President Donald Trump is a man on a mission. And he’s also in a hurry.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call his first week in the Oval Office one of the most dizzying in recent memory. The 45th-turned-47th president wasted no time getting down to business, trekking to the White House within hours of his inauguration to sign a stack of executive orders that overhauled how the federal government works, declared a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border, authorized Immigration and Customs Enforcement to accelerate deportation operations in America’s interior and declassified records pertaining to the John F. Kennedy assassination.
That’s not all; Trump has also begun a reorganization of the federal workforce, dismissed about 160 officials on the National Security Council and, yes, changed the decor inside the Oval Office. Political analysts have referred to Trump’s first week as “shock and awe.”
In terms of foreign policy, however, there isn’t much to talk about it yet. What we have is a lot of noise from Trump but not much in the way of actual policy. The only concrete move Trump has made thus far is an executive order suspending all U.S. foreign aid for 90 days (with limited exceptions) until the State Department conducts an assessment on which programs should be scrapped and which should continue.
Author
Daniel
DePetris
Fellow
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