WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is preparing to sign a series of executive orders as part of a shift in the White House strategy to increase Americans’ confidence in his leadership amid widespread criticism of his handling of the pandemic. of coronaviruses, administration officials said.
The White House is trying to reposition the president as proactive, rather than on the defensive over his response to the coronavirus, while tracking down presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in multiple polls less than four months before the election.
The strategy is combined with a plan for Trump to return to head the coronavirus briefings, which he stopped attending in April after even some of his allies said they were too long and extensive and that they were hurting the president.
A senior administration official said the executive orders will include changes to immigration policies, the census, prescription drugs and medical care. While declining to discuss further details, the official said executive actions would require a “merit-based” immigration system and address the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known like Dreamers, avoid deportation.
Trump tried to shut down the program, which his predecessor, Barack Obama, created through an executive order, and last month the Supreme Court ruled that his administration could not end the program simply by declaring it illegal. Still, the White House plans to take advantage of the ruling as a license to take extensive executive action, the senior administration official said.
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Trump has repeatedly said that the Supreme Court’s DACA ruling gave him new authority or invited him to take additional action. It did not, nor could the Supreme Court extend the authority of a president.
“It is essentially implementing the policy as much as possible,” according to the senior administration official, adding that the White House attorney’s office is confident that the president is on solid legal ground.
Trump has struggled to gain legislative traction on his immigration initiatives after 3 1/2 years in office. And it has failed to secure a health care bill, as promised during the 2016 campaign, even when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.
The White House anticipates legal challenges to some of the executive actions the president plans to implement in the coming weeks. The top administration official said the first executive order will likely refer to the census or prescription drugs, which will be aimed at lowering prices.
Supreme Court decision 5-4 on DACA said the administration needed to take a different approach to close the program. Trump said his administration would come up with a different approach to dealing with the ruling, but has not yet done so.
Trump and his allies have said for weeks that he is seeking to take meaningful executive action on immigration and healthcare.
In an interview Sunday with Fox News, Trump said he would take action on health care. Two weeks ago, he said something similar about DACA.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said June 9 that Trump was seeking to enact “executive orders that will really make a big difference,” specifically those designed to cut prices for prescription drugs.
