Within hours of taking office as president, Donald Trump plans to roll out a flurry of executive actions aligned with his campaign promises, imposing more socially conservative health care policies on the U.S. military and setting in motion the large-scale deportation of people living in the country illegally.
NBC News spoke with more than half a dozen people familiar with transition planning who outlined a number of quick actions Trump plans to take to signal a dramatic break from President Joe Biden’s administration, which Trump claimed was leading the country to ruin.
Americans will see the new Trump administration enact changes at a pace that is “like nothing you’ve seen in history,” a Trump campaign official said.
Trump is preparing on Day One to overturn specific policies put in place by Biden, with plans to end travel reimbursement for military members seeking abortion care and to restrict transgender service members’ access to gender-affirming care, two people familiar with the plans said.
But much of the first day is likely to focus on stopping illegal immigration — the centerpiece of Trump’s candidacy. He is expected to sign at least five executive orders aimed at dealing with that issue alone after he is sworn in on Jan. 20, three Trump allies said on condition of anonymity.
By contrast, that is as many orders as he signed on all issues during the first week of his last term.
“There will without question be a lot of movement quickly, likely Day One, on the immigration front,” a top Trump ally said. “There will be a push to make a huge early show and assert himself to show his campaign promises were not hollow.”
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Transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, “The American people can bank on President Trump using his executive power on day one to deliver on the promises he made to them on the campaign trail.”
Advisers based at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort or at nearby offices in West Palm Beach, Florida, are also strategizing about ending the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and preparing Trump’s return to the world stage after a four-year absence.
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During the campaign, Trump promised he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine in just 24 hours — a time frame that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has cast doubt upon.
Trump’s transition team is also fielding requests from overseas to host his first foreign trip.
Coming off a decisive victory on Nov. 5, Trump has moved swiftly to build out the Cabinet and a senior White House team that will execute his plans.
As of Wednesday, he had selected 32 people for senior positions in his administration, compared with just three at a similar point in his 2016 transition. At this point four years ago, Biden had chosen just one person for a senior role in his incoming administration: Ron Klain for White House chief of staff.
Trump may enter the White House better positioned to both spell out and enact his agenda than in his first go-round.
A kind of government-in-waiting of Trump administration alumni and allies has spent years working at Washington think tanks since he left office crafting policies to put in place upon his return. A group started after Trump left office, the America First Policy Institute, which is led by a number of his former appointees, has drafted proposed executive orders for the transition team to consider.
Transition aides are sorting through scores of proposed orders, while Trump’s eldest son sits in on some meetings devoted to choosing personnel, two people close to the transition said.
Donald Trump Jr. was among those who privately voiced opposition to rehiring Mike Pompeo, who was secretary of state and CIA director in the first Trump administration, the person close to him said.
“He viewed him as ideologically out of sync on foreign policy. Too hawkish and internationalist,” the person said. “Don would like to see as many people in the administration who reflect his father’s worldview, because he believes that’s the best way to protect his dad’s interests.”
Trump needs to move quickly to enact his agenda given the realities of the electoral calendar. Under the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, he can serve only one term. Come 2026, Congress will be focused on midterm elections that could erode Trump’s narrow GOP majority or wipe it out altogether.
“The thing to realize is Trump is no dummy,” said Stephen Moore, a senior economic adviser in Trump’s campaign. “He knows he’s got two to three years at most to get anything done. And then he becomes a lame duck and we start talking about [the presidential election in] 2028.”
“So he really wants to Secretariat right out of the gate,” Moore added, referring to the champion thoroughbred racehorse.
It’s easy enough to announce new policies when the starting gun sounds; bringing them to fruition will take time. Major questions surround separate pieces of Trump’s agenda, including the tax cut package he promised. Will Trump follow through on his promise and eliminate taxes on tips or Social Security benefits, for example?
“We’re not even sure what will be in the plan,” Moore said.
Passing a tax cut will be so daunting a challenge that after having secured the border, Trump needs to make it an overriding priority, said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., a Trump ally.
Gingrich said he has spoken to Trump advisers about making the tax cut package a centerpiece of the new administration.
“You get overwhelmed by how many things you’re doing,” Gingrich told NBC News. “They have to take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s book and focus the entire Cabinet on passing the tax cuts.”
Deporting people on the scale Trump envisions figures to be a logistical challenge that would take years to carry out. What he has in mind goes far beyond what he did last time.
During the first term, Trump’s administration deported about 1.4 million people. Biden is on track to deport about 1.6 million people by the time his term ends, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“The president is moving with clarity and purpose on his picks around DHS and the border in general,” said Chad Wolf, who was acting secretary of homeland security in the Trump administration. “It was a campaign promise, and I think that polling shows that the American people did not like the direction of the Biden-Harris administration on this issue, so it made complete sense to put together a team and to do that quickly and to have that team to start to move out.”
A key figure in the effort will be Trump’s choice for homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. As governor of South Dakota, she hasn’t managed a bureaucracy remotely like the Department of Homeland Security, which employs more than a quarter-million people and whose portfolio also includes cyber threats and terrorism.
Noem campaigned for Trump, though a person close to Trump was surprised he tapped her for the job. Trump hadn’t “talked very favorably about her” after her book came out in the spring revealing she had killed her overly aggressive dog, Cricket, the person said.
Trump was incredulous that she would choose to write about the episode given people’s emotional attachment to their pets, the person added. He was surprised that she “didn’t understand what the reaction would be,” the person said. Trump is “no dog guy, but he’s like, ‘Good Lord!’”
Trump campaigned heavily on the promise of mass deportation and will be judged partly on how he addresses an issue that he contends threatens American sovereignty. If the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. rises, he is likely to face ridicule for failing to make good on his pledge.
At the same time, he endured fierce blowback for separating families who entered the country illegally in his first term, and he invites a potentially similar reaction if he takes such an approach again in the second.
“I don’t think there is any question Trump won and won big on the idea that cracking down on illegal immigration is not just a priority, but the priority,” said a Trump donor who has had conversations with his transition team.
Another Trump ally said the focus will be on how to expedite deportation through executive order, but the policy minutiae are still being hashed out.
“This is our focus. This is what we ran on,” the person said. “It will be swift, but I think a lot of what that looks like is still being discussed.”
Advisers are trying to think through how to repatriate those who would be deported, a person working on Trump’s transition said. That will be tricky.
Among the first people who could be targeted for deportation are those deemed to pose threats, possibly including Chinese men of military age who are living illegally in the U.S.
But sending them back to China would involve diplomatic negotiations that would be likely to require give and take. Another possibility Trump advisers are weighing involves deporting people to third-party countries.
As Trump navigates those issues, he has what his allies see as an advantage that all his predecessors lacked save for Grover Cleveland, the last president to lose an election and then return to the White House four years later. Both Cleveland in the 19th century and Trump in the 21st had hiatuses to consider what went wrong and what went right.
“These are the only two guys who had four years to think about their first four years and then go back and play,” Gingrich said.
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