Jan 21: The Good and the Bad of Trump's First Days

Hamas back in control of Gaza; Biden unaware of Biden policies; Treasury didn't vet sanctions on U.S.-Israeli citizens

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The Big Story

Thanks to Joe Biden’s magic disappearing act, it’s felt as if Donald Trump has been president since Nov. 6. In truth, he’ll have been the executive for a little more than 24 hours by the time this newsletter is sent out, but he crammed in enough action on his first night in office to fill several weeks’ worth of news cycles—more, in fact, than we can cover in a single edition.

So, instead of a recap of every single presidential action from yesterday, we’re giving you the highlights: the good, the bad, and the too-soon-to-tell of what we’ve seen so far from Trump 47:

The Good

• Trump rescinded dozens of Biden’s executive orders on issues ranging from the economy and the climate to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Scroll readers should be particularly happy about the repeal of EO 14115, which authorized the Treasury and the State Department to sanction allegedly violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank. And those who have been following us a while may remember Justice40, which subjected trillions in federal climate spending to racial considerations under EO 14008—also repealed on Tuesday. You can read the full list of nullified executive orders here.

• In another Day One executive order, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” Trump ordered federal agencies to enhance their vetting and screening procedures for visa applicants to ensure that “admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.” Ben Samuels of Haaretz notes on X that the order “implicitly targets pro-Palestinian protesters—particularly those in the U.S. on visas.”

• Trump imposed a 90-day pause on all U.S. foreign development assistance, pending a review of their “programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.” That apparently includes a hold on aid to UNRWA, which Trump eliminated entirely during his first term as president.

• Trump issued an executive order on “Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” targeting the anti-mis/disinformation complex. “No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources” to “engage in” or “facilitate” the unconstitutional abridgment of Americans’ speech, including through coercive pressure on third-party platforms.

• Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly all of the more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio (sentenced to 22 years) and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes (sentenced to 18 years). While some of those pardoned were “no angels,” as the cliché has it, the overwhelming federal resources dedicated to hunting down and arresting every last grandmother who “obstructed an official proceeding” by entering the Capitol grounds that day—compared with the lax prosecutions of participants in the far more deadly and destructive racial justice rioters during 2020 and the virtually nonexistent federal law-enforcement response to anti-Israel rioters in 2024—had transformed J6 into a monument to two-tiered justice.

• Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, which, as Tablet reported in numerous articles, colluded with the Chinese government (and their Western scientific collaborators) to obscure the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and then partnered with Western governments and tech platforms to censor journalists and ordinary citizens who attempted to discover the truth. The WHO was also instrumental in convincing Western governments to pursue Chinese-style lockdowns early in the pandemic, despite Western health agencies such as the U.S. CDC having stated beforehand that lockdowns were ineffective at stopping the transmission of respiratory viruses. And, as if to send a message it had learned nothing, the WHO in late 2022 hired as its chief scientist Jeremy Farrar, a close associate of Peter Daszak—whose NGO EcoHealth Alliance likely conducted the gain-of-function research that created the COVID-19 virus—and one of the three men, alongside Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, responsible for commissioning the March 2020 “Proximal Origins” paper, which purported to prove a natural origin for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

• In an executive order on trade policy, Trump ordered the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and the Secretary of Commerce (Commerce) to take aggressive economic steps against China, including crafting tariffs and other sanctions to address Chinese violations of trade and intellectual property agreements and circumvention of tariffs through third countries. Most seriously, Trump directed Commerce and USTR to “assess legislative proposals regarding Permanent Normal Trade Relations” with China—a likely reference to a 2024 Senate bill introduced by Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio calling for China to be stripped of its PNTR status.

• Trump issued an order revoking any active security clearances for the 51 former intelligence officials—including our bête noire, John Brennan—who signed a letter claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation … and for Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, the only person identified by name in the order. As journalist David Reaboi notes on X, “This is a very very big deal. These guys were the conveyor belt of strategically deployed classified info to partisan journalists.”

• Trump hasn’t formally repudiated Tucker Carlson, and we doubt he ever will, but he did reinstall a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office that had been removed by then President Biden. We wouldn’t read too much into it, but the big theme of Carlson’s foray into just-asking-questions historical revisionism was that Churchill—an inept drunkard controlled by “Zionist financiers,” according to Carlson’s guest—was the chief villain of World War II.

The Bad

• The cease-fire deal, though to be honest we’re not entirely confident on how to read Trump’s intentions. Speaking to Israel’s Channel 12 News, Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff expressed a desire to see the deal through to the end, saying, “There’s more value in getting those hostages home alive and being able to continue to talk to solve things than there is in continuing the war.” Trump, however, said Tuesday that he was “not confident” that the deal would last and that the war was “not our war.” He added that Hamas could not be allowed to return to power in Gaza. “Most of them are dead,” he said, and “they didn’t exactly run it well; they ran it viciously and badly.”

