Joel Pollack’s The Agenda proposes over 200 executive actions for Donald Trump in his first 100 days—deporting recent illegal immigrants, halting parole programs, and resuming border wall construction—to counter Democratic legal weaponization and restore border security. He calls for firing DOJ, NSA, CIA, and FBI leadership, ending DEI policies, and replacing critical race theory with narratives like Harriet Tubman’s legacy on currency. Pollack also urges Trump to resolve the Russia-Ukraine war, bolster Israel against Iran, and adopt a tougher stance on China while promoting faith-based initiatives in schools and government. With legal battles looming, he argues Trump’s bold agenda could outpace Democratic obstruction, framing his return as essential to preserving U.S. stability and rule of law. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavelin with this week's interview with Joel Pollock from the Breitbart sites.
He's got a new book about the Trump administration, really interesting, hopefully upcoming Trump administration.
This election is not just a battle between Republicans and Democrats.
It's also a battle between Republicans and Republicans.
Donald Trump and the people who support him are really trying to transform the Republican Party from the old Mitch McConnell party of donors and corporate elites and turn it into the party of the working man, which it really hasn't been for quite some time.
And there are people in the Republican Party trying to stop it.
And that's one of the reasons that Trump is facing pressure from both sides.
But what should a Trump administration look like?
It's always hard to tell with Trump because he's a little bit, you know, he says he's a common sense guy.
He's kind of the guy at the end of the bar who knows how to fix things because anybody would know how to fix things.
But Joel has written a really interesting book called The Agenda, What Trump Should Do in the First Hundred Days, where he gets very specific about what he thinks Trump should do, not what he thinks Joel would do, but what he thinks Trump should do.
As I say, he's a senior editor at large and the in-house counsel at Breitbart News in LA, and he is the 2018 winner of the Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship, which I didn't know.
Joel, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
It's good to be with you.
Thanks for the opportunity.
So one of the things that really caught me about this book is that, like me, you were incredibly moved and angered by Trump's conviction for something, something, something, whatever they were charging him with in New York.
I still am not sure about it.
Why exactly did that inspire you to write this, to write out an agenda for Trump?
Well, I was very frustrated by the conviction.
I was furious, and I decided to turn that energy into something positive rather than simply sitting there feeling angry about it.
And what I often find helps to do when you're frustrated in any situation is to envision what success might look like, what a better future would feel like.
And I thought, well, let me think ahead to January 2025.
Let me assume that despite all of the difficulties that Trump and the country are facing right now, that this all has a happy ending.
And to me, that means a Trump victory.
I think, like many conservatives, I would have considered another candidate.
But when the Biden administration and all of these local Democrat prosecutors started targeting Trump, and it was clear they were only doing so because he's Trump, then I thought, no, we actually have to take the country back from people who abuse power in this way, this really third world way.
And I began to think about what January 2025 would feel like.
And I realized immediately that the problem Donald Trump is going to face is he's going to be a lame duck on the first day, according to the media.
That the moment he takes the oath of office, they are going to want to discuss the candidates for 2028.
They're not going to want to discuss his policies.
They're not going to want to give him a chance to govern.
And so even though he is going to have appointees to run various agencies and he's going to work with Congress on various legislative priorities, and there are some problems that can only be fixed by legislation, including by working with Democrats, he still has to come in and establish that he's there to change things for the better.
And the only way to do that is with executive actions, executive orders, policy changes, memoranda, things that he can do himself as president with his constitutional executive authority and things that he can do on the day he takes office on day one in the first week.
And that crystallized my thinking.
And so I sat down and I went policy by policy and thought, okay, what can he do on the border?
What can he do on inflation?
What can he do on foreign policy?
What can he do on faith?
Because I believe that there's a crisis of faith in this country and that the president can show leadership on that as well.
So I sat down and I came up with over 200 policies and actions that President Trump can take the day he's inaugurated.
So, you know, I had a very similar experience, by the way.
I was, you know, Trump can be infuriating.
He can be frustrating.
You sometimes want him to do things he simply will not come around and do.
You sometimes just want him to be quiet and he won't be.
But the minute they convicted him in that New York case, I was all in.
I just thought, these guys have got to be stopped.
