WSJ What’s News - How Trump’s Busy First Week Sets the Stage for His Agenda

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

After being sworn in on Monday, President Trump hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders on immigration, taxes, oil production and other priorities, and bold statements on tariffs to international trade partners. The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief Damian Paletta joins us to talk about what the president’s actions tell us about his priorities, and how legal challenges and popular support might affect how he tackles them in the future. Alex Ossola hosts.Further Reading:  What Trump Can—and Can’t—Do on Day One A List of Trump’s Key Executive Orders—So Far Trump Gives Gun, Drug Agents Deportation Power Trump Says Aiming to Place 25% Tariffs on Canada, Mexico on Feb. 1 Trudeau Promises ‘Robust’ Response After Trump’s Tariff Pledge Trump Executive Orders Target Biden’s Climate Executive Orders  Five Things to Know About Trump’s Energy Orders Trump Pushes Back on Global Tax Deal  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey Spotify, this is Javi. My biggest passion is music, and it's not just sounds and instruments. It's more than that to me. It's a world full of harmonies with chillers. From streaming to shopping, it's on Prime. Hey What's New listeners, it's Sunday, January 26th. I'm Alex Osila for the Wall Street Journal. This is What's New Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the stories

in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On the show this week, Donald Trump had a busy first week of his second term as president. He started by signing a flurry of executive orders on topics including immigration, the economy, and trade. He started laying the groundwork to fulfill his campaign promises. But as legal challenges and other hurdles bring complications to governing,

can Trump keep the support of his party to fulfill his agenda? WSJ Washington coverage chief Damian Paletta joins us to talk about Trump's first week in office, what he got done, what he didn't, and what impact all that might have on the coming weeks and months. So, Damien, just starting us off, big picture, Trump's first week in office. What were some of the things that people were expecting him to do early in his tenure?

I think we were expecting a bunch of executive orders, which is something that he did immediately. We were even expecting him to pardon the people involved with the January 6 riot, which is something he also did immediately. I don't think a lot of people were prepared just for the burst of energy though that we saw from him. It was kind of back essentially. It was like he never left almost and he picked up right where he left off when he left office in 2021. You know, he's got the swagger back, he's got the Congress to fall in line, Democrats are completely lost about how to respond to him. So this is almost in a way the same Trump that we saw in the first term, although he

seems to have learned the ways of Washington better and he seems like he's going to get off to a faster start. It sounds like he has already. So let's get into some of the things that he was focused on. Just on the topic of immigration, which my understanding is a lot of people were expecting him to take early action on. He signed at least 10 executive orders trying to end birthright citizenship, sending more than a thousand troops to the border. He declared a state of emergency at the border. He granted immigration enforcement powers to other federal agencies. What could the buildup

at the border functionally mean? That's a great question. I think what we're seeing him in his border strategy probably play out in two phases. First, as you mentioned, he did sign a bunch of executive orders immediately, including one that attempts to end birthright citizenship, although that has already been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. So we'll see how that works, but he has immediately tried to roll back a bunch of Biden-era immigration policies to attempt as a policy to seal up the border and even canceling some refugee applications and things like that. So in the policy sense, he's moving quickly. In terms of deportations,

there's been almost no real progress or movement. You know, you have to remember he doesn't really have his cabinet in place yet. And the sorts of things he wants to do in terms of deportations, he's talked about millions and millions of people, you almost need the full strength of a government to do that. And that might explain why he's moving more slowly to do that. You mentioned some of why he's moving more slowly to do that. You mentioned some of the legal challenges already to some of Trump's executive orders. There were more than a dozen states and immigration groups have sued his administration over the order to end birthright citizenship. What does this say about how likely it is that

Trump's actions on immigration will actually hold? I think this actually is exactly what he wants in terms of the birthright citizenship lawsuit. He's trying to make a change that essentially is embedded in parts of our founding documents. And so in order to do that, it's going to have to go through the court system. And so as far as the White House is concerned, the sooner the justice system can rule on this, the better for them. And if they rule that his position is constitutional, then there's really literally nothing to stop it.

I want to take us now from the border to just south and north of it to talk about tariffs. Trump has said that he wants to place 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting February 1st. At Davos, he made a dress saying, hey, countries, make your products in America or face tariffs. Damien, let's start with something kind of fundamental here. What is Trump actually looking to do by raising tariffs on frequent U.S. trading partners? There's two theories, and they might both be right. One theory is he's trying to raise tons of money. He wants to create this thing called the external revenue service that would essentially just stockpile billions and billions of dollars and then that money could be used to either

offset tax cuts or advance other parts of his agenda. So on the one side of it, there's all this money that he says will be brought in through tariffs. The other side of it though is to encourage companies to manufacture all these products in the United States to avoid the tariffs. But we've already got a sense that Canada might retaliate. Mexico is trying to essentially calm Trump down. And China's got this whole TikTok, Fintanol, like very complicated negotiation because all these issues are snowballing into one big conversation. Just looking at that February 1st deadline for Canada and Mexico, what happens now? Well, he has to make a decision.

He can't start out by creating a deadline and then back off just a couple weeks into his presidency. So I would have to think that if they don't do something, he's going to have to impose tariffs. That kind of gets to this question of whether he can afford to take policies like big tariff and positions in a way that creates more inflation, that raises prices for consumers? Or is there a way that he can tailor the tariffs on products that maybe aren't as consumer-facing,

but might hit niche businesses in a way that they would have to absorb it themselves? So I think that's what we're watching for, is to see if he does a blanket tariff on all imports, maybe does it more strategically. And if so, is there a way to minimize the amount of economic and inflation impact that would have on American consumers? Because that's the fastest way for him to lose support on this policy is if they don't really see an increase in US jobs because of this, but instead they see an increase in consumer prices. And we know how sensitive Americans are to price increases. Coming up, which moves Damian will be keeping his eye on in the coming months? That's after the break. With TD Direct Investing, you can get live support.

