The one on the right is his mugshot that was supposed to destroy him.

The one on the left is his official Presidential portrait 2025-2029.

Including 200 Executive Orders. A sample below, being simply what caught my eye:

  • State of emergency declared on the border, proclamation to close it.
  • Begin construction of new border wall areas.
  • Emergency authority to suspend entry of illegal immigrants along southwest border.
  • End immigration “Catch and Release” policy.
  • Re-institute “Remain in Mexico” policy.
  • Pardon some 1,600 of the J6 “insurrection” protestors.
  • Pause offshore wind leases.
  • End electric vehicle mandate.
  • Abolish Green New Deal policy set.
  • Withdraw from Paris Climate Accord.
  • End restrictive orders on drilling.
  • Designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organisations.
  • Suspension of security clearances for 51 national security officials who “lied” about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

There are many social media posts from J6r’s about this but I’ll take Jake Lang since I’ve written about his treatment before, here and here.

Clearly the Democrat partisans in the DOJ didn’t care about the 6th amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.

Eight hundred of those days were spent in solitary confinement as they tried to get him to plead guilty to something, anything, that would avoid them going to trial.

There’s also some stuff on dealing with the Federal workforce and bending it to Trump’s will – re-establishment of presidential control over career federal workforce, ending work-from-home and suspending DEI hiring practices, and so on and so forth. But EO’s are not going to cut it with a civil service that is perhaps 80% Democrat partisan, although revoking the security clearances of these assholes is a good start.

The whole issue of politically corrupt civil “servants” issue deserves a separate post but here’s a sample of what Trump 1 faced even before the events of late 2020:

  • Career employees in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases they ideologically disagreed with, even when the facts showed clear legal violations. This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian-Americans and protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.
  • Career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including the Title IX due process regulations, would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the Department’s policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.
  • Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.
  • Career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board routinely gave political appointees misleading legal analyses. They would only cite cases supporting their preferred position and omit contrary precedents. Some career lawyers refused to draft documents whose positions they disagreed with.

Not mentioned in that list was the deliberate sabotage of Trump’s efforts to end the DACA policy (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) that Obama simply imposed by EO. That stunt was pulled by one lawyer who did not agree with Trump and drafted a memo which would be booted by the Supreme Court, and was (see The Administrative (Deep) State). Interviewed by the NYT in her retirement the registered Republican was proud of her actions.

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (1883) established a professional civil service to replace the old Spoils System where government employees got selected if they had supported the new President. The arguments against that were, and remain, solid. However, the current US Federal Civil service appears to be as politically corrupted as that old system, while having the added power of not changing with Presidents and now backed up by Public sector unions (which even FDR warned against).

The good news is that almost all Trump’s nominees picks and actions since election day indicate that he’s aware of what was done to his policies and him last time, and that he’s not going to let that happen again.