Opinion | What I Learned About Trump’s Second Term by Reading His First 100 Executive Orders

So, as a breakdown of Trump’s fixations, the orders are not a bad proxy.

The verbs in Trump’s executive orders are telling. “Unleashing” is a constant activity, even appearing in some of the titles. The economy must be unleashed; the potential of private citizens must be unleashed; energy resources must be unleashed. “Unleashing” gives way to “restoring,” whether of prosperity, common sense or freedom of speech. (The death penalty, a Trump preoccupation for decades, also requires restoring, as do names, like “Mount McKinley,” that honor American greatness.) Finally, there is much “protecting” and “defending” in Trump’s orders — protecting citizens against immigrant invaders, defending women against gender ideology, protecting the “priceless and profound gift” of U.S. citizenship from the children of illegal immigrants, and defending religious liberty through a new White House Faith Office.

These verbs tell us how Trump sees the country. Only an inhibited America would need unleashing; only a neglected America would need restoring; only a vulnerable America would need protecting. No wonder that Trump has immediately declared several simultaneous national emergencies, involving energy supplies, the border, criminal cartels and even the International Criminal Court. And the man Trump blames for this deteriorated state of our union is Biden, who in recent years subbed in for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as Trump’s nemesis of choice.

Throughout his executive orders, Trump trashes his immediate predecessor in the White House for pushing radical climate policies, trampling free speech, embedding D.E.I. throughout the federal government, limiting energy production, encouraging an immigrant invasion, commuting the sentences of death-row inmates and, above all, deploying federal power against political enemies.

That last point is the subject of Trump’s first executive order, E.O. 14147, and it carries on where his campaign left off. “The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community.” Such actions, his order asserts, were not about the legitimate pursuit of justice but about “inflicting political pain.”

The irony of this order, titled Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, is that in several subsequent orders Trump commands his own administration to engage in such weaponization. Trump repeatedly attacks major law firms that have worked with Democratic clients or that have ties to prior investigations against Trump, suspending their security clearances and terminating any government contracts. He also calls on the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to review or investigate various actions by the Biden administration, which he accuses of behavior that is not just “shortsighted” but also “illegal and immoral.”