Politics
Trump cuts chaotic path in first weeks, bucking laws and norms in pursuit of promised agenda
Standing before a mourning nation after a tragic commercial airline crash that killed nearly 70 people in Washington, D.C., President Trump offered his somber condolences and said everyone was “searching for answers.”
He then insinuated, without evidence, that diversity hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration — and the politics of his Democratic predecessors — were to blame.
“I signed something last week that was an executive order, very powerful one, restoring the high standards of air traffic controllers — and others by the way,” Trump said. “We have to have our smartest people. It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are.”
In an instant, Trump had gone from consoling leader to partisan firebrand and turned a national tragedy into one more opportunity to push his favorite political narrative — that diversity-minded, “woke” liberalism is ruining the country and that he alone can end it, namely through unilateral executive orders from the Oval Office.
It was a breach of presidential decorum — and right in line with the rest of his tumultuous first two weeks back in the White House.
In that time, Trump has repeatedly bucked the Constitution and other legal limits on executive power, pursuing a conservative agenda aligned with his own campaign promises but also the Project 2025 blueprint he assiduously distanced himself from in the lead-up to the election.
Among other things, Trump has targeted the rights and protections for immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, fired government watchdogs and other career civil servants he perceived as insufficiently loyal, and tried to freeze an array of federal funding already appropriated by Congress for some of the nation’s — and the world’s — poorest and most vulnerable people.
He also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people who stormed the U.S. Capitol to hold him illegitimately in power in 2021, joked again about holding on to power into a third term despite being constitutionally precluded from doing so, and announced 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China.
Trump began issuing edicts immediately upon taking office Jan. 20 and has kept up a steady stream since, the result of years of prep work by him and his team — including several architects of Project 2025 — to hit the ground running in his second term, unlike his first.
“They had a very clear plan and they’ve executed on it very quickly,” said Ben Olinsky, senior vice president of structural reform and governance at the liberal Center for American Progress. “They wanted to proceed with the ‘shock and awe’ approach.”
The strategy — outlined in dozens of unilateral executive orders, many with vague parameters and unclear reach — sparked widespread fear, confusion and anger among average Americans, local and state leaders, federal program managers and entire industries and nonprofit networks, leaving chaos in its wake.
In one example, the White House budget office on Tuesday issued a directive purporting to halt federal funding for a slew of government programs nationwide, causing immediate disruptions. States reported being shut out of their Medicaid reimbursement systems and problems with Head Start and child development block grants, among other issues.
The uproar came from red and blue states alike, though Democrats were particularly apoplectic. In a letter to House members, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) dubbed the plan the “Republican Ripoff” and said it was an “unprecedented assault” that would hurt average Americans financially.
“Republicans are ripping off hardworking Americans by stealing taxpayer dollars, grants and financial assistance as part of their corrupt scheme to pay off billionaire donors and wealthy corporations,” Jeffries wrote.
California and other states sued to block the order. The week before, they had sued to block another order purporting to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants — a policy Trump said he had “no apologies” for despite a federal judge declaring it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
On Wednesday, the administration swiftly walked back the funding freeze, issuing a second order rescinding the first. However, the confusion persisted after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X that the second order was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze” outlined in the first — just a way to “end any confusion” caused by a court order that nonprofit organizations had won the evening prior to bar the first directive from taking effect.
Attorneys for the coalition of states promptly cited Leavitt’s post to win a second court order temporarily halting the freeze.
The administration also partially walked back a separate order halting foreign aid, after similar uproar mounted overseas, including over the abrupt cancellation of lifesaving HIV treatments for people in developing nations, including children.
Trump has praised his start back in office, claiming to have made swift progress on immigration in particular, which he recently told a meeting of Republicans was his top campaign priority — more so than inflation and the economy. He has also expressed frustration with the Senate’s pace in confirming his Cabinet appointees, and resistance among Democrats to some of his picks.
“We want fast confirmations,” he said Thursday. “They’ve taken too long.”
Many Republicans have backed Trump through his first weeks, and on some of his more controversial orders — including the funding freeze.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said it was “not unusual for an administration to pause funding and to take a hard look and scrub of how these programs are being spent,” and he gave the administration credit for having “taken certain things off the table” and added “clarity” to their orders as discussions over funding and budget priorities have continued with conservative lawmakers.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called Trump’s freeze “a common application of common sense” and said, “I fully support it.”
