After the first week of the new Trump administration, listing what he didn’t do would have been easier than listing what he did. He didn’t curb the rising national debt. He didn’t fully restore constitutional government. He didn’t bring the troops home from the far-flung outposts of the American Empire. But what President Donald Trump did is nevertheless impressive and outstanding, not least because he kept many of his campaign promises to end the anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-common-sense madness of the last four years.

Most importantly, vis-à-vis national security, the federal government’s primordial duty, he immediately moved to close the Southwest border and stop the illegal-alien invasion aided, abetted, and invited by former President Joe Biden. Trump deployed 1,500 U.S. Marines and soldiers to the border to back up the besieged Border Patrol.

He declared that the government will recognize only two sexes, not a panoply of “genders”; pardoned the January 6 and pro-life protesters whom the weaponized Justice Department imprisoned; withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord; and ordered the release of the assassination files of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

And during his inauguration, he vowed that the United States would take back the Panama Canal.

Not bad for the first few days in office. 

Immigration, National Security

Trump’s most pressing and significant first order was closing the Southwest border with Mexico and beginning mass deportations, beginning with the illegal-alien criminals whom Biden turned loose upon Americans with unlawful programs that released illegals into the United States. 

Border Patrol agents have encountered more than 10 million illegals at the nation’s borders since Biden took office, the vast majority at the frontier with Mexico. Rapists, murderers, and other criminals were caught and released, a move that ended in the deaths of women such as Laken Riley. A new criminal gang, Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua (TdA), established a beachhead in several major U.S. cities, and took over at least one motel and several apartment complexes in two states.

Such was the danger of Biden’s policies that the U.S. House impeached his Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban immigrant.

Trump stopped the invasion at the border with multiple executive orders on Day 1. 

“America’s sovereignty is under attack,” Trump said in declaring a national emergency at the Southwest border: “Our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans.”

Trump also declared the drug cartels that virtually control some areas of the border to be terrorist organizations, including TdA and the feral MS-13 gang from El Salvador.

He stopped refugee admissions until they are realigned with American interests, and suspended the admission of aliens until he declares that the Biden-sponsored invasion is over. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began deporting illegals from the interior, and shortly thereafter, summary deportations began. He ended Biden’s attempt to import the Third World through an illegal “parole” program and with a smartphone app created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Perhaps mostly importantly, Trump ordered the military’s U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) to “to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”

Thus did USNORTHCOM dispatch 1,000 Army and 500 Marine Corps military police and combat engineers to the border. Joining them, news reports said, would be elements of the 82nd Airborne and 10th Mountain divisions.

Within days of Trump’s taking office, illegal-alien encounters at the border had dropped to less than 1,000 per day, and as this edition of The New American went to press, the number of arrests of illegal-alien rapists, pedophiles, and murderers approached 3,000. Deportation flights began on January 24 — just four days after Trump took the oath of office.

Many illegal aliens began self-deporting and leaving the country.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump ordered an end to birthright citizenship, which permits foreigners to travel to the United States to drop “anchor babies” who are citizens. That’s called birth tourism, a trade in which the Chinese have become experts. The same is true for illegal aliens and the Biden “migrants” the former president invited into the country. Once they have a child, deporting the parents becomes next to impossible.

Trump’s order invited lawsuits from the usual leftist, open-borders lawfare organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

Enforcing the law: President Donald Trump signed myriad executive orders the day he took the presidential oath, the most important concerning immigration. Trump closed the border, began summary deportations and rounding up illegal-alien criminals, and declared the border drug- and human-smuggling cartels terrorist organizations. (AP Images)

DEI, “Civil Rights,” Gender Madness End

In keeping with his promise to end the woke ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), along with “civil rights” and “transgender” mandates — with which Biden waterboarded Americans from Day 1 of his disastrous presidency — Trump also upended those initiatives.

Most importantly, Trump overturned presidential orders dating to 1965 that supposedly protected “civil rights.” In fact, they undermined those rights by discriminating against whites. Trump rescinded President Lyndon Johnson’s executive order mandating “affirmative action” among federal contractors. He nixed similar orders from presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

“Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” says the order, called “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-based Opportunity”:

These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans. 

Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.

Trump ended all federal DEI policies and programs, and placed all federal DEI employees on leave. He also terminated all DEI training and ended all DEI contracts.

He stopped the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs from promoting “diversity,” “holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action,’” and urging them to fret about “race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin” in hiring.

As far as “gender” and “transgender” lunacy goes, Trump declared that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” Title of the order: “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

The order defined men and boys as men and boys and women and girls as women and girls. 

It also destroyed the notion that human beings have a “gender identity” apart from their biological sex:

“Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.

Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

“Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.

The Rule of Law, No Tax Money for Abortions Here or Abroad

As important as returning common sense and biological reality to the federal government is, equally important is that Trump stood up for the rule of law.

