(Paris) With his favorite pen, Donald Trump signed this week what should become his 221e executive order since January, more than in his entire first term, extending executive power more than any other president in modern U.S. history.
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To erect customs barriers, promote artificial intelligence, combat “wokism” or increase the flow of showers, the American president has increased the use of decrees at a pace not seen since the Second World War, according to an AFP analysis.
The latest, a text signed on Monday classifying fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction”.
Since his return to the White House, the 47e President of the United States had already signed 220 decrees, texts of legal and executive scope not requiring the approval of Congress, officially published as such by the Federal Register according to a last official count released Tuesday.
This is significantly more than his predecessors Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who took an average of 30 to 40 per year.
To find such a pace of production of decrees, we must go back to the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in four mandates, from 1933 to 1945, initialed nearly 4,000 decrees, but in the very different context of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Why so many decrees, when Donald Trump has a majority in Congress?
“These decrees are part of a communication strategy,” said John Woolley, professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara and co-director of the American Presidency Project site, the main independent source of archives and analyzes on the American presidency.
“It’s a way of signaling to important groups within his base that he’s advancing “the cause”,” he explains.
Domestic aim, societal scope
AFP’s analysis of official federal government data shows that the vast majority (nearly 60%) of texts focus on domestic political subjects. Less than 10% concern foreign policy in the strict sense, the rest relating to mixed themes.
Societal issues in the broad sense (culture, civil rights, education and health) predominate, with nearly 30% of decrees signed, ahead of the “commerce, economy, investment” category (around 20%) or federal state reforms (around 18%).
Yet the main theme of Trump’s re-election campaign, immigration and security issues come in 4e position (around 10%).
Among the decrees on societal issues, several refer to an “ideology”, such as this text of July 23 to rule out artificial intelligence models using “woke bias”, or that of August 28 to make “traditional” architecture the reference for federal buildings.
Efficiency in question
The effectiveness of this governance by decree is hampered by a number of legal challenges.
According to data available on the independent legal site Just Security, linked to the New York University law school, more than 20% of Trump’s executive orders are subject to legal action and more than twenty of these have been blocked, at least temporarily or partially, by American courts.
Thus, a federal appeals court ruled at the end of August that a large part of the new customs duties were illegal. Called upon to decide, the Supreme Court with a conservative majority itself seemed to doubt their legal basis during a hearing on November 5.
But, according to John Woolley, the president “does not fear being attacked on the merits of his decrees” and “deliberately tests the limits of the law” by betting on the fact that ultimately, “the Supreme Court will share a large part of his vision of executive power”.
Settlements of accounts
In his decrees, Donald Trump has a direct and authoritarian style, shows AFP’s analysis of the language and vocabulary used. The verb “impose” is used on average five times more often than among its three predecessors.
The vocabulary is also more patriotic: he invokes the “nation” two to three times more often than Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush and cites the “American people” twice as often.
Another particularity: Donald Trump attacks “the previous administration” on numerous occasions, accusing it, for example, of having let in “millions of illegal immigrants”.
Some of the decrees amount to “settling of scores”, to use a description used by John Woolley, more than 15% according to an AFP count. Previously, the researcher points out, “no president had issued decrees explicitly attacking his detractors and former opponents. »
At the end of November, Donald Trump even affirmed that he was going to cancel the decrees that Joe Biden would have signed with a “signing machine”, an automaton allowing a signature to be reproduced, allegations denounced by the former Democratic president as “ridiculous and false”.