Many of Trump’s followers have rejoiced in the changes, too, praising him for making good on his campaign promises. Some reveled online in the fact that Trump’s pronouncements seemed to be overwhelming Democrats, the media and the liberal activist networks that have so often tried to thwart his plans in the past.
Public polling indicated Americans generally have mixed feelings — and “aren’t ideologues,” said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow emeritus at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Rather, they have nuanced thoughts about political issues that don’t always match up perfectly with either of the two major political parties.
Many Americans are in favor of strengthening border security and ramping up immigration enforcement, for example, but majorities opposed Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists and his decision to leave the Paris climate accord, recent polling has indicated. Americans support efforts to rein in federal spending, but a majority opposed replacing career civil servants with loyalists, according to a recent AP-NORC poll.
They also believe it’s a bad idea for the president to rely on billionaires for advice.
A danger for Trump is if Americans start to feel that his actions are too extreme, or that he is “overreaching,” Bowman said. At the same time, many Americans “want to get things done” after a decade or more of sluggish legislative progress in Congress, and that could go in his favor as he purports to take bold action, she said.
“Perhaps he’s getting a lot done. Perhaps he’s going too far,” Bowman said. “Its going to take a while to see where things settle — as it always does.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have kept up their attacks. On Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she was pleased the budget freeze had been rescinded — and blocked in court — but that Trump’s raft of other executive orders were still holding up billions in funding for critical infrastructure and other projects.
“There is still far too much chaos on the ground,” she said.
Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), one of Trump’s most vocal critics during his first term, blasted him for his Jan. 6 pardons, said his firing of inspectors general without giving notice to Congress broke the law, and condemned several of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Kash Patel for FBI director and Pam Bondi for attorney general.
After Leavitt’s X post added confusion to the federal funding freeze debate, Schiff said he didn’t know what her post meant and didn’t believe the Trump administration understood, either.
“The chaos isn’t a design flaw — it’s the goal — to sow confusion, and never mind the impact on fire victims, small businesses or seniors,” he said.
California Sen. Adam B. Schiff, shown at a hearing Thursday, says the chaos “is the goal — to sow confusion.”
(Ben Curtis / Associated Press)
Experts in federal governance and constitutional law agreed the swift rollout of so many new policies by the Trump administration was no accident, but in line with a broader strategy to “flood the zone” with many major policy moves at once, in part to spread thin any potential resistance.
Mitchel Sollenberger, a political science professor at University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of several books on executive powers, said Trump’s early wave of executive orders was not an “anomaly” historically, as other presidents have done the same.
However, Sollenberger said he had to “marvel” at the sophistication and sweep of the Trump administration’s approach, which he said advanced old Republican ideas about executive power and even immigration in new and startling ways.
“I don’t think you’ve seen anything this wide-ranging — in terms of the policy areas being touched, and I would say the level of sophistication with the policy objectives trying to be reached here — coming from a president so early in the term,” Sollenberger said.
He said he would be watching closely to see how the courts interpret Trump’s power grabs, and how they view his administration’s framing of immigration as an “invasion” and a national security issue.
Deborah Pearlstein, a professor of constitutional law and director of the Program in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University, said Trump and his team came into the White House with a plan to overwhelm the opposition and seize more power — one “authoritarian regimes all over the world have used.”
“It was clear from everything he said, the campaign said, the campaign documents said, as he was running for office and campaigning for office, that there was a plan or a desire to systematically undo all the checks, legal and otherwise, that exist in the American system to constrain the president,” Pearlstein said.
The administration is trying to “put that plan into effect” now, she said — though they are running into “two giant problems.”
The first, she said, is that they are “trying to do too much too fast with people who don’t have, some of them, a huge amount of expertise or experience with any of this,” which has led to sloppy orders that have confused and riled average Americans.
The second problem for the administration — and a good thing for American democracy, Pearlstein said — is that “there are laws and rules and institutions responsible for enforcing them that prohibit some of what they want to do.”
As evidenced by the reaction to the funding freeze, pushback from those institutions — from states, Congress, courts and nonprofit organizations — and from the wider American public has clearly begun and can be effective, she said. But “whether and how those institutions continue to push back is a huge question.”
