Trump Keeping Up Torrid Pace During First Full Day in Office

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump launched headlong into his second term on Monday and the pace of his activities has shown no sign of slackening on this, his second day in office.

According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump signed 42 executive orders and assorted other memoranda and proclamations, took 115 personnel actions and more than 200 other executive actions, engaged in 60 minutes of Q&A with the press and delivered three formal speeches between his swearing in at noon on Monday and his appearances at multiple inaugural balls Monday night.

Trump’s first full day as the nation’s 47th president began with he and First Lady Melania Trump’s attendance at an interfaith prayer service at Washington National Cathedral.

The service has been a post-inaugural tradition since former President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in office.

In addition to the president and first lady, several members of the Trump family were on hand, including Eric and Ivanka Trump, as was Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, the nation’s new second lady.

From there, Trump traveled back to the White House, where he was scheduled to meet with top Republican leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thume, R-S.D., to discuss the way forward for his early priorities, including extending the soon-to-expire tax cuts the president signed into law during his first term.

Following the meeting with Republican leaders, Trump will meet with a larger group of GOP lawmakers from the Hill.

The talks are a continuation of discussions that actually began shortly after the November election, and they’re an acknowledgement of both the scope of the Republicans’ ambitions now that they control the White House, House and Senate, and how slim their majorities are in both chambers of Congress.

Right now the plan is to use reconciliation, a process that will allow them to pass legislation in the Senate with a simple majority — and reduce their need to garner Democratic support.

The disagreement among Republicans is over whether there should be one bill or two. 

In early January, Johnson laid out a plan to pass one big bill that would include an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, which are due to lapse at the end of the year, multiple provisions related to border security, and significant changes to Biden-era energy and manufacturing policies.

The bill would also include a provision that Trump has said is vital to advancing his agenda — a suspension of the nation’s debt ceiling.

At the time, Johnson said he hoped to pass the bill out of the House as soon as the first week of April.

Majority Leader Thune, however, said he would prefer to break the package into two bills.

The first of these would be heavily weighted with immigration provisions, and in his view, its passage would give Republicans an early and significant policy win.

It would also provide Senate Republicans with additional time to revise a second tax bill.

The other significant voice in this debate on the Hill is that of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which wants Johnson to embrace a two-bill approach, but one that appears to be far different from what Thune has proposed.

What the Freedom Caucus is looking for are spending cuts, billions of dollars of them.

The first bill would, among other things, add work requirements for Medicare and food stamps, eliminate almost all benefits for illegal immigrants, and slash funding for the Internal Revenue Service.

Those and other cuts, they’ve said, would save between $360 billion and $540 billion over the next decade.

In exchange, they said, they would agree to support a second bill mandating a $4 trillion increase in the federal debt ceiling ahead of the June deadline to increase America’s credit limit.

“Whether it’s one bill or two bills, it’s going to get done,” Trump told reporters earlier this month.

As lengthy as these conversations may be, they still don’t represent a day’s work for the new president, who is also scheduled to deliver remarks on infrastructure in the late afternoon.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue