WSJ What’s News - Trump Returns With Executive Orders and Pardons

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

A.M. Edition for Jan. 21. WSJ reporter Gavin Bade breaks down the dozens of executive orders Donald Trump signed on his return to the Oval Office, targeting immigration, energy and government reform. Plus, the president is giving TikTok 75 days to work out a deal to prevent a nationwide ban, as China signals it might be open to a sale or 50-50 joint venture with the U.S. And investors react to early clues about the new administration’s priorities, sending oil lower and the Mexican peso and Canadian dollar down against the USD. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Donald Trump kickstarts his second term with a flurry of day one executive orders. You're witnessing the dawn of the golden age of America. That's what it's going to be. We're bringing it back. We're going to bring it back fast. Plus, China changes its tune on the potential sale of TikTok and an update on this weekend's Gaza ceasefire. It's Tuesday, January 21st.

I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Just hours after being sworn into office at the Capitol Rotunda, President Donald Trump got the ball rolling yesterday on his agenda, signing a series of executive orders touching on immigration, trade, energy, government reform, and much more. Journal Trade and Economic Policy reporter Gavin Bade was tracking Trump's first-day actions as the president put his pen to paper at events across D.C., including at a raucous evening rally at a downtown arena.

And he joins us now to walk through some of the highlights. Gavin, let's begin with immigration, shall we? This is something Trump brought up during his inaugural speech and that he got to work on quickly via several executive orders. Talk to us about the steps that he's taken there. Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the cornerstones of Trump's campaign, is dealing with immigration and issues at the border and was the subject of some of his most far reaching and significant executive orders on Monday.

The most significant is declaring an emergency at the US Mexico border and ordering some very constitutionally contentious things, announcing that he would seek to end birthright citizenship, announcing that he would carry out a series of immigration raids, although he didn't give details on those, and then designating some Mexican cartels. He said he would designate them as foreign terrorist organizations, potentially setting the stage for some military intervention south of the border. So a lot of uncertainty around these things, both from a legal and feasibility standpoint, but he certainly wasted no time laying down the gauntlet, so to speak, on immigration.

Gavin, as you hinted at there, a number of the actions that Trump took yesterday, be it on immigration or other things, are likely to be challenged in court. Immigration rights groups, for instance, have already sued to stop the end of birthright citizenship. Switching gears from the emergency declaration at the southern border, let's talk about the fact that Trump also declared a national energy emergency. What exactly does that mean? What did he announce? Yes, mostly the energy executive orders and the emergency designation has to do with streamlining,

citing in construction of energy projects, specifically fossil fuel projects. He empowers a lot of his agency heads, once they're confirmed, to cut through a lot of red tape and disregard local or national environmental protocols. When citing these projects, his view is that the U.S. can do a lot more in producing energy, specifically oil and gas, despite the fact that the U.S. is producing more oil and gas than at any point in its history. We also expect him to end the Biden administration's pause on liquefied natural gas exports. And that's something that the industry certainly thinks can be a big source of growth. Also an important part of his foreign policy, Trump said in the Oval Office after signing

some of these orders that he really wants China to purchase more US energy products, specifically oil and gas. And that's one way that they can make up the purchase requirements of the so-called phase one trade deal that Beijing signed with Trump in 2020. So energy is going to be a focus throughout here. Nat. All right, some projects getting off the ground, President Trump halting others like America's offshore wind expansion, kind of part of an effort, Gavin, by the new president to undo President Biden's green agenda more broadly. Gavin McIlvenna Yes. President Trump also signed orders ending

what he would call the EV mandate or regulations from the EPA and the Department of Transportation on tailpipe standards, emission standards for new vehicles. And that would have meant an influx of electric vehicles one way or another. So Trump will seek to take those regulations off the books. And then has also pledged to roll back a lot of the electric vehicle funding in the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act. Of course, he will need an act of Congress to do that. That's one of the things that kind of remains uncertain as we go forward here. All right, there's so much else that we don't have time to get to, so I will point everyone

to our show notes where we've got a link to a Wall Street Journal tracker of all of President Trump's executive orders from day one, which includes an order that would end DEI programs across the federal government, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, plans to rename Denali, the mountain in Alaska, as Mount McKinley, as well as the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America, the president ordering a review of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to see if any of their moves under the Biden administration were politically motivated. And then on the functioning of the U.S. government, Gavin, we saw the Elon Musk-led Department

of Government Efficiency get a kickstart, along with early attempts to reform the federal bureaucracy? David Scharff, Ph.D., Ph.D. Yes, the most significant actions on that front have to do with a federal hiring freeze that Trump signed on Monday saying that at least for the time being, the federal government's not going to be hiring any more bureaucrats. Of course, he exempted the U.S. military from that declaration. And then in addition to that, he also signed an order that would set up some DOGE teams, Department of Government Efficiency teams, that will be embedded at agencies throughout the federal government,

sort of cost cutters in chief at each one of these federal agencies. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few months as well. That will certainly be interesting to watch. Gavin, finally, what else stood out to you in terms of what we heard yesterday or maybe what we didn't? One of the most surprising things was something that did not happen in Trump's slew of executive orders, and that was any new tariffs on foreign nations right off the bat. However, he renewed the threat to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

