President Donald Trump began his tenure in Washington last week, with his inauguration moved indoors due to cold weather. However, the winter chill was no match for the flurry of executive orders, pardons, and actions he initiated. Trump swiftly dismantled numerous Biden administration policies.
To many in Washington, it feels like history is unfolding in real-time. “Absolutely,” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Va. “The thing that’s really interesting about studying history is when people are living through historic moments, they know it.”
Chervinsky highlighted the historic nature of Trump’s return: “There’s no doubt that seeing a president come back after being defeated in an election, that’s only happened one other time, and came back after being indicted on dozens of felony charges, and was involved in an insurrection to overthrow the previous election. These are just not things we’ve seen before,” she said. “And so, there’s no doubt that we are living in a historic moment.”
On his first day in office, Trump pardoned around 1,500 January 6th defendants and set a record for signing executive orders, with even more issued in the following days.
These orders ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to ending diversity efforts in the federal workforce, exiting the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization, and reinstating anti-abortion policies from his first term. He also attempted to alter the constitutional right to citizenship for children born in the U.S., but a federal judge has temporarily halted this change.
Chervinsky emphasized the importance of the separation of powers: “We are in a system that has separation of powers. There are supposed to be checks and balances. And it is essential that both Congress and the court do their job to check the president, as the president checks them. That is how the system was designed to work. And I think that should give Americans comfort that they occasionally still want to actually do that role.”
Executive orders have often been pivotal and controversial, such as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, FDR’s funding of the Manhattan Project, Eisenhower’s desegregation of Southern schools, and Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps. In the past decade, there has been a back-and-forth with Obama, Trump, and Biden reversing each other’s policies.
Chervinsky noted, “When a president needs to use executive orders to get most of their agenda done, it means either that the agenda is not particularly popular, or it is a reflection of the ills in our current political system. Congress doesn’t do much. They don’t pass that much legislation. They’re kind of a broken institution. So, what we see is that a president is trying to go around that. And until Congress tells them not to, they’re going to continue doing it.”
Reflecting on the current political climate, Chervinsky said, “There have always been periods of fighting, to be sure. American politics is messy.” When asked if she had called it “vicious,” she laughed and said, “That would be an accurate description!”
Recalling Benjamin Franklin’s response when asked whether America was a monarchy or a republic, Franklin said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Chervinsky added, “One of the things that’s great about history is it reminds us that we can be in really bad periods but come out of it. What I think about our current moment perhaps is different is that we have forgotten that nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent.”
“The founding generation, they had skin in the game because they had fought in the war, or they had been in Congress when this government was founded. And so, no matter how terrible it was, they never wanted to throw it out completely, because they had tried to build this thing from scratch,” Chervinsky said. “I think a lot of Americans today take for granted that we will always be here.”
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