This is one of the biggest abuses of power.
And the funny thing about it is they keep saying that Trump is so terrible because he will do that.
He will arrest his political opponents, and yet they've done it to him.
And it's absolutely disgusting.
Before we get to the specifics of your recommendations in the agenda, how does the race look to you right now?
We're talking right after Kamala Harris has chosen Tim Walz as her running mate.
How does the race look to you?
Every August, every four years, feels the same to me, which is that Democrats have the momentum.
They have the wind at their back.
This seems to be the season where Democrats and the media get their script together.
They have a sense of confidence that they can win if they can carry out whatever plan it is that they have.
It didn't feel this way a month ago.
A month ago, with Joe Biden still the Democratic candidate and Donald Trump recovering from a miraculous event and surviving that assassination attempt and coming in with a beautiful convention in Milwaukee.
It felt like Trump and the Republicans were going to win quite handily.
But I said at the time, I don't expect Democrats simply to sit there and to allow Republicans to win.
Actually, I expect them to fight.
And although I don't like it when they think they're going to win and Republicans feel like there's no chance for the Republican candidate, as an American, I found it offensive that Democrats would simply sit there and let Joe Biden continue as their candidate.
I wrote a post or two about how the voters deserve a good fight.
And they delivered.
They replaced Joe Biden.
They've installed Kamala Harris, who never got any votes in any presidential primary.
And they're putting up a good fight.
And they're doing it through their mastery of the media, through their control of culture.
They're completely erasing her past, her record, and they're hiding her from press conferences and unscripted questions.
So they're doing their very best.
They're running the 2020 basement strategy that helped Joe Biden.
I think that if the election were held today, Kamala Harris would win.
Even though Trump is ahead in national polls, I do think that once you have vote by mail on a national scale, Democrats have a built-in advantage because vote by mail matches both Democratic turnout operations and it matches Democrat culture politically.
Democrats control the system of voting for their own voters and their own voters are prepared to defer to the party leadership.
We've just seen them do that by accepting Kamala Harris as the nominee and Tim Waltz as the vice presidential nominee.
Democrats are actually more trusting of centralized authority.
And so they're happy to have party activists run the voting process through ballot harvesting, through vote by mail, and so forth.
Never mind that there's no other democracy in the world that does it this way.
Republicans prefer to go to a polling place to vote in person.
And I think any Republican candidate has to overcome the advantage that Democrats have.
And I would give it somewhere between four and five points, actually, in terms of the voting.
I think it's not enough for Trump to have a two-point lead nationally.
That means he's two or three points behind.
The good news is that I do think Trump has a way to win, which is simply to emphasize policy, which is why I wrote this book as well.
This is what Trump can talk about.
He can tell people what day one looks like.
Kamala Harris will never talk about policy.
In fact, I covered her in 2019, and policy is what tripped up her presidential campaign.
Every time she was asked to explain what Medicare for all means, what the Green New Deal means, what defunding or reimagining the police, that's their preferred term, what reimagining the police means, she couldn't do it.
And she won't do it because these are just catchphrases that don't have any policy substance.
We've heard her now backtracking.
We've heard her campaign say she doesn't support these things anymore.
We haven't heard it from her.
She doesn't want to talk about policy.
And Trump can because he has a record of success in office and because he has a tendency to do what he says he's going to do, unless, of course, he's stopped.
Now, Democrats will try to stop many of the things that I outline in the agenda through lawsuits in friendly forums like Hawaii, California, and so on.
But the sheer number of things here, over 200, I think will be enough to overwhelm the legal lawfare strategy of Democrats, at least for a while, and will allow Trump to be an impactful president as soon as he takes office.
I was surprised that you started the first chapter of your agenda is pardons, pardoning people.
Why is that?
Is that just because you were so ticked off about the verdict in New York, or is it something else?
That's part of it.
Also, it's part of a section.
Chapter one is the rule of law.
And to me, the rule of law is the fundamental principle.
We hear Democrats talk about that a lot, but it's the principle that they honor in the breach, you know, the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
They have undermined the rule of law through an open border, through reducing the powers and authority and respect of the police, through all of the over-regulation they've done.
You know, when you create new regulations and laws out of thin air, really, you encourage scoff laws.
