Trump's Nightmare List Of Executive Orders

Trump's day one policies could kill millions

Trump has recently signed a flurry of executive orders on his very first day in office. While I did not have high hopes for the Trump presidency, these executive orders are quite a bit worse than I expected. In fact, I think I’m probably much more opposed to his executive orders than the typical Democrat is—many of the things he did for cheap applause are far more insidious than they are politically contentious.

Let me first describe the ones I don’t care about—either thinking these don’t matter much or are good.

• I do not care about the one saying there are only two genders; this is mostly a culture war issue that was expected and not very major [Edit: this was probably a mistake, it looks like it will have some non-insignificant policy effects that seem bad—see Alyssa Vance’s comments].

• Similarly, I do not care about/am probably in favor of the one rolling back DEI policies on the federal level.

• I’m relatively agnostic about DOGE as I think that there is a stupendous amount of government waste, but that Elon et al are probably not ideal judges of which programs ought to be cut.

• I do not know what to think about the law designed to prevent deliberate weaponization of the government—I’m against weaponization, but would need to know more details.

• I don’t know enough about his anti-inflation policies nor about unvaccinated workers.

• I don’t know about his anti-government censorship program—I’m against government censorship, but I’d need to know more details about the program.

The above range from things that I’m loosely in favor of to loosely opposed to—none, I think, were huge deals. In my view, the concerning things, ranked from least bad to worst were:

1. His declaration of a bogus national emergency and pardoning of the January 6 rioters heightens my concerns about his risk to Democracy, but only by a bit. None of this was that surprising, but it is alarming; when a guy attempts a coup, does nothing as rioters try to overthrow the government, then declares a bogus national emergency and pardons the guys who tried to overthrow the government, one should grow rather concerned.

2. Putting Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, thus maintaining devastating and crippling sanctions, is quite bad. The U.S. has had an embargo on Cuba for about 60 years—the idea that it will prompt any kind of regime change is utterly laughable, and just harms the desperately poor people of Cuba. This is a supremely moronic symbolic gesture that hurts poor Cubans and benefits no one.

3. Reinstating Tiktok is also bad. I am in favor of the Tiktok ban, but not for the standard reason. I think it’s unlikely that it’s a big threat to national security. Instead, I think the reason to ban Tiktok is that it seems to be causing mass misery among young children. Just as we do not give cocaine to kids, we should not be giving digital cocaine to them—a highly addictive substance that makes them polarized and miserable. If, as Haidt has argued, social media is the main reason Gen Z is more miserable than previous generations, this will plausibly jeopardize the mental health of literally millions of young people. Not good!

4. Terrorist designation for gangs and cartels is also a bad idea. This is part of a longstanding Trump plan to go to war with the cartels which would go badly, as I’ve argued at length. Combining the war on drugs and the war on terror is a recipe for even more disaster than either was individually, and has destabilized Mexico. Largely because of U.S. military actions in Mexico, about 70% of guns in Mexico come from the United States. A 175 page report by the Rand corporation, discussing actions like the one Trump proposed, concluded, “All the prior studies are implicitly pessimistic about the possibility of greatly increasing the impact of the interdiction system.”

5. Trump has been shutting down immigration—having the military seal the border, attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship, returning tens of thousands of Mexicans to Mexico, and shutting down refugee resettlement. As I’ve argued at length, immigration restrictions are both bad for America and seriously immoral. It’s particularly immoral to deny citizenship to an asylum or refugee fleeing serious danger—what gives us the right to use military force to keep a poor war-torn Syrian trapped in hellish and dangerous conditions? And even worse than that is denying citizenship to people born in America to immigrant parents, who have known nowhere else—though that will likely be struck down as unconstitutional.

Each of these are, I think, quite bad. But three more actions tower above them and are even worse.

First, Trump pulled out of the world health organization and ended U.S.’ negotiation on a treaty to enhance pandemic preparedness. This is a disaster! Pandemic preparedness is not the sort of thing that we can go alone. If a pandemic breaks out in, say, China, it affects the entire world (those skeptical of this claim should consult recent history). Because of cross-country externalities, the solution has to be global. Trump’s decision will also have devastating humanitarian effects, as the WHO is critical in combatting disease in the developing world, especially through vaccine distribution. Aid programs to eradicate smallpox overseas saved around 200 million lives and were largely carried out by the world health organization.

Second, Trump’s decision to cut off foreign aid is ghoulish. Foreign aid makes up less than 1% of the federal budget, though on average Americans think it takes up 31%. PEPFAR—just a single foreign aid program—has been responsible for saving about 25 million lives since 2001, and this is likely an underestimate. Hoarding money in the richest country in the world, when children are dying who can be easily helped, is evil. If we choose not to spare one percent of the budget to help those dying of horrendous diseases and starving to death, we are truly a stupid and morally decrepit nation.

And while aid is commonly criticized, these claims don’t hold up. A meta analysis found a positive and statistically significant effect of aid on growth. Most analyses critical of aid look at the median item of aid, and don’t account for the aid programs that have saved many millions of lives—enough to make aid clearly worthwhile. The benefits of U.S. foreign aid have included:

• Since 2008, USAID's efforts in 25 priority countries have helped save the lives of 4.6 million children and 200,000 women.

• In 2016, USAID helped 82 million women and children access essential health services.

• In our priority countries, the percent of demand for family planning satisfied by a modern method has increased from 45% in 2010 to 51% in 2015.

• Since 2012, 25.3 million children have been vaccinated against deadly preventable diseases.

• In 2015, over 12 million children under-5 were reached with USG supported nutrition programs.

