Donald Trump tosses executive order pens to his drooling suckups.By Emily Singer Daily Kos StaffAfter not putting his hand on the Bible as he took the oath of office, Donald Trump gave an extremely dark and lie-filled inaugural address on Monday in which he rattled off a list of his priorities—none of which will lower prices for Americans, as he promised to do.
In his speech, Trump bragged about his narrow victory, whined that he’s been “challenged more than any president in our 250 year history,” and ultimately declared that God himself saved Trump so he could “make America great again”—a totally humble thing to say.
He then went on to list his priorities, most of which were either immigration related or meaningless gestures meant to hurt vulnerable populations or make him feel macho.
In fact, after the official speech was over, Trump spoke to an overflow crowd of his supporters—who were kept out of the Capitol Rotunda where the speech took place so that the cadre of billionaire tech bros Trump pals around with could get front-row seats—telling them that his advisers really wanted him to talk more about inflation, but he refused.
"How many times can you say an apple has doubled in cost?" Trump said in a rambling speech in which he went on to complain about his 2024 victory again and said he would have won California if it were not for fraud—a complete lie.
In any event, here are the promises Trump made in his inaugural address that won't help your pocket book and could actually make your finances worse:
1. He’s sending troops to the border.
"I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” Trump said, invoking the Nazi-esque language about immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border.
Deploying troops to deal with immigrants at the border will cost taxpayers money, and likely won’t make a difference as it is legal to seek asylum in the U.S.
2. “Drill, baby, drill.”
“America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth and we are going to use it,” Trump declared. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
Contrary to what Trump said, America is already producing a record amount of crude oil, and is currently the lead oil producer in the world for the sixth consecutive year.
What’s more, experts say his “drill baby drill” policy won’t actually lower prices.
“This will likely have little to no impact on #gasprices or fuel prices in the short-term, as a President can de-regulate, but there is no direct action that can be issued requiring oil companies to raise production,” Patrick De Haan, a gas prices expert, wrote in a post on X.
3. He claims he’s creating a new agency to collect tariffs.
“I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” Trump said. “For this purpose, we are establishing the External Revenue Service to collect all tariffs, duties, and revenues that will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury coming from foreign sources.”
Of course, foreign countries do not pay tariffs. Companies in the United States that import goods pay the tariffs, and then they pass those added costs down to consumers, raising prices and causing inflation to soar.
His new tariff policy will be destructive to the economy, and your pocket book.
4. Trump says he will “bring back free speech to America.”
“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” Trump said.
There’s already a thing called the First Amendment that protects speech, so it’s unlikely a toothless executive order will do anything more than give Trump a piece of paper to sign at his big boy desk.
5. Trump declares there are only two genders.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said.
This declaration will literally do nothing to make your daily life better, and instead will only hurt transgender Americans, who are already at risk of being targets of violence and discrimination.
6. Trump says he will change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Trump wants to look macho by declaring he will unilaterally change the name of a major body of water. How will this help you, you ask? It won’t. It’s literally a meaningless gesture.
It was such a dumb promise that Hillary Clinton was seen laughing out loud in the audience.
7. Trump says he will rename Denali to Mt. McKinley.
“We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley to Mt. McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs,” Trump said. “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”
Alaskans, where Denali is located, don’t even want this, but that’s not stopping Trump from using his sharpie to sign an executive order to make him feel like he’s accomplishing something.
8. Trump declares he will take back the Panama Canal.
“We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made and Panama’s promise to us has been broken,” Trump said. “The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated. American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form. And that includes the United States Navy and above all, China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back.”
There’s a lot to unpack here.
First, American ships are being charged the same as other ships in the canal.
And second, China is not operating the canal.
Trump has been telling this lie for weeks, leading Panamanian President Jose Mulino to declare publicly, “There are no Chinese soldiers in the canal, for the love of God. The world is free to visit the canal.”
Trump even threatened to use military force to take back the canal, which would violate Trump’s other inaugural speech promise of not starting any wars.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pointed out that conflicting message after Trump’s inaugural address.
“He pledged to be a president of peace and not start any new wars but also pledged to forcibly take another country’s territory,” Maddow said.
9. Trump says he’ll put astronauts on Mars.
“And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said, a line that really got co-President Elon Musk going.
Finally, what he does will speak much louder than his Inauguration words
Monday’s inauguration offers America’s yammering pundit class another opportunity to fall all over themselves dissecting the true meaning of President-elect Donald Trump’s words. You’ll see opinion pages clogged with analysis comparing Trump’s remarks to his 2017 “American Carnage” speech, speculating on how the president has or hasn’t changed, and wondering what we can learn about the administration to come.
