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Trump Signs Executive Orders on Day One of His Administration, Jan. 20, 2025

January 20, 2025 · The White House · 0:47:44

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Hours after his swearing-in, President Donald Trump sat at the Oval Office desk on the evening of Jan. 20, 2025, and signed his first wave of executive actions while taking questions from the press pool, in the White House broadcast (uploaded Jan. 21). The session opened with pardons and commutations relating to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — approximately 1,500 people, full pardons with about six commutations held for further research, as the presenting aide described them — and an instruction that the Bureau of Prisons act immediately on receipt.

The signings that followed, as presented on camera, included a proclamation guaranteeing the states protection against invasion, invoking executive powers over what the document calls the ongoing invasion at the southern border; an order realigning the United States refugee admissions program; an order on protecting America from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats; an order designating the cartels and other organizations as foreign terrorist organizations — asked whether he would consider ordering U.S. special forces into Mexico, the President answered, “Could happen. Stranger things have happened”; withdrawal from the World Health Organization, with the President citing a $500 million U.S. payment against China’s contribution; a declaration of a national energy emergency; an order on the definition of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, which he acknowledged would be tested in court — “we have good ground”; an order reforming the federal workforce, including the Senior Executive Service; and the order creating and implementing the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE — Elon Musk, he said, would get an office for about twenty people, not a West Wing office. Between documents he fielded questions on a Ukraine deal, the Panama Canal, Greenland, and immigration enforcement raids, which he said would happen: “It has to happen, or we’re not going to have a country left.”

Why it matters

This is the term’s opening move captured in a single sitting: the Day One signing session set the administration’s first-day agenda — border and immigration enforcement, energy, the federal workforce, and government efficiency — in signed orders rather than speeches, and it remains the baseline record against which the scoreboard tracks what those orders became.

Scoreboard watch

A signing session is a scoreboard event: the Jan. 6 pardons, the cartel foreign-terrorist-organization designation, the national energy emergency declaration, and the creation of DOGE are each candidates for the promise and scoreboard records, flagged here for the review-gated scoreboard process.

Sources: The White House, “President Donald J. Trump Signs Executive Orders on Day One of Administration” (YouTube, 2025-01-21; event Jan. 20, 2025, the Oval Office, Washington, D.C.) — official description and broadcast transcript as aired.