On his way out the door, President* Biden keeps issuing executive orders. One of the most controversial is the recent order that ‘permanently’ prohibits exploring or drilling for oil along most of the US coastline.
This is being reported as something that will be difficult or impossible for Trump to reverse, because doing so would require Congress to take action.
That could be the case if he approaches it as a one-off. But it’s not hard to make the case that pretty much anything Biden did after their campaign debate was done by someone who was clearly not in full control of his faculties.
So really, instead of signing hundreds of executive orders on his first day in office, Trump could replace a lot of them with a single executive order, rescinding every executive order signed between June 27, 2024 and January 20, 2025, all in one fell swoop.
That would mean rescinding pardons, commutations, medals, judicial nominations, and appointments; sending bills to Ukraine (and other countries) for funding they shouldn’t have received; putting the coastline back in play for oil exploration; and undoing a lot of other things that Biden has done to try to throw monkey wrenches into Trump’s presidency.
But he shouldn’t say that the orders are being rescinded. He should say they’re being annulled. They’ll be treated as if they never happened.
There is precedent for this in divorce law. When two people get married, there are two ways for them to get unmarried. The first is to get a divorce. But the second is to get an annulment.
A divorce is the legal process of terminating a valid marriage, whereas an annulment is a legal ruling that declares a marriage null and void, as if it never existed.
What are grounds for annulment? Fraud, coercion, and lack of capacity.
So, on day one, Trump should annul rather than rescind all those executive orders, claiming a lack of capacity on Biden’s part as justification.
Apart from its sheer elegance, the beauty of this strategy is that right now, Democrats are lining up all kinds of court actions to obstruct anything new that Trump might try to do.
Suddenly, they’d have to divert their attention (and resources) to reviving old gains that have been killed. They’d still be in court but looking backward, leaving Trump free to move forward.
It would be classic Trump.
