Lessons from Trump's first week

In 2017, the crowd size lie and the Muslim Ban were instructive about Trump's priorities

What exactly will the opening days of Trump’s next administration look like from a policy perspective? Which campaign promises was he serious about, and which were just bluster? It’s hard to know for certain — he’s different than he was eight years ago, as is his party, as is Washington. But looking back to the early days of his first term is instructive about what he’ll prioritize.

We tend to think of much of Trump’s first term, especially its first few weeks and months, as something of a mess, filled with boasts and unnecessary fights and poorly-vetted hiring decisions and massive scandals. That’s not wrong, but it was also filled with a surprising number of policy accomplishments. As this NBC News timeline shows, in the first week of Trump’s presidency in 2017, he signed executive orders to:

• begin the rollback of the Affordable Care Act

• fund construction of a wall at the southern border and cut funding to sanctuary cities

• reinstate the Mexico City Policy barring federal funding for organizations that provide abortions

• withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement negotiations

• streamline production on the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines

• and more!

Some of these would result in longstanding policy changes, and some would be quickly reversed when Joe Biden entered office in 2021.

But two specific moments from that first week really stand out that illustrate Trump’s priorities for his first term: the crowd size lie and the Muslim Ban. I explain these and their significance below.

Crowd Size

On January 21st, Trump’s first full day in office, the brand new President sent his brand new press secretary, Sean Spicer, to the White House Briefing Room to claim, falsely, that Trump’s inauguration had the largest inaugural crowd in history. Spicer was a well-credentialed pre-Trump Republican, having worked in the George W. Bush administration as well as for the Republican National Committee. He had been publicly critical of Trump’s campaign and some of his comments in 2015 and 2016.

That Trump could compel such a person to lie on his behalf, in front of a room full of people who knew he was lying to them and laughed at him for it, on television where the audience knew he was lying, was an important demonstration of the kind of power Trump would exert over the next four years. It didn’t matter how absurd or petty the claim was; his people would make it nonetheless, and they would frequently have to abase themselves and compromise their integrity and their credentials to keep him happy.

Muslim Ban

On January 27th, Trump signed Executive Order 13769, an order that he and others in his administration labeled the “Muslim Ban.” It was the beginning of a series of administration rules focused on reducing immigration and refugees in a targeted way that focused on Muslim-majority nations. This ban would be litigated for months, revised and reissued, but ultimately the Supreme Court would uphold a later version of it.

This act was important because it concerned a central issue for Trump: immigration. He had taken vague and inconsistent stances on a range of topics throughout the 2016 — including several issues, like the social welfare state and abortion, that had long been central to the Republican coalition. But he’s been consistent on his desire to see immigration reduced or eliminated, especially from nonwhite populations and from countries he does not like. He got significant pushback from the ban order, which affected hundreds of thousands of people, including business travelers, students, and others. Yet he continued to push at it until some version of it became government policy. This illustrates Trump’s resolve in this specific area of public policy, and he not only doesn’t mind the negative press it generates, he actually sees that as a source of validation.

These two aspects of Trump’s first week — an absurd assertion of dominance and an unpopular and massively impactful immigration rule change — illustrate the type of thing we can expect at the beginning of Trump’s next term. He campaigned extensively on the mass deportation of tens of millions of migrants and even made that a central theme of the Republican National Convention. He is likely to push for some version of that to begin early in his term. It will generate massive political pushback and, probably, considerable resistance from state and local governments and community members, and will likely produce nation-wide state violence on a scale no living American has seen. But it is not something he’s likely to abandon.