Front Burner - What will Trump's first 100 days bring?

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Yesterday, Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time as President of the United States.In his inaugural address and as he signed executive orders throughout the day, Trump made his priorities for his first days in office clear. He declared an emergency at the southern border, made it the official policy of the United States that "there are only two genders", said America was "taking back" the Panama Canal and much, much more.Many of these moves are things that Trump has promised or threatened to do on "day one". Which is why on the eve of inauguration day we spoke to Tolu Olorunnipa, the Washington Bureau Chief with the Washington Post and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book 'His Name is George Floyd' about what to expect in the coming days of the second Trump Presidency.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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The golden age of America begins right now. Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life. But I felt then and believe even more so now that I was saved by God to make America great again. Hey everybody, it's Jamie. So yesterday, Donald Trump was sworn in for the second time as President of the United States.

And as promised, he wasted no time making his presence felt by signing a flurry of executive orders on his first day back in office. And the next item, sir, is a letter that will be transmitted to the United Nations explaining that we are withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty. Thank you, sir. This next item is a directive to the federal government ordering the restoration of freedom of speech and preventing government censorship

of free speech going forward. In his inaugural address, flanked by his family, tech billionaires, and cabinet appointees, Trump laid out what his priorities will be during his initial days in office. All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. Today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.

emergency, we will drill, baby, drill. It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female. In a second rambling speech to the overflow room, Trump repeated his lie that the 2020 election was rigged, criticized Joe Biden's preemptive pardons from earlier in the day, said that Hillary Clinton, She didn't look too happy today. and that Nancy Pelosi is responsible for what happened on January 6th. But she's guilty as hell.

Speaking of January 6th, You know tonight I'm going to be signing on the J6 hostages. Pardon us. In one of his executive orders, he pardoned people convicted of nonviolent offenses related to the January 6 US Capitol attack and commuted the sentences of others convicted of more serious offenses. Among the things that he's promised that he did not act on yesterday was the 25% tariffs that he's been threatening against Canada and

Mexico. For much of the day there was a sense of relief but then around 8 p.m. Monday night he said this from the Oval Office. We're thinking in terms of 25 percent on Mexico and Canada because they're allowing vast numbers of people to come in and fentanyl to come in. Are you planning on getting those for that? I think we'll do it February 1st. Signing executive orders doesn't mean any of these things have actually been fixed, changed, or dealt with, but they are things that Trump has promised or threatened to do on day one, many times over. Which is why, on the eve of Inauguration Day,

I spoke to Tolu Olorunipa, the Washington Bureau Chief with The Washington Post and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, His Name is George Floyd, about what to expect in the first days of the second Trump presidency. ["The New York Times"] Tolu, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to be with you.

These are, of course, not Trump's first 100 days as president. And I wonder if you could take me back to 2017. What characterized the early days of his first term? Well, we have to go back to January 20, 2017, where Trump gave his inaugural address. It was different than anything that we had seen in this country.

And so it really set the stage for his early days in office. There was a lot of chaos. He tried to enact a ban on travel from several Muslim majority countries. And it led to chaos at airports. There were big protests over his actions. Refugees are welcome here. A weekend of protests over President Trump's

immigration crackdown. That order signed Friday, leading to instant chaos and confusion at airports at home and around the world travelers not allowed to board flights bound for the U.S. some including children detained upon landing. Others there's a lot of infighting in the White House he didn't really know how to work the levers of government you put a lot of people in office who were opposed to one another

and so there's a lot of fighting and leaks. President Trump's enemies within the administration continue an unprecedented level of leaking for a presidency that is not yet two weeks old. There are new leaks tonight about the president's role in launching a mission in Yemen in which US Navy SEAL William Owens became the first American killed in Yemen. Talking about it all morning, President Trump facing questions now about his son-in-law amid reports that Jared Kushner tried to set up a back channel with Russia. Amid the barrage of Russia revelations, there could be a White House shakeup, something we have heard before. And that was a very turbulent period. Now he's gonna be coming in with a lot more loyalty among his ranks and a lot more experience. And so we'll have to wait and see

how much he shakes things up. But I do remember those early days where he started off talking about American carnage and there was a lot of carnage within his administration because they couldn't figure out how to work their levers of power and get things done. Okay, let's talk about some of the things that Trump says that he plans to do.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to seal the border on his first day in office and start deporting undocumented migrants. What are people anticipating could happen here? What could it look like? Immigration is one of the big issues that people expect Trump to act very quickly on and very aggressively on. He does have a lot of leeway as president to use his executive power to try to move things on the immigration front.

