11 min read

Trump's Executive Orders -- the Bad and the Ugly

Trump's Executive Orders -- the Bad and the Ugly
Mr Happy Face, crowned the world’s ugliest dog

I discussed Trump’s Executive Orders earlier this week. Many of them are focused on growth and efficiency, and I am totally on board with them.  

But there are a bunch that are stupid, ill-thought, immoral, unAmerican.  They come in a bunch of different flavors.

Shooting ourselves in the foot

These orders are self-inflicted wounds, weakening the government and the country for no good reason.

Sticking our energy head in the sand

We are already producing oil and gas at record levels.  And we should retain the flexibility to do even more.  But these EOs, while cloaked in all kinds of climate talk, primarily are about drilling for more oil/gas and walking back from renewables and electrification.   Solar and wind have been making tremendous gains in efficiency and cost, electrification allows us to move between fuel types transparently, and China is already kicking our butts on EVs.   Whether it is 100 years or 500 years, we do have to move beyond fossil fuels; we need to get going.  

Vacuous and petty

Many EOs are just hot air.   This is the worst — a content-free appeal to everyone to make prices lower.   This was a tent pole in the Trump campaign, and he is doing little about it — grocery prices have increased since he was elected, mainly due to egg prices.

A great way to “end the weaponization” of the Federal Government is to go after your predecessor’s staff and try to ruin their lives.  

This is no way to run a railroad

Leading a workforce of over 3 million people is hard; very few executives ever have to manage at this scale.  The President has to get very good at repeated broadcast communication of priorities.   So something like Executive Orders is necessary — memos outlining priorities for the entire workforce.  They should be clear, concise, and inspirational.

But the way EOs are done now is terrible.  They are incomprehensible.   These are among the worst.   Each subsequent president revokes the prior President’s orders, which in turn are revocations of prior President’s orders, and so on.  Turtles all the way down.  Every department will have to parse these and determine what they mean, which will result in multiple inconsistent interpretations, requiring even more work to rationalize.  

Look over there — those immigrants are the problem

Trump ran on a campaign blaming immigrants for all kinds of problems that they didn’t create.   And now he is creating further turmoil at the border.  The US has real economic challenges — growth, manufacturing capability, and creating more great jobs.  I’ve seen no evidence that immigrants, unskilled or skilled, are the causes of any of these problems.   And there is plenty of evidence that immigrants contribute significantly to our society.

Enough already

Do we really need to keep demonizing Cuba?  For a candidate who says he wants to leave abortion rights up to the states, why does he meddle with the issue every time he can?  And can we please move beyond the TikTok sideshow to more important issues?

Just gross

These are just gross.  Immoral, un-American, embarrassing, and hateful.

Throwing away human potential

Three things are true.  

  • First, we have a good deal of racism, sexism, and discrimination in our society.   And we have a lot of classism in our society.   And we often conflate the two.  You have to be willfully blind not to see the discrimination.   
  • Second, we are throwing away massive amounts of human potential by not addressing racism, classism, sexism, and discrimination.  Great potential entrepreneurs, artists, thinkers, writers, craftspeople, teachers, performers, etc., are wasted annually.   Our society is poorer when we burden people with unnecessary hardship just to eat, find shelter, get educated, and work.  
  • Third, the “DEI” wave of combatting this was a failure. There were good intentions, but probably also some bad intentions.  There was good execution and also crazy excesses.  And the whole name is now poisoned in the minds of many in the country.  So we need to rip it up and try again.   

So I am OK with tearing up some of the failed guidelines we tried — but we have to set out a new course, and the administration has done nothing; they’ve just thrown away a bunch of stuff.

We need to learn from our missteps and move ahead positively, not just slide backward.

Now What

I read all these to become a more informed citizen, which is a valuable outcome in its own right. I will continue to read orders and actions as they are released; there are more this week.

One conclusion you quickly draw when you read all these orders is: What a giant hairball!  This is the most incomprehensible way to communicate with the federal workforce and the electorate. Maybe that is the point.  But gosh, I immediately want to dig in and start building a site to explain all this to voters easily.  Not even ChatGPT can unwind some of this morass.

More to the point, I don’t find it helpful or convincing to be simply anti-Trump in my conversations.   I need to dig in and identify exactly what I don’t like and communicate around those issues.  I become clearer-headed and more effective in my communications.  And I need to be more effective because combatting Trump’s worst instincts is important — his worst actions weaken our country and diminish us.

And he will respond to pushback, as happened this week with the Federal funding freeze. We need to make our voices heard and let the government know what we will and won’t tolerate every day.