I mean, he said they would probably do that by February 1st. And so a 25% tariff is something that's very, very scary for people in Ottawa, Mexico City, and also in many trade-reliant U.S. industries. I think you're going to see a flood of lobbying and calls on that in the next few days. Day one, and the tariff countdown clock is already ticking. Journal reporter Gavin Bade covers trade and economic policy for us. Gavin, thank you so much for the time. Gavin Bade Thanks, Luke. It's a pleasure to be here.

Luke O'Connor Coming up, we've got the rest of the day's news, including updates on Trump's cabinet picks, TikTok's fate, and the market reaction to the change in administrations. That and more after the break. Well in addition to a raft of executive actions, President Trump yesterday pardoned nearly all of the roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The sweeping clemency effectively wipes away four years of prosecutions, including more than 1,100 convictions, and contradicts the case-by-case approach that Trump and his allies

had signaled ahead of his inauguration. Some Trump allies had also voiced opposition to pardoning defendants who had assaulted police officers, more than 140 of whom were injured in the riot. Trump's proclamation followed a last-minute move by outgoing President Joe Biden to immunize members of his family and high-profile officials from potential prosecution by the new administration. Biden acknowledged the extraordinary nature of the preemptive pardons to those not charged with wrongdoing, but said he couldn't stand by as they faced threats of retribution. Among those on the pardon list were Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped lead efforts to fight the

COVID-19 pandemic, retired General Mark Milley, who Trump suggested should face death for treason, and members of the House committee that investigated the January 6th Capitol riot, as well as police officers who testified. The Senate has confirmed Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State by a vote of 99-0, making him President Trump's first cabinet member. Rubio won the trust of his colleagues thanks to his traditional views on foreign policy issues and tough stance on China. Meanwhile, Trump's nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe,

and his defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth have both inched closer to taking office after Senate panels yesterday advanced their nominations to the full Senate. Hegseth, Trump's most controversial cabinet pick, survived a 14-13 party-line vote in the Senate Armed Services Committee and could be confirmed by week's end. A fragile ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas is continuing to hold after coming into effect over the weekend. Three Israeli hostages, all women, were released on Sunday in a chaotic handover, the first of 33 captives set to be freed over six weeks in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

President Trump appeared to take credit for the hostage release during his inaugural speech yesterday predicting that his legacy would be that of a peacemaker and unifier, though in later remarks at the White House he tamped down expectations that the current deal would hold. How confident are you Mr. President that you can keep the ceasefire in Gaza and conclude the three phases of the deal? I'm not confident. It's not our war, it's their war, but I'm not confident.

President Trump is giving TikTok 75 more days to work out a deal to prevent it from going offline in the U.S. In an executive order yesterday, Trump directed the Attorney General not to enforce a January 19 ban of the app, which led it to briefly go dark over the weekend before Trump signaled he would take action to keep it online. And now, journal Asia Tech reporter Stu Wu says that Beijing's long-standing position that it would block a forced sale of TikTok appears to be shifting in response to comments from Trump that he'd like U.S. and Chinese interests to split control of the app 50-50.

What happened yesterday is that a spokeswoman for the Chinese government said, actually, we think that private companies should be able to figure out their own solution. So that was a hint that they might be opening up to this idea of maybe a sale, maybe a joint venture for TikTok in the United States. We've reported that Chinese government officials have internally discussed the idea that Elon Musk could be this US investor that could have a partial ownership in TikTok. The Chinese government would be okay with that. But we don't know whether the Chinese government has actually discussed this actual idea of Elon Musk or the leadership of TikTok's parent company by dance. In markets news, oil prices are falling after President Trump laid out plans yesterday to boost

American oil and gas production. The journal's Chelsea Delaney says that's just one of several ways that potential policy shifts under the new administration are already making waves. One of the biggest so-called Trump trades was this huge run up in Bitcoin. We did see Bitcoin rise to a new intraday record. Yesterday it was almost at 110,000. It's come back a bit today. But really where investors are focused right now is on trade and tariffs. We're seeing the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso

in particular getting hit hard in the currency market. So for investors, this definitely shows that Trump is serious about implementing tariffs and that has a whole range of ramifications for the economy, for inflation, and particularly for these overseas economies that are quite dependent on sales to the U.S. And it is shaping up to be a busy earnings day with Charles Schwab and 3M reporting before

the opening bell, followed by Netflix, United Airlines, and Capital One after the close. And that's it for What's News for this Tuesday morning. Additional sound in this episode was from Reuters. Today's show was produced by Kate Bullivant. Our supervising producer was Daniel Bach, and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.