Pearlstein said she worries the most about moves by Trump to consolidate power, including by pulling the federal purse strings away from Congress and clearing career civil servants out of the government in favor of his own loyalists, and will be watching how the courts handle those issues carefully.
She said the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has an expansive view of executive powers, particularly in foreign affairs and national security, but has not always ruled in Trump’s favor and may still be an important constraint.
She said others must watch for and speak out on oversteps by the Trump administration in their own fields of expertise.
“Every person can’t chase every ball, so you have to find ways of prioritizing and distributing the social democratic work of pushing back,” she said. “That’s where I think civil society can be particularly effective.”
The Trump administration has signed off on a company’s plan to convert an oil and gas pipeline to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert to thirsty California cities for the first time, a lucrative venture that critics say threatens natural springs and wildlife.
The federal Bureau of Land Management released documents Thursday saying that Cadiz Inc.’s plan to repurpose 162 miles of the pipeline to transport water “will not significantly affect” the environment.
“We’re excited to achieve this pivotal milestone. After many years of planning and environmental review, the project has now reached the construction stage,” said Susan Kennedy, chair and chief executive of Cadiz.
Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes, who have been fighting the project, criticized the decision.
“This groundwater mining proposal would drain the desert and rob the Mojave of its rare springs and wildlife habitat,” said Chance Wilcox, California desert associate director of the National Parks Conservation Assn. “It’s indefensible that the Trump administration would once again try to revive the pointless Cadiz project, by defying decades of scientific warnings and refusing to conduct an environmental review of the groundwater mining.”
The application for the federal authorization was filed by the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co. The documents say the company plans to build seven pump stations, three of them located on federal land managed by the agency.
The 30-inch steel pipeline runs underground from Cadiz’s desert property, near the town of Amboy, northward to the town of Mojave.
The BLM said in its authorization that repurposing the pipeline for water “would comply with all applicable statutes and regulations.” The agency said it has “reasonably determined that the impacts of groundwater withdrawal associated with Cadiz’s groundwater extraction project are outside the scope of analysis.”
Cadiz’s attempts to export water from its property 200 miles east of Los Angeles have drawn controversy for decades.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that requires the project to undergo scientific study and gain approval from the State Lands Commission before it can take water from the Mojave and sell it to California cities.
Activists opposing the company’s plans include civil rights leader Dolores Huerta.
“Cadiz spells destruction for water, sacred lands, and the desert economy,” Huerta said in a statement. “It is exactly this type of greed and injustice that I have dedicated my life to oppose.”
Leaders of nearby tribes have also objected to Cadiz’s plans to pump from the desert aquifer near the Mojave Trails National Monument and Mojave National Preserve.
“It is the living heart of the desert,” said Daniel Leivas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. “To drain it would be to drain the life out of the entire desert. No profit is worth such desecration.”
Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”
“Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.
For years, while pursuing its plan to sell water far away, the company has been using wells on its property to irrigate nearly 2,000 acres of farmland growing lemons, grapes and other crops. It has drilled more wells in anticipation of being able to export water once the government approved its pipeline.
The company intends to pipe water to communities in San Bernardino County and says it’s “expected to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of new water in the drought-plagued Southwest.” It says the federal permit “marks a key milestone as we finalize project financing with prospective investors.”
Cadiz bought the 220-mile pipeline from El Paso Natural Gas in 2020. Once construction is completed, the company says the pipeline will be able to transport up to 25,000 acre-feet of water per year — about 5% of what Los Angeles uses each year.
The Los Angeles-based corporation is also seeking to build a new pipeline along a railroad right-of-way to transport water to the south.
Environmental groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging the project.
Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the Trump administration’s decision “a green light for environmental destruction.”
She said six of the proposed pumping stations slated to be built are in the habitat of desert tortoises, a species in decline.
“We’ve successfully fended off this project before and we’ll continue to fight to stop this zombie from coming back,” Anderson said.
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed a Trump administration decision that had cleared the way for Cadiz to pipe water across public land. In 2022, a federal judge scrapped the pipeline permit that the Trump administration had issued.