He has already said that he's going to try to target people who are in the country illegally, specifically people who have come recently under the Biden administration, as well as people who have a history of violence or crimes, criminality in their background. We will reinstate my remain in Mexico policy. And I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country. I expect him to try to show a force in terms of using the various agencies and the law enforcement powers that are under the federal

government's command to show themselves being, you know, going into neighborhoods, going into big urban cities, and at least for the spectacle, pulling people out and saying that you're going to be going out of this country. I expect him to try to do a lot of that. And then on the policy front, he has a number of policies that he put into place during his first term, things like the quote unquote remain in Mexico policy, uh, different kinds of policies where they use the pandemic to really restrict the ability of people to come into the country and claim asylum.

I've heard and read that they are looking for new diseases or new public health threats that they can use to justify that same kind of policy, even though we're not in the middle of a pandemic, but there are wide ranging powers that go to a president when you are in a health crisis. And so I've heard that they're going to try to use that to restrict access to anyone trying to come across

the border and claim asylum, saying that we have a public health crisis and we can't allow any more people to come through. We will not be deterred. Together we will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our children safe, healthy, and disease-free. And so I think between trying to close down the border and keep it from having more people cross and trying to deport large numbers of people who are already here, I think we're going to see a lot of action from this president, especially early in his administration.

Here's one that's been getting a lot of play here in Canada. Trump has been threatening Canada and Mexico with a 25% levy or tax on all exports to the U.S. and also a 10% increase on tariffs already in place from China. Three quarters of everything that we sell internationally is sold to the U.S. This is a real problem for us, as you can imagine. I am curious to hear what you are hearing about how serious this is, how it could play out what they're preparing.

Yeah, there are two camps on this. There is a camp that says that Trump uses these tariff threats largely as a negotiating ploy. He wants to be able to say that I extracted things from allies or adversaries by threatening and making a hard bargain. And eventually he comes to the table and says, Oh, we're not going to have these tariffs. We're not going to rate the prices of goods for the American taxpayer. We're just going to say that we've won and claim the win and back down.

He did a lot of that during his first term. And a lot of people in his in his administration who weren't a big fan of tariffs who were nonetheless part of his administration this time around, he is now surrounding himself with people that will support what he wants to do. And so I do expect there to be a push towards making the tariffs actually a reality. I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families.

Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens. Now, he could always back down. He could always get, you know, a pretty good bargain from these other countries, including Canada, saying that we're going to enforce stricter border measures.

We're going to offer different economic incentives to not put these tariffs in place. Yeah, we make some concessions on dairy or whatever. Yeah, for sure. And we've already seen this with, you know, things like TikTok, where Trump is at in the past, driven a hard bargain. And then, you know, when presented with new information or presented with, you know, the political outfall of some of these things, he decides that, you know, maybe it's not

such a good idea to move forward with the most extreme version of a set of events. And so I wouldn't be surprised if he does eventually strike a bargain, but it seems like in the initial running, he wants to be seen as serious when it comes to tariffs. He wants to be seen as making an example of different countries. And even if this is, you know, what he does to try to strike a hard bargain with other countries, I think there will be at least one scapegoat, one country that gets these tariffs and has to deal with the consequences and to put all the other countries on notice that this is how he's going to operate in his second term. Let me tell you, Tolu, we're pretty worried it's going to be us.

You mentioned the TikTok ban. Late Saturday evening, the long-threatened TikTok ban went into effect in your country. It's still working here, though. And it looks like TikTok initially accepted the ban and shut down, but that didn't last too long. Trump is, as you mentioned, has previously been a supporter of the ban.

TikTok has 100 million users in the United States, but President Trump is not one of them. The president told reporters Friday night that he wants to ban TikTok TikTok has 100 million users in the United States, but President Trump is not one of them. The president told reporters Friday night that he wants to ban TikTok using an executive order as early as today. Now in a statement, TikTok... But then said this past weekend that he plans to issue an executive order giving the company more time, most likely 90 days, to find an American buyer.