What if that’s pointless? It should come as no surprise to any observant citizen that Trump is stamped from the same deformed mold that produces uninspired autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Those leaders and their historical counterparts should serve as reminders that in administrations like this, words are little more than a shield for far-reaching and often brutal official acts.
As Donald Trump delivers his second inaugural address inside the Capitol building his supporters attacked four years ago, Trump’s most loyal deputies will be at the White House printing out the draconian, far-right policies they’ve spent years crafting. Those papers will be stacked on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, ready and waiting for Trump’s jagged presidential signature. Those papers—not the words Trump says about them—are what matter.
Trump’s roster of priorities includes executive orders that will reshape the White House and realign Americans’ relationship to their government in ways that won’t be fully clear for weeks or months to come. Worse still, some of those changes will survive Trump’s four years in power and become permanently embedded in America’s governing power structure.
Long after Trump leaves office, it will be those surviving policies that continue to corrode and weaken our fragile democratic system. So forgive me if I don’t care to dedicate much time to parsing Trump’s prose.
Chief among Trump’s priorities is a perverting of the justice system to serve his partisan interests. We see this in the executive orders and regulatory decisions that Trump promises to enact within his first hours in office.
Those orders have been drafted by far-right extremists, including Stephen Miller and Corey Lewandowski, and have as their single goal the centralization of all executive power under Trump. It is a terrifying vision of America’s future, and there’s little anyone can do to stop it.
For his part, Miller has amassed a level of personal power within Trumpworld that has little parallel in modern American politics. His vague official role doesn’t do justice to the fact that he is now on par with (and on immigration issues superior to) Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Trump’s words on Monday will come from Miller’s pen. More importantly, almost all of the signature Day One actions Trump has promised comes from Miller’s mind. What does that look like?
In short, like a horror show. Executive orders that Miller has helped author include one lifting ICE’s ban on raiding sensitive sites like schools, churches, and hospitals during immigration sweeps. Another removes civil service protections from thousands of government workers and replaces the meritocracy with a system of Trump loyalty tests for prospective government workers. Yet another puts the Department of Justice in the position of helping anti-abortion red states find and prosecute women who obtain abortions in places where reproductive freedom still exists.
With the stroke of a pen, the federal government will find its way into our schools, our bedrooms, and our doctors’ offices on a scope never before seen in American history.
Oh yeah, and the over 1,000 people currently in jail for violently attacking the federal government on Jan. 6, 2021? Expect most of them to receive pardons within Trump’s first month in office. That act will give Trump a core constituency of former federal convicts who have already proven their willingness to engage in violence on his behalf.
Think of it as a modern Praetorian Guard—or a new generation of single-minded pro-Trump brownshirts. Those militant MAGA warriors will be Trump’s personal enforcers as his orders and demands veer increasingly outside the rule of law.
For the communities targeted by Trump’s sweeping actions, the response has been a mix of fear and determination. In Colorado, immigration groups are rapidly retooling their strategies to account for a more severe ICE and the possibility of larger, more aggressive immigration raids.
But even those groups struggle with the sheer scope of the challenge ahead and the swell of federal resources Trump is prepared to dedicate to terrorizing communities he dislikes.
“We’re trying to help as much as we can. And I think the reality is that for thousands of families, there’s just no path,” Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition Communications Director Raquel Lane-Arellano told local radio station KHOL 98.1. “There’s no way to make the next four years safer … so the alternative is to prepare for the worst, which is deportation.”
The terror will not stop there. Trump’s allies are preparing legal challenges to bedrock ideas of American equality, from attempting to overturn same-sex marriage rights to reversing the FDA’s efforts to ensure women can access the abortion medication Mifepristone. Trump will amplify those efforts with early executive orders ending federal protections for some LGBTQ+ workers and ending the government’s current policy of assisting women who must travel to obtain abortions.
It’s unclear whether most Americans fully recognize how quickly and deeply Trump will reshape the federal government in his own image. That’s the thing about the government we’ve built; so much can be undone in a matter of minutes, provided leaders are willing to face (or ignore) public criticism. T
rump has made clear he intends to make muscular use of the nearly limitless power afforded to the presidency. It’s a shame he’s choosing to use that power to achieve such toxic and divisive ends.
Regardless of what Trump says at noon on Monday, we can and must look past the bluster of his words and judge him based on his actions. If his team of advisors is to be believed, those actions will be quick in coming once Trump retakes his seat in the Oval Office.
For the MAGA movement, Monday represents not just an electoral victory but a generational, ideological one. It’s the rest of us who will pay the heavy price for that victory.
We must all fight back every day, in every conceivable way. Every one of us. Every day.
