Looking critically at Trump's flurry of Executive Orders

Why we should watch what is done, and not to be distracted by what is said

Around Westminster, the most useful guides to the nature of modern politics may not be the journalists and commentators, still less the ‘think tanks’ with their portentous names and solemn but flimsy ‘reports’.

They are perhaps instead the con-artist conjurers on Westminster Bridge - whose activities are detailed in this fine piece.

For it is these lowly tricksters that remind us that we should watch what is done, and not to be distracted by anything else.

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The Conjurer, painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

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In the United States and the United Kingdom there is currently a lot of noise and a lot of misdirection.

As a famous chess player once observed:

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

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The constant noise and endless misdirections are indeed exhausting.

By the time any of the noise and misdirections are translated into action (or inaction), you are tired to notice and others will be too tired to care.

We will be onto the next outrage, and then the next, and the next.

The hard thing is to separate out what is done (and not done) from what is said.

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In the United States there has been a flurry of Executive Orders from the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump.

This sounds very impressive, and it sounds very scary.

But, an Executive Order is not a precise thing - it is a generic term to describe a range of documents that can come from the President.

As this US academic explains:

Some of these Executive Orders will be instruments provided for and envisaged by pre-exisiting enacted legislation: and these will usually have direct legal effect.

Others will have no legal framework and have no legal basis for having any effect.

Many will range between these two extremes.

All will be ‘Executive Orders’ put forward and signed by the President - but pretty much that is all they will have in common.

And according to another US observer, many of these Executive orders are not even of serviceable quality:

This is not surprising: competent legal drafting is not easy, and many of these “Executive Orders” are from pressure groups and professional antagonisers.

Like the Truss legal letter recently examined on this blog, what you have here are media-political devices disguised in the form of legal documents.

But it is a mask, and what we are seeing is essentially a masquerade.

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This is not to say that some - maybe many - of these Executive Orders are not going to have adverse effects for somebody - especially in the short term.

Indeed, given the many partisan conservative judges now on the federal bench, there will be energetic judicial exertions to give effect to otherwise shoddy Executive Orders.

But what it does mean is that we should be careful not to accept everything at face value.

For a flurry of Executive Orders may be little different from a flurry of Press Releases.

And we should be mindful that we are dealing with con-artist conjurers.