President Donald Trump has signed more than 300 executive orders since coming into office — and a New York Times reporter thinks he knows why.
According to opinion writer Carlos Lozada, Trump "favors the flourish of the order over the hassle of lawmaking." After all, "Why bother assembling legislative coalitions when you can just write, 'By the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered' and then tack on whatever you like?" he asked.
Lozada has read through every single Trump orders so far, and found that they laid bare "the assumptions, obsessions and contradictions of the man signing them."
Lozada described Trump's orders as "a bit of a mess."
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He continued, "Some of the orders are so generic as to be meaningless. One of the shortest declares that U.S. foreign policy must always 'put America and American citizens first.'" Another order "requires that taxpayer money should be spent 'only on making America great.' It’s hard to know how to execute such orders, other than to proclaim them."
Lozada wrote that although some orders are "specific in their instructions," still "others list no precise actions but only instruct some new task force or council to think of things to do."
For example, Lozada wrote, "An agency or program may receive new responsibilities in one executive order only to find itself dismantled in another. Orders sometimes echo Trump’s standard slogans, whether putting America first or making America great, without adding much meaning to them. And stylistically, they veer from formal policy pronouncement to campaign speech to social media diatribe, sometimes all within the same text."
Lozada wrote that "despite the muddle — or perhaps because of it — the new administration’s orders fulfill one essential service: They affirm and expand Trump’s vision of the presidency, of politics, of our Nation...they "illuminate the president’s interpretation of America’s values — what kind of people belong herebelong here, how the nation’s history should be taught, which principles are worth upholding and defending."
The trouble with executive actions, which Trump may find out one day, "do not carry the same legitimacy or endurance of laws passed by Congress and can be revoked by future presidents."