But during President Trump’s second term, the company has again made headway on its plans. In February, Cadiz announced that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had invited it to submit an application for a $194-million low-interest loan for the northern pipeline project.
The company said in May that it reached an agreement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation to provide funding for a review of its potential role in “augmenting water supplies” along the shrinking Colorado River.
The company has also been lobbying the Trump administration. The group Public Citizen said in a recent report that Cadiz, through its nonprofit Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co., enlisted former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s new lobbying firm, the Bernhardt Group, and has spent at least $330,000 on lobbying in 2025 and 2026.
Records show lobbyist Luke Johnson has repeatedly accompanied Kennedy at meetings with Interior Department officials.
“The extensive influence of David Bernhardt’s boutique lobbying firm on the agency he formerly led highlights how insider firms staffed with former Trump officials have grown in recent years,” said Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen. He said Bernhardt and his lobbyists “have learned how to master influence-peddling in the anything-goes era of Trump 2.0.”
Earlier this month, an Arizona water agency announced it signed an initial “memorandum of understanding” agreement to buy up to 10,000 acre-feet of water per year from Cadiz’s Mojave Groundwater Bank. The Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District provides water to farmlands in Pinal County, where growers are dealing with water cutbacks.
The company said that for this to happen, it would need to build pipelines and reach deals to exchange water across state lines.
Members of California’s congressional delegation have raised concerns. In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla called for a thorough environmental review, saying that federal agencies and peer-reviewed scientific analyses have “warned of the significant and irreversible impacts that Cadiz’s project could have on federal lands and surrounding communities.”
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Indio) said in a letter to Burgum that he is concerned about the company’s long-standing effort to extract and export groundwater.
“The area I represent cannot afford to absorb the long-term costs of a commercially driven groundwater export scheme,” Ruiz said.
President Trump has promoted a chain of newly rebranded gas stations across the Philadelphia area with lower gas prices. The New York Times has not been able to get detailed information about who is behind the stations. The Trump administration says it did not fund or subsidize the company.
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Kelley Paul is no stranger to the American political scene. As the wife of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and the daughter-in-law of longtime former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), she has seen her fair share of the campaign trail, emerging as a powerful surrogate during her husband’s 2016 presidential run.
She is also an accomplished writer, speaker, and public relations professional. As America ushers in its 250th anniversary, Paul saw the perfect opportunity to branch out into the world of children’s literature. Recently she sat down with Fox News Digital in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest to discuss her new book, “Good Night, Young American.”
Kelley Paul is the wife of Sen. Rand Paul and author of two books. (Courtesy Kelley Paul)
Paul credits her family for giving her the inspiration for the new project:
“I have to give a lot of credit to my daughter-in-law, Kate. She and our son were over for dinner last summer with our grandson, who was only six months old at the time. And Kate was like, you know, we need more patriotic books for babies. She wasn’t really happy with a lot of the book options she was seeing. And that night at dinner, we kind of played around with some ideas. And I came up with ‘Good Night Young American.’ And a year later, here it is.”
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“Good Night, Young American,” recommended for children ages 4–8, takes kids on a visually and thematically engaging journey through early and colonial history.
“Well, our revolutionary history is such a great adventure, right? So when I came up with the concept that my little boy would start out on the 4th of July with his parents, asking, what is it all about? I knew we’d be celebrating the 250th. Kids ask, what are we really celebrating?
And his dad describes the Declaration of Independence to him in the signing. So I tried to think what is going to appeal to children in this great adventure of our revolution. So when he falls asleep that night, he’s in the crow’s nest of the Mayflower. He is a pilgrim, he’s a colonist, and then he makes friends with all the great revolutionary heroes that we know. So he makes friends with Sam Adams, he joins the Sons of Liberty, he meets at the Green Dragon. This is so exciting for children, right?
It’s visual stuff. He makes friends with Ben Franklin, and he’s flying the kite. Dramatically rides on the midnight ride with Paul Revere. He and his dog, his little dog, are with him for all the adventures. And of course, he crosses the Delaware with George Washington. And I wanted to make the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of it something that was dynamic and exciting visually. So I have him swinging on the Liberty Bell when the declaration is signed.”
Paul worked closely with the illustrator, Marika Monesi, to bring the events of America’s founding to life in an engaging and visually appealing way for children.