He now suddenly is a real advocate of TikTok. He says that platform needs to be open for people to watch his inauguration. Why the reversal on TikTok for Trump? Just tell me more about it. Yeah, Donald Trump, if anything else, he is a populist in the sense of the word that he understands the things that are popular

and he knows that going against something that has a broad popularity in the country, especially among a key constituency like young voters, it's not something that he wants to do. He's actually, you know, he tries to drive a hard bargain, but he actually does not like to be seen as someone who is taking a broadly unpopular point of view and pushing forward something

that's gonna make people feel like he's taking something away from them. And so he started to get feedback from, you know, the young people that supported him. He realized that this is a pretty popular platform and it's a platform where he is actually relatively popular and where he has been able to trend and get a large number of followers.

You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that. So a lot of this is sort of ego driven and driven by sort of these actions of a president who sees himself as trying to represent the viewpoint of the people who put him into office, trying to represent this new crop of young voters who are Trump curious or who are willing to vote for Trump or willing to see Trump as part of the counterculture. And as of today, TikTok is back.

Yeah! Despite all the national security implications, despite the fact that he had a previous position saying that China was potentially going to use TikTok to spy on Americans, now it's all about the popular nature of this app. This is really Trump trying to find what's popular and trying to figure out how to align that with his own policy.

He also spent quite a bit of time during his campaign talking about the problems he sees with wokeness. And woke has to stop. Because along with everything else, it's destroying our country. We're going to stop woke. Woke. Woke is bullshit. He said he would end woke-ism in schools on day one.

And what does he mean by that? What could that look like? It's hard to tell because if you ever ask someone who likes to traffic in the word wokeness what it means, you'll get a thousand different definitions, sometimes no definition. But I do expect Trump to take a lot of symbolic action, at least on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, on trans issues. He really wants to be seen as quote unquote, bringing America back to quote, common sense. For Republicans and conservatives, that means pushing back against the idea of diversity,

equity and inclusion being a part of the government ethos that we've seen over the past four years under Joe Biden. You know, the idea of quote unquote, boys playing in girls sports. With the stroke of my pen, on day one, we're going to stop the transgender lunacy. And I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation,

get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high school. And we will keep men out of women's sports. Those are the things that Trump has branded as woke and that he plans to reverse either in policy or in symbol. Sometimes the federal government does not have the power to actually move on some of these things.

Some of them are handled by states and local governments or even at the local level, at the school level. But he can issue an executive order saying, you know, the federal government recognizes two genders or the federal government believes that only girls should play in girls sports and things like that. And I would expect there to be a lot of symbolic executive actions, you know, studies being put together or commissions being put together or, you put together or statements of principle from the federal government. Those will largely be what leads the way, but there will also be some policy changes in areas where he has the power to change policy on quote unquote

woke ideology and things like diversity in the government. I would expect that to be one area where his government tries to roll back some of the things that Joe Biden has done, especially all the things that have been done since 2020 when George Floyd was killed and it led to this outpouring of support for diversity and equity type policies. Now we're seeing a big rollback and Trump wants to be the leader of the movement to roll back that progress. This week, I will also 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 colorblind and merit-based. Merit based. She said, Tex, what did you do? You shot me. Join us as we dive deep into a world of power, money, and greed, and one man's secret quest to grab the million-dollar fortune of his deceased wife. From Sony Music Entertainment and Waveland Road, this is Deadly Fortune. Listen wherever you get your podcast. I also wanted to ask you about his team, right? His appointments and confirmations have really run the gamut from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Department of Health and Human Services.

And just can you walk me through where we are on some of the biggest appointments right now and which ones are proving to be the most controversial? I'd say the most controversial ones are the defense secretary choice, Pete Hegseth, a Fox News personality who has not a lot of experience in the kinds of background that you would expect of a defense secretary. This is someone who's going to be leading a department

with an $800 billion budget and more than 3 million members. Heralded by some as a much-needed Washington outsider, his many critics label Hegseth supremely unqualified with his suggestion women are unfit for combat roles and a past allegation of sexual assault. I'm not a perfect person, as has been acknowledged, saved by the grace of God. Hegseth dismissed most of the criticism against him as a media smear campaign. But Democrats...

