Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.
President Donald Trump’s second term has fulfilled many of the darkest fears people had about his first.
He is deploying the military into blue cities and moving to seize the nation’s elections. Where he once had protesters tear-gassed so he could stage a photo op with a Bible, his gestapo has now executed two U.S. citizens and assaulted countless others.
These are the abuses of a would-be dictator who learned from his first occupation of the White House, and what he learned is to go bigger and go faster—and nowhere is that more evident than in his approach to the executive order.
This past Tuesday marked the 400th day of Trump’s second term, and in that time, he signed 243 executive orders, more than four times the number he’d signed at this point in his first term (59), according to a Daily Kos analysis of data from the Federal Register, the official journal of the government.
Trump’s new rate also far outpaces the number of orders former Presidents Barack Obama (44) and Joe Biden (81) had signed by their 400th day in office. In fact, Trump has signed more orders in his second term than in all four years of his first (220), and he is only 34 orders behind the total number that Obama signed in eight years (277).
At his current rate, Trump is signing a new executive order every 1.7 days on average. If he keeps up that pace, his second term will beat Obama’s eight-year total around April 24.
As of Friday, President Donald Trump has signed 463 executive orders during his two terms, the third-most for a president since World War II. He still has over 1,000 days left in his second term.
Of course, overall, Trump has already surpassed Obama in this measure. Factoring in Trump’s first-term orders brings his total to 463, the third-most for a president since World War II, behind only Harry Truman (906) and Dwight Eisenhower (484). At his current rate, Trump will pass Eisenhower’s eight-year total around April 3, with over 1,000 days left in his second term. However, to surpass Truman, Trump would have to maintain his pace through early March 2028.
Such similar rates between Truman and Trump only highlight the latter’s aggressiveness. Unlike Trump, Truman was leading the nation during a major war. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Truman’s orders were related to World War II. Even small actions, such as authorizing military officials to temporarily commandeer an Oregon airport, required Truman’s signature. Numerous orders wound down agencies near the war’s end.
There is also a stark contrast in how they approach domestic crises. Truman used his pen to push the nation forward on civil rights by desegregating the military and federal workforce—objectives Trump has fought against with his own orders.
Worse, unlike some past presidents, Trump may not slow the pace of his executive scribbling as he approaches the end of his second term. If Democrats win a chamber of Congress (or two) in November, Trump’s rate could increase as the future of his legislative agenda dims. That’s already happened once: Before the 2018 midterms, Trump had signed 86 orders, but afterward, he signed 134.
But Trump isn’t waiting for that. On the first day of his new term, he signed 26 executive orders, beating the previous first-day record of nine, which Biden set, among presidents since Truman. Those 26 orders largely focused on undoing Biden’s progress. In fact, a single executive order Trump signed that day rescinded 67 previous orders, which were concerned with mitigating environmental damage, promoting diversity, and lowering drug prices, among other things.
Far-right conspiracy theories about the 2020 election often center around voting-machine companies like Dominion Voting Systems.
That first day was not abnormal, either. Trump signed eight orders on just April 9, 2025. They concerned tariffs, defense contracting, energy policy, water pressure in showerheads, and a single law firm, which he appears to have targeted for its representation of Dominion Voting Systems, the voting-machine manufacturer at the center of far-right conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
Such a sweeping range of orders shows him treating the presidential pen as an authoritarian silver bullet. It enacts his agenda as much as it harasses his foes and rewards his sycophants.
The trouble for him is that the executive order isn’t a silver bullet. Courts have regularly rebuffed his attempts to punish law firms, and in its most high-profile case of Trump’s second term so far, the Supreme Court reined in his economically destructive tariffs. Executive orders hold real power, but they are not as durable as legislation.
In theory, what is done via executive order can be undone via executive order. Just like Trump did on his second first day, the next Democratic president can revoke every order Trump has signed.
But the extensive damage of Trump’s orders—and the pain they will cause before they’re revoked by a new president or overturned by a court—cannot as easily be fixed.
Any updates?
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Apparently, in Maine, Graham Platner’s tattoo controversy was much ado about Nazi. The progressive candidate leads Gov. Janet Mills in the state’s Democratic Senate primary by a whopping 64% to 26%, according to a fresh University of New Hampshire poll. That’s an especially surprising result given that last year Platner was revealed to have a tattoo associated with Germany’s Third Reich, which he claimed not to know the meaning of and has since apologized for and had covered up. More impressive is that the poll finds in a hypothetical general election, Platner outperforms Mills against Sen. Susan Collins, arguably the Senate’s most vulnerable Republican. Platner leads Collins by 11 points in a head-to-head, while Mills leads Collins by just 1 point.
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Americans hate Trump’s tariffs, so it’s little surprise that a pair of new polls, both conducted by YouGov, find around 60% approval for the Supreme Court striking down said tariffs. Worse for Trump, more than 1 in 4 Republicans in both polls support the ruling.
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Amid our increasingly AI-dominated hellscape, a Pew Research Center study finds alarming results about how American teens use chatbots. Among those ages 13 to 17, 54% have used chatbots to do their homework and 42% have used them to summarize an article, book, or video. No wonder new film students can’t sit through films anymore.
Vibe check
How successful do you think the Civil Rights Movement was in achieving its goals? If you think it achieved most of its goals, you’re more likely to be a Trump voter.
A higher share of Trump voters (38%) than Kamala Harris voters (24%) say the 1960s movement attained “most” of its goals, according to the latest YouGov/Economist survey. Meanwhile, 65% of Harris voters say it “made significant advances, but failed on many dimensions,” compared with 44% of Trump voters who say the same.
What’s behind this divide? It could be a few things.
First, Trump voters see racism today as a relatively minor issue. The poll finds that 20% of Trump voters see racism as “a big problem,” which is the same share that says racism is “not a problem.” Meanwhile, 66% of Harris voters see racism as a large problem in society.
In other words, it’s easier to think an anti-racist movement achieved most of its goals if you don’t think racism is much of a problem today—or if you just won’t admit that it is.
It may also result from Trump voters being less aware of the movement’s goals, which were broader than integration and the elimination of Jim Crow laws. For instance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. aimed to deliver large-scale economic justice, decrying America’s practice of “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”
He imagined a much different society, telling his staffers in 1966, “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