The Liberty Bell, originally saved from the British by Lynnport farmer Frederick Leaser, sits in its Philadelphia shrine. (iStock)
“She really captured the excitement on the little boy’s face, his personality, but I worked very close with her,” Paul said. “I wanted there to be a lot of movement, a lot of dynamic images. So, for example, with the Liberty Bell, for kids, a bunch of men standing around writing a document…I wanted to bring it to life. So I said, let’s have him running up to the top of the bell tower in Philadelphia at Freedom Hall and swinging on the Liberty Bell. And she was just such a great artist. With the George Washington scenes, he’s crossing the Delaware because that, again, is so visual. I wanted drive home to children the incredible bravery and courage of our founders, how cold and miserable and hard that war was.
“Also, I love the illustration that she did of the King of England reading the Declaration of Independence. I have to give my husband Rand a little credit there. On the first couple of drafts that she did, Rand was like, ‘He needs to be fatter. King George was famously fat!’ So it was a lot of fun. It was very collaborative.”
KELLEY PAUL ‘EXHAUSTED AND ANGRY’ THAT THOSE WHO HARASSED HER AND HER HUSBAND FACE NO CHARGES
Part of Paul’s motivation for the book was related to the teaching of American history today, and the controversies therein:
“I do think that we’ve gotten away from really celebrating our founders and our heroes. What they were doing in 1776 was incredibly radical, if you think about it. At that time, everyone accepted the divine right of kings. Everyone accepted hereditary rule. And our founders took Enlightenment ideas from John Locke and philosophers, and they turned it into the framework for a government. The idea of self-government and that our rights come from our Creator, that we have inalienable rights that are given to us by God and not from a king. Those were radical ideas of the time.
Historians say an early draft of the Declaration of Independence offered new insight into how Thomas Jefferson refined the nation’s founding document. (Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images)
I like to say our founders were the first civil rights heroes, the first civil libertarians. And I think our education system has gotten away from that. They don’t view them in the time that they existed, and suddenly now everything is oppressor versus oppressed narrative. And they are labeled more like colonizers or enslavers, and that’s the only view that they’re looked at, and not as human beings who sacrificed their very lives to write the Declaration of Independence, to form this country…it was an incredible, bold, and courageous act, but it was also an act of moral courage and philosophical courage.”
Ultimately, Paul hopes that her books will stimulate the natural curiosity of America’s youth to learn more about their rich history:
Participants carry the City of Cumberland’s “America 250” parade banner down Baltimore Street during the America 250 parade in downtown Cumberland, Maryland, on June 27, 2026. Spectators line both sides of the street as American and Maryland flags lead the procession. (Fox News Digital/ David Marcus)
“Well, I hope that my books, especially with America’s 250, will spark a lot of questions and that they will give a framework for parents to talk to their kids about the founding of this country. And I hope children from a very, very young age will come away with this idea that they are a part of America’s story, that they as Americans can take pride in the heroism of our revolutionary founders. That as Americans, this is all of our story. So that’s really my goal with the books.”
One of the biggest challenges Paul faced was taking big ideas that may be hard for a four or five-year-old to grasp, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and distilling them down into an accessible format for kids:
“Well, I try to use language that kids could understand, and very much use simple terms. But if you think about it, it is simple. Our rights come from God. And when he makes friends with Thomas Jefferson, he says, Thomas Jefferson has written this amazing document that says that we can all be free to live our lives the way we choose, and no government can take our rights to, you know, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness away from us.
He also talks about James Madison and the Bill of Rights and the most important right is freedom of speech. That is that no government can tell you what to say or what not to say.”
Rand Paul, who famously puts Constitutional principles front and center in the public square, also played a key role in the book’s thematic development.
Kelley Paul and her husband Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. (Courtesy Kelley Paul)
“Rand has been incredibly supportive. I’m just so grateful and blessed to have had an amazing, now 36-year marriage to Rand Paul. And he was very involved. He would read over the drafts and gave me a lot of, like I said, good advice about things in history that he thought I should include.
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And I’m also just very grateful to be the daughter-in-law of Ron Paul. And so, I wanted these books to be there for our little grandson who I call ‘my favorite little American’ and help him from an early age be educated in the legacy that, the Paul family has in this country.”
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