As Donald Trump began his second presidential term by issuing a record number of executive orders, Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government Andrew Rudalevige—an expert on presidential power—was tapped by several news sources for his political insight.
“Clearly, they had done some prep work this time in a way that didn’t happen in 2016 and 2017,” said Rudalevige of the president and his team. He was quoted in The Washington Post in an exploring last week’s “flood” of presidential directives.
“You had a whole group of pretty well-funded entities able to focus on what they wanted to do if they could wrest control and could implement Trump’s policies immediately,” he added.
Speaking on January 24, 2025, Rudalevige told host Michel Martin that, with almost fifty executive actions being issued “out of the gate,” the new president is already setting numerical records, though, he added, “Many of these things are routine” in terms of federal employment, for instance.
The latest round of presidential orders, however, also contain some directives that Rudalevige said amount to an abuse of presidential power.
“Executive orders are supposed to be used to faithfully execute the law. That's a presidential duty in the Constitution,” he explained. “It's a little hard to square that with an executive order telling the attorney general, for example, not to enforce the law, or, in the birthright citizenship case, to effectively rewrite the Constitution. That's not within presidential authority,” said Rudalevige, in reference to Trump’s effort to end the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the US.
“As a candidate, Donald Trump sharply criticized President Barack Obama for using executive directives to make policy."
On inauguration day itself, January 20, Rudalevige was featured on , where host Amna Nawaz asked him, among other things, about Trump’s declaration of two national emergencies—one relating to the energy situation and the other regarding the southern border. “It's worth keeping in mind there doesn't have to be a national emergency for the president to declare one,” commented Rudalevige. But once an emergency is declared, he continued, certain “standby powers” are activated. “If you remember the southern border emergency in President Trump's first term, that allowed him to access some funds for military construction that he could then repurpose to the border wall.”
Rudalevige also authored a recent post on the political news website , (formerly The Washington Post’s political science blog, The Monkey Cage), in which he offered a rundown on presidential executive orders “from FDR to Biden.”
Trump’s current fondness for issuing executive orders stands in sharp contrast to what he said in the run-up to the 2016 election, wrote Rudalevige. “As a candidate, Donald Trump sharply criticized President Barack Obama for using executive directives to make policy. Obama, Trump claimed, only used them ‘because he can’t get anything done’ and they were ‘the easy way out’—'he doesn’t want to work too hard.’ By contrast,” he continued, “Trump said he would ‘do away with executive orders for the most part.’”
Executive orders have not only been the preserve of President Trump in recent times. Rudalevige discussed the history and utility of executive directives on a lengthy on January 18. Further, President Biden issued a flurry of actions during his final days in office, wrote The Washington Post’s Matt Viser in a January 16 featuring comment from Rudalevige. These actions included extending temporary protected status to nearly one million immigrants, commuting the sentences of nearly everyone on federal death row, and granting his son Hunter a sweeping pardon.
“One of the advantages that the president has is they can move first,” commented Rudalevige. “They can create a new status quo, and in Washington, the status quo is privileged… And to the degree you can reset the agenda somehow, it’s appealing to presidents when they’re going out the door,” he added.
Rudalevige’s latest book is (Princeton University Press, 2021).
