On the first day of President Trump’s second term, he signed a record 26 executive orders. Some of them were really big. Others feel more likely messaging memos. And still others are bound to be held up in the courts. So what does it all amount to? What exactly in America has changed?In a former life, I co-hosted a podcast called “The Weeds” with other policy wonks at Vox, including Dara Lind and Matthew Yglesias. We’ve since gone our separate ways; Lind is currently a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, and Yglesias is the author of the Substack newsletter Slow Boring. But since this was such a big policy week, I wanted to get some of the band back together.In this conversation, we discuss how much Trump’s immigration orders will actually change our immigration system; whether any of Trump’s orders address Americans’ concerns over prices; how serious Trump actually is about tariffs; and more.Book Recommendations:The Fifth Risk by Michael LewisDemon Copperhead by Barbara KingsolverEveryone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan BlitzerLeft Adrift by Timothy ShenkWhy Nothing Works by Marc J. DunkelmanMiddlemarch by George EliotThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full Episode
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. In 2017, when Trump came into the White House for the first time, on day one, he signed exactly one executive order. It was targeting the Affordable Care Act. In 2025, he signed 26 executive orders on day one, throwing pens into the roaring crowd. Some of these orders were really big, ending birthright citizenship.
There were big orders on energy. He signed orders about Doge and governmental efficiency, about the federal workforce. Some of them were more messaging bills. Some of them are big, but... They may not be big after the courts get done with them. So what has really changed here? What has all this flurry of policymaking and activity amounted to?
One of the difficulties of covering Donald Trump is it's always hard to know where to look first, where even to look at all. Back in the day, I used to do a policy podcast at Vox with Matt Iglesias, who is now the author of the excellent Substack newsletter, Slow Boring, and Dara Lind, who's now a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Thought it'd be good to have a bit of a reunion with two of the people who follow the policies that Trump is working on most closely to get into the guts of what is actually changing and what as of yet really isn't. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Darling, Matt Iglesias, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Good to be on. It's like old times. Yeah.
So let's dive into immigration first. Donald Trump signed about 10 executive orders on border security and immigration. When you look at them together, Dara, what do you see?
What we see here is a body of orders that are pushing the federal government to take a much, much, much, much, much more aggressive approach on immigration enforcement, especially in the interior of the United States, especially integrating the military into border enforcement in a way we haven't seen. But...
without really prescribing a whole lot in terms of specifics because they understand that that's going to have to happen at the agency level. That's going to have to – you know, that requires the actual machinery of the federal government to work itself out to figure out what that looks like on the ground. And so a lot of Biden-era enforcement priorities got rescinded.
It is currently – and this is actually as of Tuesday night – The U.S. has the legal authority to deport people without a court hearing if they're arrested anywhere in the U.S. and cannot prove to an ICE agent's satisfaction that they've been in the U.S. for at least two years, which is something we're going to have to see how that plays out on the ground. And there is...
A push toward building more capacity for detention, which is going to be very important if they're going to scale up enforcement efforts. A push toward punishing other countries that refuse to accept deportation flights by putting visa sanctions on them, which is going to be extremely important if you're going to succeed in deporting people.
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