• Steve Witkoff in general. We mentioned the Middle East envoy’s financial ties to Qatar during our discussion of his role in brokering the hostage deal, and he hasn’t done much thus far to allay anyone’s suspicions. Witkoff on Tuesday confirmed a report that he would be visiting Gaza to oversee the implementation of the cease-fire and stressed that the cease-fire must hold to pursue “normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” That would’ve been a nice carrot in, say, 2019 … before the Biden administration inverted the Abraham Accords formula by putting the Palestinians at the center of it.

• The memecoins. In the run-up to the inauguration, Donald and Melania Trump launched a pair of memecoins—crypto assets with “no economic purpose,” per The Wall Street Journal—dubbed $TRUMP and $MELANIA. The coins briefly skyrocketed in value over the weekend before dropping 50%, though they should both still be lucrative for The Trump Organization, which owns about 80% of the $TRUMP supply.

The Too Soon to Tell

• TikTok. We were more worried about this one yesterday, before Trump came out with a range of hawkish China trade policies, but there’s still the danger that the combination of TikTok’s popularity, the president’s dealmaking instincts, and the interests of some of his donors will make “saving” TikTok—and thus providing a foreign adversary with a propaganda ray aimed squarely at the minds of more than 170 million Americans—seem like a win-win arrangement. CNN reports that Trump is demanding that TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, give up a 50% stake in the company to U.S. investors and that “tariffs on Chinese goods could hinge on whether Beijing approves a potential future deal.” We hope that price is too steep for President Xi Jinping, because we won’t feel any better about TikTok melting the brains of young Americans knowing that a handful of well-connected Americans are padding their portfolios off the back of it.
  

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The Rest

→Hamas is “effectively back in control in Gaza,” at least according to a Tuesday headline in The Wall Street Journal. Thousands of armed and uniformed militants have emerged from their tunnels since cease-fire took effect on Sunday, in what one former Israeli hostage negotiator told the paper was a “slap in the face to the Israeli government and army.” The terror group’s current armed strength is unknown, with around 17,000 of its prewar strength of 30,000 having been killed in the war, according to Israeli estimates. But a Jan. 13 article in the Journal noted that Hamas was rapidly expanding its recruitment under the direction of Yahya Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed.
”We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the IDF is eradicating them,” said retired IDF brigadier general Amir Avivi.

→One of our pet theories about the “Biden administration” is that its titular leader often had very little idea what was done in his name by aides, staffers, cabinet officials, and their allies in the progressive nonprofit sphere. In an interview with Baris Weiss of “The Free Press” over the weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson described an early 2024 meeting with Biden in which Biden denied signing, or having any knowledge of, his administration’s freeze on liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. Johnson says that during a brief one-on-one with Biden, he pressed the then president about the ban, which he argued was working against the administration’s efforts to reduce European dependence on Russian gas. The president, according to Johnson:

Looks at me, stunned, and he said, “I didn’t do that.” And I said, Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago. And he goes, “No, I didn’t do that.” And he’s arguing with me. And I said Mr. President, respectfully, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out and we’ll read it together, you definitely did that. And he goes “Oh, you’re talking about natural gas? … No, no, you misunderstand. What I did is I signed this thing to, we’re gonna conduct a study on the effects of LNG.” I said no you’re not sir, you paused it.

So it would appear that not only were Biden’s staffers systematically misbriefing him about the public reception of his policies—telling him, in effect, that everything he did was wildly popular—they were also misbriefing him about what those policies were.

→Speaking of outsourcing policy to radical nonprofits, The Times of Israel reported last Friday that the Biden Treasury and his State Department mistakenly sanctioned two Israelis with U.S. citizenship as “violent settlers” last year under a Biden executive order. Issachar Manne, sanctioned in July, and Levi Yitzchak Pilant, sanctioned in August, have sued the U.S. government for violating their constitutional due process rights by imposing the sanctions by administrative fiat; their lawyers have also argued that they are not eligible for sanctions as U.S. citizens, despite being falsely identified as “foreign persons” by the U.S. Treasury. U.S. officials speaking to The Times of Israel confessed that “Washington didn’t properly vet some of the settlers it sanctioned last year,” all but admitting what we’ve previously reported at Tablet and The Scroll, which is that the Biden administration outsourced its sanctioning decisions to Democracy for the Arab World Now, a foundation-funded NGO aligned with Qatari foreign policy objectives that regularly submitted “dossiers” of bad Jews to the Biden Treasury. The executive order under which the sanctions were levied, EO 14115, was repealed by President Trump on Tuesday.

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