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27 January 2025

Donald Trump’s gladiator politics

The president knows most of his executive orders will be challenged in court. He wants the fight.

By Katie Stallard

When Donald Trump first entered the White House in January 2017, he was still assembling his nascent administration and grappling with the bewildering machinery of government. During the years that followed, he repeatedly railed against the supposed disloyalty of the officials beneath him, claiming that his agenda was being derailed by what he viewed as a recalcitrant bureaucracy and partisan resistance from within the “deep state”.

Eight years on, the contrast is stark. Trump returned to power on 20 January buoyed by what he sees as an incontrovertible mandate – having won the popular vote for the first time he also has a Republican-controlled Congress, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a battery of executive orders ready to go. He is not looking for the approval and legitimacy he apparently sought at the start of his last term when he surrounded himself with four-star generals. Instead, he is now staffing his administration with trusted lieutenants, apparently committed to delivering on his promises, and unleashing a torrent of executive orders designed to establish his total dominance of American politics and test the limits of presidential power. Any efforts to mount a new resistance this time will be met with the battle cry: this is what the people voted for.

Perhaps more so than any other president in recent history, Trump has an instinctive grasp of the politics of spectacle and the power of the right image to bolster his personal brand. From the moment he glided down his golden escalator in Trump Tower to launch his first presidential bid in 2015, he has relentlessly focused on the production of his presidency, and the imperative to signal strength in his public appearances. This was evident when he responded to his felony conviction in New York last June by making a defiant appearance at an Ultimate Fighting Championship match the following night, striding into the arena to thunderous applause to the soundtrack of Kid Rock’s “American Badass”. It’s hard to imagine a more potent political image than that of Trump on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer, his ear bloodied by a would-be assassin’s bullet, pushing past his secret service detail to thrust his fist into the air and mouth the words: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Those same instincts prompted Trump’s flurry of executive orders, choreographed to give the appearance of massive action from his first moments back in power. He did not even wait to get back into the Oval Office to get started, heading straight from the inauguration ceremony at the Capitol to a stadium filled with his fans in downtown Washington. There he sat at a desk on stage and began signing executive orders, holding the documents aloft to display his signature to the rapturous crowd. For his critics, the signing ceremony was a cheap publicity stunt designed to titillate his Maga base, but Democrats dismiss these crowd-pleasing instincts at their peril. Trump understands a fundamental truth in America’s increasingly gladiatorial politics: that power must be embodied.

In contrast to Joe Biden’s faltering final days, Trump, who is only three years younger than his predecessor and also now in his final term as president, appears determined to demonstrate that he is now in complete control. The sheer volume of executive orders already signed – more than 40 within his first 24 hours – is precisely the point. With each black leather folder he was handed by his aide to sign in front of the cameras during his first day back in the Oval Office, Trump was signalling to his supporters that he is taking power into his own hands and delivering on his promises. Unlike many of his predecessors, he has indicated no intention to work across the aisle in Congress to get new legislation passed. Instead, he expects Congress, and the members of his own party in particular, to fall in line. In the short term, this means confirming his cabinet, despite clear reservations among plenty of Republicans and Democrats alike, about nominations such as the former Fox New host Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defence, and Tulsi Gabbard, who has been accused of repeating Kremlin talking points and having connections to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, as Director of National Intelligence. But there will be much bigger battles ahead.

This is not how America’s system of government is supposed to work. In theory, there are three co-equal branches of power – executive, legislative, and judicial – intentionally designed to act as a check on each other and prevent any one body from becoming too powerful. But Trump, repeating his insistence that American politics as usual is broken and that he, alone, can restore the country to greatness, appears determined to test that theory.

If the furious pace and quantity of orders Trump has already issued is surprising, the contents should not come as a shock. From declaring a national emergency at the southern border that requires the US military to help repel an “invasion” of immigrants, to declaring a national energy emergency that requires immediate efforts to extract more oil and gas, withdrawing from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organisation, declaring that there are only two genders, and pardoning or commuting the sentences of all those involved in the 6 January attack, Trump signalled his intentions, repeatedly, during the election campaign. These actions range from the symbolic – such as ordering that the US flag is flown at full-mast on all future inauguration days and renaming Denali in Alaska Mount McKinley, over the objections of Alaska Republicans – to challenging the constitutionally guaranteed right to citizenship for everyone born in America.

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The lawsuits have already started. Within hours of Trump signing the order on birthright citizenship,  immigrant rights advocates had already filed suit against the government in a New Hampshire federal court. Twenty-two Democratic-led states have since filed their own lawsuits, along with other civil rights groups, setting up a legal battle that is all but certain to end up in a showdown at the Supreme Court.

This will not come as a surprise to Trump. He wants that fight. He wants to be seen as the valiant president who is “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” as his 20 January executive order was titled, or “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” and “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”. He understands the potency of the political ads that ran during the closing weeks of the last campaign that declared: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Trump and his allies want the framing, in the 2026 midterms and beyond, that Republicans are for secure borders and American citizens, while Democrats are for no borders at all.

The danger for Trump is that this moment turns out to represent the height of his powers – before the challenge of actually delivering on his policies and the legislative struggles kick in; before the factional struggles beneath him erupt into full view and the jockeying to succeed him begins in earnest. With hindsight, issuing this initial blizzard of orders might well turn out to have been the easy part. The crucial question now will be whether he has correctly interpreted his mandate – whether these are, really, the issues that motivated more than 77 million Americans to vote for him – or whether he will be judged instead, as Biden was, on how the economy fares over the next four years. The problem with presenting yourself as the personal embodiment of American power is that you are also liable to be held responsible if things go wrong.

[See also: An abomination of an inauguration]  

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