Donald Trump has kicked off his presidency by signing hundreds of executive orders, some of which he launched at his inauguration speech yesterday alongside ridiculous promises to colonise Mars and rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America”. This raft of new measures could be described as about what you’d expect but slightly worse. It’s hardly surprising that Trump is going after trans people or migrants, but the extent of his plans and the speed at which he’s getting started is still pretty alarming. Along with Elon Musk doing what looked an awful lot like a Nazi salute on stage, yesterday was a bad vibes beginning to a new era of American politics.

Here’s everything you need to know about the first steps of the Trump administration.

TRANS RIGHTS

During his inauguration speech, Trump declared that it will “henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”. This is a statement so vague that you might hope it’s just red meat being tossed to his base and doesn’t actually mean anything beyond his government having a hostile stance towards trans people (hardly a surprise). But unfortunately, it does appear to be backed up by a raft of hard policies targeting the trans community. May Davis Mailman, a spokesperson for the incoming Trump administration, told reporters on Monday (January 20) that these policies are aimed at “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government”.

In practice, this will mean banning any option other than ‘male’ and ‘female’ on passports and other forms of official identification, overturning a 2022 Biden law which introduced a gender-neutral ‘X’ marker, and making it so these categories correspond with sex assigned at birth. Trans women (named specifically) will be barred from any gender-segregated facility which takes funding from the federal government, including prisons and domestic abuse shelters, and the government will stop recognising the Transgender Day of Visibility. The order also defends trans conversion therapy, bans the “forced” use of pronouns (suggesting that federal workers will be allowed or even encouraged to misgender people), and prohibits taxpayer funds from being used towards gender-affirming care, which will presumably make it impossible for lower-income trans people to access it for free through Medicare.

As far as anti-trans policies go, this is all pretty nightmarish, bordering on worst case scenario. But these measures will face significant legal challenges, and Trump does have a track record of not following through on his plans. 

IMMIGRATION

Unsurprisingly, immigration was a key theme during Trump’s inauguration. He declared a “national emergency” at the southern border and promised deportations of “millions and millions of criminal aliens” (there is nowhere even close to “millions” of migrants in the US who have been convicted of a crime, and undocumented migrants actually commit less crimes than US citizens.)  

As Trump outlined in his speech, the government will begin designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist” organisations, and he will direct the government to use “the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil.” For a long time there has been speculation that Trump might invade Mexico in some capacity if he was granted a second term, and designating the cartels as “terrorists” could well be a step in that direction.

One of the most radical policies Trump is threatening to introduce is the end of birthright citizenship (unlike the UK and many other countries, if you are born in the US you are automatically granted American citizenship), which is protected under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. It looks doubtful that Trump is going to be able to pull this one off, considering how legally and culturally engrained it is. Just 24 hours after signing the executive order, he has already been hit by a legal challenge from a migrant’s rights organisation, which described the move as both unconstitutional and “a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values”.

THE CLIMATE

One of the biggest cheers of the day came after Trump promised to “drill, baby drill”, which doesn’t inspire much confidence about our chances of surviving the climate crisis. He promised to do away with “the Green New Deal”, which was more of an aspiration than something which was ever actually introduced by the US government. Whatever Trump is referring to, it’s clear he intends to roll back whatever progressive climate policies Biden introduced. While he didn't mention it during his speech, the US government has also withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, an international treaty aimed at preventing the Earth's temperature from rising above 2c – a threshold past which the coincidences for the threshold would be extreme.

One executive order will declare a “national energy emergency” in order to encourage more oil drilling in the US, and another will revoke government support for electric vehicles, introduced under Biden (not even this was enough to wipe away Elon’s shit-eating grin.) Based on Trump’s speech, you’d think that climate change was just some woke, trendy nonsense that we don’t have to worry about anymore. Wouldn’t it be nice to believe that were true?

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION

Trump promised to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colour-blind and merit-based.” These are just generic right-wing talking points but – as with his remarks about gender – they are backed up by policy proposals, in this case aimed at “ending radical and wasteful DEI programmes”.

According to spokesperson Mailman (who said it was “very fitting” to announce these policies on Martin Luther King Jr. Day), this effort will include slashing environmental justice programs, equity-related grants, and all other kinds of diversity-related programmes. This mirrors an anti-DEI backlash taking place in the corporate world, with companies like Facebook, McDonald’s and Walmart recently getting rid of their own programmes. It is an attempt to formalise and codify the “anti-woke” antagonism which has been animating the conservative movement for years.

PALESTINE

Trump got a lot of “credit where credit’s due” acclaim for forcing through a ceasefire deal last week, partly because it made it so clear that Biden’s failure to do the same was either a deliberate policy or the result of such staggering, incredible incompetence that it may as well have been. But let’s not start heralding Donald Trump as the Lion of Khan Younis just yet. No one seriously thinks that he is an ally to the Palestinian cause (there’s a reason why Netanyahu preferred him over Kamala Harris and there’s a planned settlement named after him in the illegally occupied Golan Heights), and one of the executive orders he signed yesterday – which removed US sanctions against violent Israeli settlers, introduced by Joe Biden – made this perfectly clear.

This measure indicates a symbolic support for Israel’s project of illegal settlement-building, and all of the displacement and ethnic cleansing that requires, which is particularly troubling at a time when settler violence has been increasing dramatically in the West Bank: since October 2023, at least 860 Palestinians, including 175 children, have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The policy of sanctioning individual settlers, and not the Israeli government which directly facilitates, encourages and protects them, never made much sense in the first place, but now even this cursory gesture of disapproval has been removed, leaving Palestinians in the West Bank more vulnerable than ever.