'Shock and awe' White House fires first salvo in its war on government

Donald Trump was barely into his second week back in the White House when he declared that his latest presidency had heralded the "golden age of America".

- Chris McGreal

Others reached for more ominous characterisations of the barrage of executive orders from the new administration that have rocked the US government: blitzkrieg, shock and awe, criminal.

Trump came out of the starting gate fast with a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the cancellation of federal diversity programmes and the wholesale dismissal of independent anti-corruption inspectors from a number of federal agencies.

But the most far-reaching orders amounted to a power grab by the White House, with a purge of senior officials regarded as insufficiently deferential to Trump, a demand for the mass resignations of civil servants and an illegal attempt to snatch control of trillions of dollars in spending from Congress.

The president has not had everything his own way. The White House was rapidly forced to back down over spending in the face of legal challenges. But that may prove no more than a bump in the road for Trump as he works to remake the federal government in his image following a blueprint laid out by rightwing strategists.

William Galston, a former deputy assistant for domestic policy to Bill Clinton, said Trump had unleashed a "deluge" of policies to overwhelm opponents, from pardoning about 1,600 rioters convicted of the January 6 insurrection to attempting to strike down the constitutional right of citizenship for anyone born in the US.

"This is a deliberate strategy. Shock and awe. You try to do so much on so many fronts so quickly as to confuse and overwhelm the opposition through volume and speed to make it impossible to unite in resistance. Think of it as a blitzkrieg," Galston said.