Trump’s Day One Punch List

A sobering conversation with conservative legal scholar John Yoo about what the president-elect can and cannot do on his first day in office, from imposing tariffs to pulling out of NATO, pardoning insurrectionists, targeting people on his “enemies list,” and finally building that wall.

Yoo, who has advised Trump, warned that some of his ambitions, like unilaterally withdrawing from NATO, could cause a “constitutional earthquake.” Photo: Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Tara Palmeri

December 27, 2024

Donald Trump has promised to do many things on Day One: launch the biggest mass deportation in American history; tariff the daylights out of Canadian and Mexican imports; end birthright citizenship and all foreign wars; etcetera. Clearly, he can’t do this all by himself, and during his first term, we saw how his executive orders—for instance “closing the border” or the so-called Muslim ban—got tied up in the courts. Congress, meanwhile, can barely pass a budget these days, let alone amend the Constitution’s plain guarantee of birthright citizenship.