Trump’s first 25 days

Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, and has delivered on many of his campaign promises already. He has signed more than seventeen executive orders on many controversial issues. So far in his term, which has been 24 days, he has:

• Greenlighted the Keystone XL and North Dakota Access Pipelines. Both of these have met powerful resistance from citizens in the form of protests and petitions due to the environmental impact and, in the case of the NDA pipeline, violating Native American rights.

• Blocked the National Parks Service twitter account from tweeting after they retweeted a photo comparing inauguration attendance between president Obama’s and his own.

• Threatened Chicago, saying in a tweet that if gun violence did not decrease soon he was going to “send in the feds!”

• Ordered his press secretary Sean Spicer to lie to the public about inauguration attendance numbers. When Counselor Kellyanne Conway was interviewed at a Meet the Press interview, she claimed that Spencer did not lie, but was instead providing “alternative facts.”

• Has refused to admit that his use of an unregulated and unregistered android to tweet and email is the same thing that he harshly criticized his opponent Hillary Clinton for during the entirety of the presidential race.

• Held his first phone meeting with Vladimir Putin, and assured the press that he intends to form strong bonds and allyship with Russia in the next few years.

• Pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal he criticized often on the campaign trail.

• Appointed Stephen Bannon, who’s only experience in national security is seven years spent in the navy, to the national security council. Bannon is the chairman of Breitbart.com, a website that has been known to support the alt-right movement, which shares many common views with nazism and has been accused of propagating sexist, racist, and Islamophobic ideals. Members of the alt-right movement deny these accusations.

• Reinstated the ban on international abortion counseling, which makes it illegal for foreign agencies that accept US currency to provide abortion services, even if the services are not funded with American money.

• Issued a government mandated blackout of all updates on climate change. Agencies affected include the EPA, CDC, and NASA. The EPA has also had all grants frozen, and members are forbidden to speak about it on any social media platform.

• Instructed that the Affordable Care Act be waived, deferred, or delayed in any instance where it would create financial burden on states, making it clear that this Republican administration plans to repeal Obamacare at some point. Republican representatives have admitted that they do not have a replacement plan.

• Signed the executive order to begin construction on the Mexican/American border wall, which is estimated to cost between twelve and fifteen billion dollars and take more than fifteen years to construct. The Mexican president has expressed his resentment of this, and made it clear he will not pay for it as Trump has repeatedly claimed he will.

• Claimed that he wanted to remove the United States from the UN.

• Banned all people from seven Muslim majority countries, including green card holders, from reentering the US. None seven countries on the list have been known to send terrorists into the United States on 9/11 or any other occasion, and ones that have sent terrorists have been omitted including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Trump has come under scrutiny for excluding these countries, as it is believed the main reason he has done so is that he has business ties to those countries.

• Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway cited a massacre carried out by two Iraqi terrorists that was supposed to have occurred under the Obama administration. This massacre never happened, and she has claimed that she misspoke and did not mean to imply that anyone died, but that she was instead referring to the sentencing of two Iraqi citizens living in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to federal prison after they confessed to attacking U.S. soldiers in Iraq and tried to assist al-Qaeda in Iraq by sending money and weapons.

• Refused to release tax documents as he had promised on the campaign trail.

No matter your opinion on Mr. Trump, it cannot be denied that things are happening at a very rapid pace. History will decide whether that is for better or for worse.