You encourage the public not to take the law seriously.
So they've undermined the rule of law.
And I do believe that nonviolent protesters who were given jail terms after January 6th should not have gone to prison.
They should be pardoned or their sentences commuted.
I think that there are people sitting in jail today who are political prisoners in the United States.
I think Steve Bannon is a political prisoner because he defied the January 6th committee, which was an illegitimate, one-sided show trial and should never have had any kind of authority or recognition from the courts.
So I think we have to undo the abuses of the judicial system to get back to a place where Americans can trust law enforcement again and can trust that those we trust with our lives and our liberties, those who dispense justice in this country, really can be trusted.
What about, I mean, the obvious thing is the border.
You know, Ann Coulter was always furious at Trump because she voted for him the first time.
She loved him the first time because of his promises to close the border and then felt that he didn't.
What can he do that he didn't do last time?
Well, the border is the very next priority in the book.
And he has sweeping authority as president to enforce the immigration laws, to allow Border Patrol to do its job, to resume building the border wall where Biden halted construction.
And I think that he can, in fact, halt migration across the southern border completely.
And he can end the parole program through which so many people have entered the country.
There are so many things he can do because as we learned through Supreme Court cases during the Trump administration, the first time around, the president has virtually untrammeled authority over immigration policy.
So there is so much that he can do.
Now, when he tried the first time, he faced stiff opposition from Democrats.
They tied these things up in the courts for a long time.
And he also faced opposition from Republicans who were divided about immigration and who didn't want to fund the border wall.
And when there were some bills proposed to do so, they were also bills that expanded other kinds of immigration that made it difficult for Republicans on the other side of the issue to accept.
So there were all kinds of messy legislative attempts.
And what I try to do in the agenda is say, look, you can solve some of these things by working with Congress.
Eventually, you have to.
But in the meantime, there are things you can do today to enforce the law.
And I do think that President Trump won't be as trusting of congressional leadership this time, whether it's Democrats or Republicans.
I think he will be inclined to use his executive authority within the constitutional boundaries to achieve some of these goals, like securing the border.
Do you think that, you know, he has at times recommended mass deportation, and at other times he seems to soften his point of view on that.
Do you feel that America would tolerate mass deportation?
I've always wondered about this.
The pictures that you're going to see of the crying children, the people being separated, America is still an incredibly generous country in that regard.
Do you think that that's something that he can do or should do?
Or is there some other way to handle this?
So many people are now here illegally.
They have accomplished.
The Democrats have accomplished their goal of flooding the country with illegals.
How far can he go, do you think?
I think he can do some deportation.
I think you're correct that Americans don't like to see the law being enforced, whether it's deporting illegal immigrants or even just ordinary law enforcement.
People often get very upset to see that.
And I think he can make a first pass at it.
I think he can deport people who've been convicted of crimes, people who came in the last four years under Joe Biden, who knew that they had no place here, but who came illegally anyway.
And I think there are certain groups that would be easier to deport.
But I do think that long term, there is going to need to be some other solution.
But you can't solve that problem until you also have full border security and a wall and programs like e-Verify.
The American people will accept some accommodation for humanitarian reasons for people who came here illegally.
They just want to make sure that it's the last time we ever have to do it.
So I think that once Trump can demonstrate that he's able to build the wall and secure the border, then I think conservatives who are opposed to immigration, and really it's not just conservatives.
I mean, the opposition to immigration, both illegal and legal, is growing in this country.
I think people will be satisfied once they know that this is not going to be yet another in a series of amnesties that never ends.
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You know, I was watching, I cannot remember where it was I saw this, but this, you know, they had this Project 2025, which was essentially an 800, 900 page document doing what you do in the agenda, what Trump should do in his first 100 days, what you do in very, you know, very tersely and quickly and in a very comprehensible way.
And I was talking to one of the authors and I said, why didn't you just publish a three-page summary or something like that?
Because nobody knows what's in it.
But they were demonizing this project 2025.
And one of the things that they demonized was that it wanted to cut something like 40 to 50 percent of the bureaucracy.
And I was trying to imagine America in an uproar over losing the bureaucracy, which I think we would all like to see 100% gone.
