Quick: Which of President Donald Trump’s second-term executive orders currently threatens to do the most damage to our collective political order?

Birthright citizenship jumps to mind. But Trump’s effort to shred our 150-year-old conception of citizenship, freedom, and equality has been blocked by the federal courts from the start and has never gone into effect. Based on oral argument in the Supreme Court in April, Trump’s attempted redefinition is all but certain to fail.

Global emergency tariffs would have been a contender as they temporarily threw international markets into disarray. But the Supreme Court invalidated the president’s unilateral “Liberation Day” scheme in February.

Trump’s executive actions attacking universities, media outlets, and law firms are anathema to core First Amendment notions of free speech and association. But the president’s bullying tactics have been uniformly rejected by the federal courts and have blessedly little chance of ever becoming law. (Though we can’t discount the chilling effect as many of the targeted institutions meekly chose to “settle” with the administration rather than fight.)

Allow me to nominate a little-noticed contender: Trump’s March 2026 executive order absurdly titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

Again, this one hasn’t attracted much attention. Part of that is a function of sheer volume. In his first year-plus back in office, Trump has issued a torrent of executive orders — over 250 so far, already more than Joe Biden or his own first term and just under Barack Obama’s output over eight years. Trump’s executive order on elections also hasn’t drawn intense public scrutiny because it doesn’t attack the Constitution quite as aggressively as birthright citizenship does or seek to remake the global economy like tariffs. And the order’s language is dense and confusing; it’s hard to tell on first reading........

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