Donald Trump's "shock and awe" first week in office was exactly what he had promised — or threatened.

He issued almost 100 executive orders and policy changes during that chaotic week. These included freeing virtually all of his supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, attempting to nullify the 14th Amendment and end birthright citizenship, declaring a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, launching nationwide raids against undocumented immigrants and their communities as part of “the largest deportation plan in American history,” escalating attacks on the LGBTQ community, closing down government programs and offices focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, withdrawing from both the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord, and throwing out many other changes made by the Biden administration regarding the environment, the economy, education, and other areas.

Most of this was spelled out in advance by Project 2025 and Agenda 47. None of it should have come as a surprise.

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As Trump’s eventful first week concluded, he fired more than a dozen inspectors general across a wide range of federal agencies. The role of such inspectors is to provide nonpartisan legal supervision and oversight, something Trump manifestly sees as an obstacle to autocratic rule. Firing them all was likely illegal, but Trump simply doesn't care. According to him — and also according to the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court — his narrow electoral victory now renders him above the law as a de facto dictator.

In an essay for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch reflects on this "reactionary Week One backlash" striking "at the very heart of LGBTQ rights, academic freedom on college campuses, the environmental movement, and decades of rising empowerment for women":

On the surface, Trump’s dictator-on-Day-One orders were a campaign-promise-fulfilling war on 21st-century liberal “wokeness,” but in reality the MAGA movement was stabbing at the heart of MLK, of LBJ’s “Great Society,” and the progressive victories that have sustained my generation for our lifetimes.

In a matter of hours, an American strongman had achieved the long-held dream of the far right, to toss the wave of liberations of the Long Sixties down an Orwellian memory hole … .

[B]oomers like us grew up in the afterglow of victory of World War II that led us to believe America was the nation that conquered fascism, not a land that would someday succumb to it. Most of us didn’t realize as schoolchildren what we understand better today, which is that the forces of reaction that powered Jim Crow and the KKK would never go away or stop pushing back… . There is much to be written — today and by future historians, if the field of history survives — about how we got here, with the dangerous mix of understandable grievances about a capitalist and right-wing assault on the American........

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