225 Executive Orders in One Year

According to Congressman Steve Cohen's office, which has been tracking Trump administration actions, Donald Trump signed 225 executive orders in 2025. By any historical standard, that represents an extraordinary pace.

Some of these are symbolic. Some are genuinely consequential. The media — depending on which outlet you read — is either treating all of them as civilization-ending or ignoring the legitimate policy questions they raise.

What's Actually on the List

According to Cohen's tracking page, Trump's 2025 executive actions include:

• Tariff adjustments on imported goods, repeatedly revised throughout the year
• December 15: Designating fentanyl a "Weapon of Mass Destruction"
• December 11: Preempting state-level AI regulation
• September 25: Permitting TikTok to keep operating despite a congressional ban
• September 19: Creating the $1 million "Gold Card" visa for foreign nationals
• September 5: Restoring "Department of War" as an alternative name for the Defense Department
• August 28: Mandating "beautiful" federal architecture

Some of these deserve serious scrutiny. Some are eyebrow-raising. Some are just weird.

The Irreversibility Question

Ambassador Alberto M. Fernandez at MEMRI raised this directly in a January 31, 2025 analysis titled Can Trump Reverse The Irreversible? The piece — restricted to professionals in policy, media, and law enforcement — frames the core tension: government programs and bureaucratic structures develop a self-perpetuating life of their own. Fernandez describes this using the Cold War-era Pentagon term "Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone" (SLICC) — a system that exists solely to justify its own existence.

Trump can sign executive orders constantly. The question is which of his actions actually restructure power in ways that outlast a single administration.

Fentanyl as a WMD designation? That has real legal teeth. It potentially unlocks different military and law enforcement tools.

Renaming a federal building's architectural style? That's reversible before the paint dries.

The TikTok Problem

Congress passed a law. Trump bypassed it with an executive order on September 25, 2025, allowing TikTok to keep operating.

A Republican president allowed a Chinese-owned app to stay live in defiance of a bipartisan congressional ban. If a Democrat had done this, conservative media would have responded with fierce criticism. The silence from the right on this one is notable. The silence from the left — who spent years calling TikTok a national security threat before suddenly defending it — is equally revealing.

China is the real long-term strategic threat to the United States. Allowing ByteDance to maintain its foothold in American digital life — and American data collection — because it's politically convenient is not a national security win. It's the opposite.

The AI Preemption Move Is Bigger Than It Looks

Trump's December 11 executive order undermining state-level AI regulation is getting almost zero serious coverage.

States like California were building their own AI oversight frameworks. California's SB 1047, for example, would have imposed safety requirements on large AI models. The Trump administration moved to kneecap that entire state-level regulatory ecosystem.

From a free-market, federalism perspective, this is a complicated call. If you believe federal preemption is appropriate — and sometimes it is — then fine. But if you believe states should be laboratories of democracy, this is the federal government overriding local governance. Conservatives don't get to celebrate federal overreach just because it benefits tech companies they like.

What the Left Is Getting Wrong

CNN's framing — represented by a 2020 opinion piece from David A. Andelman that got recycled into this conversation — treats every Trump policy move as an attempt to "lock in" irreversible damage before accountability catches up.

Some executive orders are easily reversible. The next president can undo most of them with a stroke of their own pen. Cohen's office lists dozens of actions as "harmful" without distinguishing between symbolic gestures and structural changes. Treating everything as equally catastrophic is how you lose credibility.

What the Right Is Getting Wrong

The GOP cheerleaders are equally ineffective. Celebrating 225 executive orders as a sign of strength ignores that governing by executive order — at this scale — is an end-run around Congress. Republicans spent years correctly arguing that Obama's executive overreach was bad for constitutional governance. The same principle applies now.

If Trump's policies are good, pass them through Congress. Make them law. That's how you make them actually irreversible.

What Regular Americans Should Watch

The fentanyl WMD designation matters — watch how law enforcement and the military use that new authority.

The tariff chaos matters — it directly affects prices at the grocery store and the hardware store. Specific numbers on consumer impact are still rolling in.

The TikTok decision matters — and nobody is holding Trump accountable for it the way they should.

The AI preemption matters — it shapes who controls the rules of the most transformative technology since the internet.

The rest is largely noise.

Focus on the decisions with real structural consequences. Don't let either side distract you with the decorative architecture orders while the substantive power moves happen in the background.