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Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash DI offer to learn more. Let's talk now about energy. There were a bunch of executive orders rolling back oil and gas regulations around EVs as well. Trump halted wind energy leasing and permits for federal lands and waters, declared a national energy emergency that makes national security the top priority, and of course withdrew from

the Paris Agreement. Okay, lots going on here. I want to ask specifically about the green energy transition, which is something that the Biden administration and Obama as well were focused on during their time as president. Will Trump's moves kind of sideline those efforts that have been building up for all these years? Trump believes that he campaigned hard on this idea that we need to increase domestic production of oil. Americans seem to be very supportive of that message. Americans seem to be very supportive of that message. And so he doesn't see any political backsliding

or any political penalty if he follows through on this. What's really interesting about this is that oil prices are quite low right now. And so are gasoline prices. And oil companies and oil rich nations in the Middle East, they actually don't want to produce more oil because it'll make prices even lower. And so what we saw from President Trump is he's already begun pressuring Saudi Arabia

to increase oil production. One of his promises that he made during the campaign was that he would, in the first 12 to 18 months, cut energy prices for Americans by 50 to 70 percent. But in order for him to pull that off, you're going to have to have Saudi Arabia and other countries really participating in a coordinated effort to rapidly increase production. But you also could tip the country or parts of the economy into a recession because when prices fall that much, a lot of companies could go out of business and that could mean a big drop in jobs. So it's a very complicated economic game he's playing here,

but at the same time, I think he believes, and he might be just right, that if he can get prices on energy down, it'll really lead to a burst of economic enthusiasm in this country. Well, one really interesting thing that he did was, for the first time, I think, in his political life, threatened Russia. He issued this threat against Russia, saying that if they don't end the war in Ukraine immediately, he's going to hit them with taxes, tariffs and sanctions and a range of other things. And that could end up actually driving up energy prices. So that's something that we're going to have to watch closely too. I want to talk very briefly about taxes. Trump has pushed back the global tax deal. Rolling back taxes was one of his really

big agenda items. And it seems like he's maybe been a little slower out of the gate on this one. I think Republicans feel like they have the full year to sort this out. A large part of the 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. And they know it's going to be very difficult to make sure they get the exact pieces in place that they want. Essentially, the corporate tax cuts that were in the 2017 law, those are permanent, those stay. But the individual tax cuts and a lot of individual tax are paid by companies, different kinds of companies. So those tax cuts expire at the end of December and they will go back up if nothing is done. And so they're going to try to do this through a process in Congress called reconciliation,

which is a little confusing, but essentially it's very easy for Republicans to do it without Democratic support. And so we're going to be following this all year. There's going to be twists and turns and there's going to be some kind of intra-Republican sparring over exactly how these tax cuts should look. But Trump does have plenty of time to figure that out. As we're putting this first week to bed here, I want to just zoom out a little bit and talk

about what Trump's actions during his first week can tell us about his agenda and his priorities. Well, every day has been like a year so far of his presidency. So we had the executive orders on day one, then the pardons at night, then we had more pardons, and we've had more executive orders, then we've had the threats against other countries. I think one thing he's done is obviously by pardoning the people involved in the January 6th riot, and by pardoning the founder of this Silk Road dark web, he's kind of following through on campaign promises for political supporters. And these are things he said he would do before he was elected. He was very transparent with the American people that these are things that he

felt should be done and he's done them and so in a way his presidency's there's almost like two skis on it right one is the one with his economic agenda and his policy agenda that's full speed ahead and he's moving very fast he's kind of shaken up government already and then there's this other one that's much more political and these are things that he promised his supporters, that maybe his supporters would feel a lot more about changing the name of Mount McKinley. And obviously, with these pardons,

these are the things that his base is more excited about. And it keeps him happy. They feel like he listens to them. He understands them. He's going to do things on cryptocurrencies that he didn't really touch in his first term. But these are things that are really important to some of his supporters now. There are a lot of things that are going to be overlapping and interlocking in the coming

weeks and months. But what is maybe one thing that you're going to be keeping an eye on that you think is particularly salient or interesting or indicative of Trump's approach in the coming weeks? Couple things. One is he's operating at a time when he's at peak power and the Democrats are at peak weakness, and they don't know what to do. And so we're watching Democrats to see

whether they just stand back initially and let Trump do his thing, or whether they try to engage, maybe even work with him on immigration policy, things like that. The other thing is he is, at at times too unpredictable for his own party. And one of the things Republicans have done is they've fallen in line, they're taking their cues from him. Speaker Johnson ousted the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee because Trump

didn't want the guy there. They're doing whatever he wants. And there's going to be times though, whether it's a vote on the debt ceiling, or it's going to be some change to immigration policy or something else, when it's going to really put some Republicans in a tight spot. And he has such slim majorities in the House and the Senate that we're going to have to see whether everyone will fall in line with him or not. Damian, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you. And that's it for What's New Sunday for January 26th. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bansi, with supervising producer Michael Kosmides and deputy editors Scott Salloway and Chris Sinzley. I'm Alex Osila. We'll be back on Monday morning with a new show. Thanks for listening. you