nervous that outgoing President Joe Biden, in his last official acts in office, issued preemptive pardons for five of his family members, for retired Gen. Mark A. Milley and Anthony Fauci, two prominent Trump foils, for members and staff of the Jan. 6 congressional committee and for police officers who testified before the panel.
It’s safe to say that no first day was quite like this.
Even the days leading up to it were unprecedented.
The weekend before he was sworn in, Trump and his wife Melania both launched billion-dollar meme coins, adding to their phenomenal wealth and raising ethical concerns that have to be Googled to be understood or believed. Trump also ushered in a new era of social media support, credited by TikTok with single-handedly saving the app from a brief blackout caused by a law aimed at ending Chinese ownership of the short video platform.
May we live in interesting times indeed.
Flurries of snow, executive orders
Trump was expected to sign anywhere from 100 to 200 executive orders Monday, erasing Biden’s modern record of 22 in his first week.
Biden’s record was remarkable then. Going back to Carter, seven presidents in their first week in office had signed only 13 executive orders combined. In one day, Trump seemed well on his way to signing as many executive orders as the 220 of his full first term and Biden’s 176 total.
“With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense,” he said.
Not even a cold snap could stop Trump’s fiery personality. A massive inaugural celebration was moved indoors for the first time in 40 years on Monday, and Trump stood in the Capitol Rotunda, raised his right hand and swore to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.
The late venue change called to mind the similar indoor inaugural of President Ronald Reagan in 1985, fitting since Trump has remade the GOP in his image the way Reagan did then. The shift inside also eliminated the spats over crowd size that marred Trump’s first inaugural and eased potential Secret Service concerns for a man who survived two assassination attempts last year, one when a bullet whizzed by his ear in a Pennsylvania field.
“I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason,” he said Monday. “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Echoes of Ronald Reagan
Trump’s most famous line is borrowed from Reagan. Trump trademarked “Make America Great Again” in 2015, but it was Reagan who first made the line great in 1980.
Trump’s swearing-in on Monday called to mind another Reagan bon mot: “It’s morning in America.”
That opening line from a 1984 Reagan campaign ad seemed to sum up the sense of supporters, some of whom still believe they elected Trump to the White House three times even though he legitimately lost the 2020 election to Biden. There’s no dispute now: Trump is back.
In South Carolina, where Trump’s three Republican presidential primary wins in 2016, 2020 and 2024 included last year’s trouncing of former Gov. Nikki Haley, the mood was celebratory.
Last week, Gov. Henry McMaster, who became one of Trump’s first political allies in 2016, joined GOP peers and ordered state flags moved from half-staff, where they had stood since former president Jimmy Carter’s death, to full staff for the day of Trump’s inauguration.
Even celestial bodies stood at attention in the state capital of Columbia. Sandwiched in between Sunday’s gray rainfall and Tuesday’s expected whiteout, the sun and moon both stood at attention in the blue-sky morning hours before Trump’s inaugural 500 miles north on the 95.
South Carolina Republican Party chair Drew McKissick calls the state “Trump country.” In November, it rode Trump’s coattails to a Senate supermajority for the first time in 150 years.
McKissick may need a new catchphrase because the country is Trump country again now.
Midterm elections looming already
Elections have consequences, as the nation quickly saw Monday with Trump’s barrage of executive orders, his promise to undo so many of Biden’s actions and his vows to make America his again. Among his promises are sending the military to the southern border, opening up Alaska to oil drilling, easing regulations about electric vehicles, pulling the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, promising higher tariffs and taxes on foreign countries, saying the federal government would recognize only two genders, and generally daring the Supreme Court to stop him.
He had already remade the court more to his liking, of course, much to the delight of supporters who relish the nation’s rightward tilt after a court with three Trump justices ended Roe v. Wade; shored up gun rights; stuck a fork in affirmative action; curtailed unions, regulatory action and government efforts to combat climate change; and expanded powers of presidential immunity.
Trump’s ultimate place in history will be determined over the next four years, but he is already that rarest of commanders-in-chief. He is only the second president ever to serve two non-consecutive terms, joining our nation’s 22nd and 24th president, Grover Cleveland, who served twice in the late 1800s.
In reality, the president will have two years to do as much as he can, as much as Congress and the Supreme Court will let him, as much as Democrats find themselves unable to stop, as much as Americans will allow, before the 2026 midterm elections.
Such elections are typically when presidents in power lose some of it for going too far. In a staggering 20 of the 22 midterm elections since 1938, the party in control of the White has lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; Trump lost 40 in 2018. The exceptions were Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002. In the U.S. Senate, where terms of six years rather than two complicate this trend, the majority party has lost seats in 15 of those 22 elections.
Republicans did gain two seats under Trump in 2018, so maybe Trump will be an exception in two years.
How far will be too far? We’ll see.
He is already the most consequential president of our lifetimes, a claim he holds for his Supreme Court appointments alone. He now has the chance, as he said on Monday, to be one of the most consequential ever, reshaping the nation’s immigration policies, presidential powers and more.
“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”
In a land of second chances, it’s America first again.
Just ask the pugilist in the people’s house.
This story was originally published January 20, 2025 at 1:55 PM.