He hasn't had a lot of a managerial experience, but he does seem like he is on the glide path to being confirmed because Trump has the rock solid support of the Republican majority in the Senate. Other people who are relatively controversial, RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services. He's someone who has expressed anti-vaccine ideology in the past and really had some extreme views

on a number of things concerning health. Now, one of his main false claims was that autism comes from vaccines. During the pandemic, R.F.K. Jr. was also a critic of restrictions to limit the spread of COVID-19. He also spread misinformation by telling media that COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. R.F.K. Jr. has also long campaigned against fluoridated water. Trump has said he wants R.F.K. Jr. to go wild on health,

and so that has led a lot of people to question whether or not he should be the leader of America's health care system. But he could get the votes as well because Trump has Republican votes behind him. The third person that is somewhat controversial is Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who Trump has chosen to lead the intelligence community in America. She has some controversial ties to Russia and Syria that caused cause people to wonder whether or not she should be the keeper of America's secrets. But again, because Trump has that 53 seat majority in the a hundred member Senate,

he can lose a number of votes and still get through his cabinet choices. And so writ large, he has a pretty unconventional cabinet. It's made up of some people who are conventional, like Marco Rubio for a secretary of state, but other people who are very unconventional and people who are most importantly to Trump, loyal to him and willing to do his bidding.

And so, it's not the kind of cabinet that you would ever see in the past in American history, but Trump is coming in and wanting to do his own thing, wanting to have loyalists around him. And because he's remade the party so much in his image, the kinds of senators that would stand up to him and say, no, this is too far, are largely out of the party. People like Mitt Romney, they are no longer in government. And so he has a pretty much of a rubber stamp to get his nominees through and to support his agenda going forward.

I know this isn't a cabinet appointment, but Elon Musk is set to lead Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. And what are people anticipating here in terms of him taking an axe, I guess, to government departments? What are people in Washington, where you are, thinking is going to happen here? This is a new wrinkle in Trumpism. The first time around when he was in office, he wasn't really that focused on cutting spending.

He gave a good talk about it, but he didn't really seem to care much about it. He just wanted to cut taxes. This time around, he seems to be very serious about cutting spending. And you know, it's an age old thing in Washington. People say they want to cut the size of government, but he's put behind this effort, you know, not only the richest person in the world, but they're putting together a huge team outside of government, tech billionaires, tech executives who are looking to try to make the government more efficient in their words, but they're also looking to cut, you know, trillions of dollars in spending from the government.

Sources say Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, chosen by President-elect Trump to form a Department of Government Efficiency told the mostly Republican lawmakers yesterday that they would be keeping a naughty and nice list of those who join in the budget slashing proposals and those who don't. Lawmakers reportedly discussing a variety of cuts targeting the Education Department, redundancy in the government workforce and government employees working from home. And so this could be something that could really change the way government works.

You could see the real impact on programs that people have gotten used to that, you know, in Trump's mind and the mind of his acolytes are not worth the dollars that we spend on them. Those programs could be cut short. Trump could try to use the power of the presidency to X out some of the spending that has been approved by Congress that has been approved by

Congress that has never been tested in the courts, whether or not a president can say Congress has passed this funding, but I don't want to spend the money, so we're not going to do it. It's called impoundment. Whether or not he can do that, the courts will potentially ultimately decide. But if this doge effort goes forward, we could see the government of the United States really reformed in a way that could reshape how people interact with the government, the kinds of programs and support that people have gotten used to and that have

helped some people could be cut down, cut short, eliminated. And I don't think people are quite ready for that. It could be a major shift in the way the government works. Is there anything that we haven't talked about today that you are really watching for when we're discussing what to expect in the first hundred days? I do think there's this really interesting alignment between Trump and the world of technology, technology executives, and what that means beyond just, you know, cutting government and cutting taxes. What it means for regulations, what it means for things like crypto and AI, and whether or not Trump has the opportunity to sort of lead the country in a forward-looking

approach to the 21st century technology that's emerging, or whether or not, you know, in the words of Joe Biden, we are leading ourselves into an oligarchy where these tech billionaires are going to sort of feast on the carcass of a declining nation and just sort of pick off wins for themselves and not for the country. And so I do think this alignment between Trump, not only Musk, but people like Mark Andreessen, David Sacks, people that are going to be advising Trump that emanate from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has normally been a pretty blue liberal area. And I think this new alignment between Trump and the Silicon Valley executives could have a lot of potential, but it could also lead to some unintended

consequences and some really controversial things. And so I'll be watching that very closely to see how Trump acts when it comes to the big issues of technology, whether or not he acts in the best interest of the country or just in the best interest of this billionaire class of executives that seems to be closing up to him as he gets ready to take office. Totally. This is great. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. You got it. Thank you. All right. So before we go today, former President Joe Biden's final moves in office were also made public yesterday,

including communing the sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier and as I mentioned in the intro, preemptive pardons for potential targets of the Trump White House, like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney, and preemptive blanket pardons for his family, who he said were subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me. The worst kind of partisan politics," he went on. Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.