• More than 6.8 million malaria deaths were averted worldwide between 2001 and 2015, primarily among children under five years of age in sub-Saharan Africa with the greatest progress occurring after 2005, when U.S. President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) programs were launched.

Third, Trump took a series of actions to expand the use of fossil fuels. These expand fossil fuel drilling, take the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, stop the production of new wind farms, and revoke environmentally-friendly executive orders under Biden. This is quite concerning—as my friend Aron Wall says:

(For that matter, I have some qualms about calling a "conservative" anyone who doesn't believe in some form of environmental conservation—the arguments for doing so are almost exactly the same as the arguments for not making radical changes to the economy or civil society, namely that these things represent a delicate balance that has evolved over a long period of time, and that balance is easy to destroy but very hard to replace. In other words, it's a bad idea to try to cut off the branch you are sitting on.

Except that actually it's even more foolish to ruin the ecology, as in that case we are talking about a system which God allowed to evolve over millions of years, not mere hundreds of years. I believe that we humans have been placed on this Earth as divinely appointed stewards of the Environment. God wants us to cultivate our planet and care for it—not pillage and destroy it for the short-term profit of shareholders. It may be hard to replace a repressive system of government, but it is far easier than to recreate an extinct species, or to suck 1/3 of the carbon dioxide out of the air in order to return the atmosphere to the condition it was in before the Industrial Revolution.)

These actions will increase climate change, something that will potentially cause millions of annual deaths. Even if you’re not concerned about climate change, you should be concerned about pollution—even Trump is, having said:

“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely immaculate clean air. And we had it. We had H2O.” “We had the best numbers ever and we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything.”

(As Richard Hanania has pointed out, Trump seemed to think that H2O was a particularly pristine kind of water, rather than a synonym of water. This braindead moron is somehow the president).

Pollution kills about 7 million people a year around the world, many in poor countries, and perhaps around 100,000 deaths in the U.S.. This means it’s responsible for over 10% of global deaths. Generally it’s a bad idea to do more of the thing that kills 10% of people.

But the most important negative effect of Trump’s new policies—to a utilitarian like me—is the impact on wild animals. There are literally quintillions of wild animals. This means that pollution potentially kills tens of thousands of times more wild animals than people.

Even more concerning than the direct death of animals, in my view, is that this has long-term effects on wild animal suffering. Nature is a nasty place, especially for R-strategists—those creatures who give birth to very many offspring, few of whom survive. Tuna, for instance, lay about 10 million eggs, meaning the life of most every tuna has been very short and culminated in a painful death.

But in a more hazardous environment, R-strategists are favored by selection pressures. As the book of Wisdom suggests, when “Brief and troubled is [their] lifetime; there is no remedy for [their] dying,” and “our lifetime is the passing of a shadow;” the ideal evolutionary strategy is to “enjoy the good things that are here, and make use of creation with youthful zest.” If an environment is dangerous and lethal, the strategy of simply having as many babies as possible and hoping some survive is more successful than investing time in careful parenting. Empirically, climate change has already been having this effect. As Glenn writes:

If global temperatures stabilize again in a few centuries, and the total biomass of wild animals returns to normal, nature will likely be populated disproportionately with r-strategists compared to what it would be if anthropogenic climate change had not happened. This will also likely persist for a very long time, as it has historically taken millions of years after a mass extinction for full species diversity to return.

There are an estimated 10 trillion (10¹³) vertebrate individuals on Earth, as well as 10 sextillion (10²²) invertebrates. If we assume conservatively (and just for illustrative purposes) that the biomass of 10% of the vertebrate population is converted to smaller-bodied animals — say, half as large — each of whom produces an extra 10 offspring per year who experience one day of suffering and then die, the number of extra suffering-years caused per year would be 55 billion, or more than the entire number of suffering-years caused by all land-based factory farms per year. If you accounted at all for how the reproductive strategies of invertebrates might change, the total would be mind-bogglingly bigger. But even if you just stick with vertebrates and assume the effect lasts one million years, the effect of climate change on wild animal suffering would be at least 55 quadrillion suffering-years, which is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of suffering that factory farming ever has and likely ever will produce.

This is simply an unfathomable amount of suffering; there’s basically nothing that comes close. Even if you think it’s a good thing that climate change is reducing wild animal populations in the near-to-medium term because wild animals live net-negative lives, the effect of reduced population is only likely to last a few hundred years until temperatures again stabilize. However, the likely mass extinction of K-strategists and the concomitant increase in r-selection might last for millions of years.

The most concerning point is about the long-lasting nature of the effects. Millions of years from now, if humans go extinct, animals will continue suffering and dying as R-strategists because of us. And this is just one of the ways climate change might harm wild animals. Brian Tomasik, in a detailed treatment of the subject, describes many other ways climate change may worsen wild animal suffering.

If, like me, you think wild animal suffering is the worst thing ever by orders of magnitude, making it quite a bit worse is extremely serious. And while this may sound surprising, there are just so many wild animals that the overwhelming majority of suffering on Earth—likely well above 99.99%—is had by them. Trump’s actions to make wild animal suffering worse are probably his worst policy.

Those defending Trump said that while he sounds like a buffoon, his administration would be staffed by competent technocratic elites pursuing gray-tribe goals. They said that he’d work on AI safety, and other stuff that doesn’t fall neatly on the political spectrum. Instead, it seems like he is following populist and traditionally conservative goals, and sticking a finger in the eye of gray tribe members who care about the environment and foreigners. To the extent that smart technocrats like Vance have a say, they are people with values diametrically opposed to my own, who have intellectually lobotomized themselves, or pretended to, so as to be in Trump’s good graces. Such people do not give me much hope.

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