Trump thinks his executive orders are key to re-election – but they may backfire yet
Donald Trump is under pressure – you can tell that by the number of executive orders he is signing at the moment.
With a Congress struggling to agree on further measures to help the US out of the economic problems caused by Covid-19, and with an election on the horizon and poll numbers not looking too healthy, Trump has done what he does best. Take unilateral action.
Executive orders are often more indicative than crucial and the president may find himself in that boat over his attempts to tweak tax laws. Butting up against the power of Congress to make and change laws often
doesn’t end well for the White House, and Republican senator Ben Sasse was quick to disabuse Trump of his ideas of power.
“The pen-and-phone theory of executive lawmaking is unconstitutional slop,” a statement from the senator read. “President Obama did not have the power to unilaterally rewrite immigration law with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and President Trump does not have the power to unilaterally rewrite the payroll tax law.” Trump then used a morning tweet on Monday to abuse Sasse as Republican in Name Only (RINO).
Democrats also jumped in, calling the measures “weak” and “too narrow”. “It’s a stunt,” former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told MSNBC. “There’s no doubt about it, it’s most likely, as even Republican senators have said, unconstitutional, bypassing the Congress, trying to spend money that he has no authority to direct.”
For Trump it is all about the optics and his ability to say – as he did on Saturday – that his actions “take care of, pretty much, this entire situation”. However little truth there is in that. Executive orders play their part for Trump – they allow him to seize the narrative and let him play his favourite role as the political outsider.
The issue is that overuse of executive orders annoys Congress, as you can see. And with an election less than three months away, some voters may feel that it shows Trump can’t work with the other branches of government and that he doesn’t have what is needed to lead the country. Or if they believe he did, that he may have lost it.
The president clearly believes that executive orders are a boon for him – but Trump needs to be careful.