Trump has made a lot of statements about what he will do on day one of his administration, so many that there will not be enough hours in the day to do most of them even if he were serious about the promises. But I know what his most important priority will be and that is to try and show that the crowds at this inauguration exceed in size what Barack Obama had in 2008. That his inauguration crowd in 2016 was much smaller than Obama’s was something that really rankled him to the extent that he made his then press secretary Sean Spicer look foolish by trying to argue otherwise when the aerial evidence clearly showed the opposite. Trump continued to lie about this long after everyone other than his cult followers knew that it was false. So brace yourself for this to be his top priority.

But what about the more consequential things that he has promised to do one day one?

His list includes starting up the mass deportation of migrants, rolling back Biden administration policies on education, reshaping the federal government by firing potentially thousands of federal employees he believes are secretly working against him, and pardoning people who were arrested for their role in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” he said of his Day 1 plans.
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Trump said during the campaign that he would roll back Biden administration action seeking to protect transgender students from discrimination in schools on the first day of his new administration.
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Speaking at a Wisconsin rally in June, Trump said “on Day 1″ he would “sign a new executive order” that would cut federal money for any school “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the lives of our children.”

Trump hasn’t said how he would try to cut schools’ federal money, and any widespread rollback would require action from Congress.
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Trump has repeatedly said he could settle the war between Russia and Ukraine in one day.

When asked to respond to the claim, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said “the Ukrainian crisis cannot be solved in one day.”

Leavitt, the Trump press secretary, told Fox News after Trump on Wednesday was declared the winner of the election that he would now be able to “negotiate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.” She later said, “It includes, on Day 1, bringing Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table to end this war.”
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Speaking last month at his Madison Square Garden rally in New York, Trump said: “On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”

HE has promised things to be done quickly..

Trump could begin the process of stripping tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections, so they could be more easily fired.
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Trump wants the ability to convert some of those career people into political jobs, making them easier to dismiss and replace with loyalists. He would try to accomplish that by reviving a 2020 executive order known as “Schedule F.” The idea behind the order was to strip job protections from federal workers and create a new class of political employees. It could affect roughly 50,000 of 2.2 million civilian federal employees.

He also loves tariffs and thinks they are the solution to pretty much all fiscal problems, such as closing the budget deficit and protecting American industries.

Trump promised throughout the campaign to impose tariffs on imported goods, particularly those from China. He argued that such import taxes would keep manufacturing jobs in the United States, shrink the federal deficit and help lower food prices. He also cast them as central to his national security agenda.

“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump said during a September rally in Flint, Michigan.

The size of his pledged tariffs varied. He proposed at least a 10% across-the-board tariff on imported goods, a 60% import tax on goods from China and a 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico — if not more.

So how much will tariffs bring in? Let’s do the numbers.

The United States is the largest goods importer in the world. U.S. goods imports from the world totaled $3.2 trillion in 2022, up 14.6 percent ($413.7 billion) from 2021. China was the top supplier of goods to the United States, accounting for 16.5 percent of total goods imports. The top five suppliers of U.S. goods imports in 2022 were: China ($536.3 billion), Mexico ($454.8 billion), Canada ($436.6 billion), Japan ($148.1 billion), and Germany ($146.6 billion). U.S. goods imports from the European Union 27 were $553.3 billion.

If he levies a flat 10% tariff on all imports, that would raise about $320 billion, while the deficit is $1,870 billion, so not much of a dent. Even a 20% flat rate (which is something he has floated) raises $640 billion which will still be insufficient. What if he carries out his maximal threat to put 60% tariffs on China and 25% on Mexico and Canada and 20% on all other countries? That will still only raise $898 billion.

Of course this scenario assumes that everything else will remain unchanged with this action. In reality, it will have huge repercussions. For one thing, the cost of imports will rise which means that the market for imported goods will drop, reducing the revenue from tariffs. Furthermore, other countries will retaliate with their own tariffs, which means US exports will drop.

While Trump sees tariffs as protecting domestic producers, in the current interconnected world with complex supply chains, where companies import some of the components of their goods and then export the finished product, the impact of increased import and export tariffs are going to be hard to predict.

One thing that is likely is that other countries, fed up with the bullying behavior of the US that it can get away with it only because of its dominance and control of the financial systems, will increase their efforts to find alternatives for trade and financing, strengthening the hand of the BRICS consortium.