In what he called the beginning of a “national reconciliation,” he pardoned or commuted the prison sentences of some 1,500 Americans prosecuted for joining in the mostly peaceful protest about the 2020 election at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The attorney general will dismiss any ongoing cases against those defendants.

Trump also pardoned pro-life activists convicted of breaking the law under the unconstitutional FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act.

Signed by President Bill Clinton, who once said abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” the law was used by the Biden administration to prosecute protesters who lawfully exercised their First Amendment-protected right to peacefully protest outside abortion clinics.

Observed the Thomas More Society, which sought the pardons, the Biden administration weaponized the FACE Act to prosecute the defendants selectively. First, it overcharged the protesters with felonies for infractions that were at most misdemeanors. Second, Biden prosecuted the pro-lifers but prosecuted no one for the hundreds of acts of violence against pregnancy centers and churches, which are also covered by the law, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision. In one case, the jury was rigged, Thomas More noted. One of those pardoned is 76-year-old Joan Bell, who was arrested in May 2024 for praying outside an abortion clinic.

The pardons struck a blow against the weaponization of federal law not only against targets such as the mostly peaceful J6 protesters, but also the Joan Bells of this nation who were arrested for protesting the mass slaughter of unborn children.

“The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions,” Trump said in the order called “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” 

Those unconstitutional actions, not least threatening and vilifying as terrorists parents who spoke out at school-board meetings, were meant to inflict “political pain.”

The Biden administration and its far-left allies across the nation “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” the order explained:

It targeted individuals who voiced opposition to the prior administration’s policies with numerous Federal investigations and politically motivated funding revocations, which cost Americans access to needed services. The Department of Justice even jailed an individual for posting a political meme.… The Department of Justice has ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6, and simultaneously dropped nearly all cases against [Black Lives Matter] rioters. 

No More WHO or Paris Climate Accord

Trump also signed executive orders to protect American taxpayers from predatory freeloading nations and their janissaries in anti-American global organizations.

The United States quit the World Health Organization (WHO), Trump said, for “mishandling” the China Virus, for failing “to adopt urgently needed reforms,” and for becoming captive to the political influence of member nations. As well, “WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.” 

Recall that the WHO refused to blame China for the Covid-19 virus, despite knowing the Asiatic microbe swept the globe after it escaped from a lab in Wuhan. That lab was conducting gain-of-function research — illegally subsidized with U.S. tax dollars — on bat viruses.

Likewise, Trump ditched the anti-American Paris climate accord, one of many “international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives,” he said.

As well, those agreements pump money into nations that “do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.”

In dropping out of the accord, Trump said his job is “to put the interests of the United States and the American people first in the development and negotiation of any international agreements with the potential to damage or stifle the American economy.” And “agreements must not unduly or unfairly burden the United States.”

In almost every case, Americans gain little from these pacts, treaties, and agreements other than a massive bill to pay, while the rest of the signatories freeload.

Example: the United Nations, which Trump should abandon next.

Trump also paused foreign aid for 90 days because the U.S. “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases [are] antithetical to American values.” The foreign-aid industrial complex does little more than “destabilize world peace.” No more free money will rocket around the globe unless disbursing it is “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.” 

JFK, RFK, MLK Files

Trump also followed through on his vow to release the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination files.

“I have now determined that the continued redaction and withholding of information from records pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not consistent with the public interest and the release of these records is long overdue,” Trump said:

And although no Act of Congress directs the release of information pertaining to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have determined that the release of all records in the Federal Government’s possession pertaining to each of those assassinations is also in the public interest.

Unclear is whether the released MLK files will include those held by the National Archives until 2027. A judge sealed the records in 1977 pursuant to a lawsuit filed by the discredited hate group Southern Poverty Law Center.

Those files likely contain more information about King’s deviant and “unnatural” sexual practices, including his being an accomplice in a rape, than the files already available to the public.

Release the files: Keeping yet another promise, Trump ordered the release of the assassination files of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and “civil rights” leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (AP Images)

Security Clearances Revoked

In another blow against the Deep State, Trump rescinded the security clearances of the 51 former intelligence officials who falsely claimed that Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop, uncovered by the New York Post in October 2020, was “Russian disinformation.” The far-left, pro-Biden media, notably Politico, ran with that lie, and during his third debate with Trump, President Joe Biden used it to claim the laptop story was disinformation.

The 51 officials, including James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, and communist John Brenner, former CIA director, said the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Unfortunately for them, the laptop was not disinformation, as Hunter himself confirmed in a lawsuit filed against former Trump aide Rudy Giuliani in 2023.

Also losing a security clearance is neoconservative armchair warrior John Bolton.

Panama Canal

During his inauguration speech before the slowly burning Establishment apparatchiks seated behind and around him, Trump delivered his promises and objectives with characteristic brio.

He also implicitly reasserted the Monroe Doctrine: A foreign power will have no influence in the Western Hemisphere. The imprudent and illegal Panama Canal Treaties are null and void.
“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,” he 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,” Trump continued. “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.”

Again, not bad for the first several days on the job.