How far do you think Trump should go in taking on the entrenched power of an unelected government, which has become unbelievably, you know, its power was cut back by the recent Chevron decision, but still it's still an amazing glob of an object.
How important do you think it is that he takes that on and what do you think he should do?
It's absolutely essential.
And look, the new standard has been set by Javier Malay in Argentina, who came into office and canceled nearly half of Argentina's administrative departments.
Now, Trump doesn't have the same authority under the Constitution, but he does have the power to fire many people.
He can make executive policies about where these departments are located.
There's no reason that all these departments need to be in Washington, D.C.
The Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Interior should be out west.
You could have other departments in different places.
Department of Agriculture should be somewhere in the Great Plains, not as you come into Washington, D.C., near the mall.
You know, it doesn't need to be there.
And he can make a lot of these changes on his own.
It does get more difficult when you're talking about massive spending cuts.
You do have to work with Congress on that.
So at the end of my book, I say, here are some things that Trump should work with Congress on, but the focus needs to be what can he do in the first 100 days.
And I do think that the Javier Malay approach needs to be taken.
People need to understand that this is not going to continue.
That if we've seen them do it in Argentina, of all places, we can do it here as well.
And it has an effect, by the way, also on inflation, because when you have all of these government departments in an expensive city like Washington, D.C., taking up expensive real estate, the cost of doing business is higher.
The cost you have to pay to keep people employed is higher.
You could move those departments out.
The real estate's cheaper.
The office space is cheaper.
The salaries can be lower.
You can start to solve some of these other spending problems by ending this giant vortex in Washington, D.C. You know, you have a chapter about foreign policy.
And foreign policy is interesting because it's the one place where the president has the most power and can act kind of unimpeded by Congress and by the bureaucracy.
And it's the one place where Trump really was superb.
I mean, he really did a great job.
He didn't start any new wars, which is very impressive.
And those fights that he took on, he seems to have not just won, but one handily and quickly.
What do you want to see him do when he comes back?
Well, I think he should resolve the Russia-Ukraine war, which I think would be not easy to do, but would be enabled if you had a peace conference, if Trump made it clear that it was time for the two sides to talk.
And for some reason, Joe Biden, who campaigned on diplomacy, has been completely reluctant to do any of that.
So I think Trump simply can say, look, we're going to have a talk to settle this.
So I think he can close that down.
And I think he can say that he's going to give Israel free rein to respond as it needs to terrorist threats, to threats from Iran.
One of the reasons that the October 7th terror attack happened was it was clear that Biden wasn't going to support Israel and hadn't supported Israel, had in fact restored funding to Palestinian agencies or the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, which later became implicated in October 7th.
He made it clear that there was no clarity.
Biden basically muddled the Trump policy.
And when Trump had stood firmly behind Israel, that's when you got the Abraham Accords.
And that's when other allies began to feel like it was worth something to work with the United States.
Biden hasn't added a single nation to the Abraham Accords.
So I think you have to lead through strength where you have the opportunity to do so.
And you lead through diplomacy in Eastern Europe because fundamentally, you're not going to defeat Russia.
And the notion that the United States can impose some kind of regime change on Russia is silly.
Yes, we have to deter Russian aggression, but there have to be ways of doing it that give security guarantees to both sides and that end this incredibly wasteful and costly conflict.
So those are some things.
I also talk about China, how Trump can return to his confrontational approach with China, which I find very interesting because he talks about friendship with the Chinese leadership, but there's a condition, which is that China doesn't take advantage of the United States.
And I think that's a better way of talking about China than the way Biden has done.
Yeah, no, I mean, he was always being hit, Trump, for saying, you know, I can get along with this one, I can get along with Putin, I can get up, but he was really quite tough with them at the same time, which I think is the right way to go.
Do you feel that the military needs to be combed out, that the leadership of the military needs to be changed?
I do think so.
Look, there's a huge political divide that's emerged in our country between the officer class and the enlisted class.
And if you talk to people in the military, they'll tell you that there are many people in the enlisted ranks who are very solidly pro-Trump.
And often people in the officer ranks feel differently because Trump is a disruptor.
And the officer corps are an elite and a necessary elite and an honorable, distinguished elite.
But they're hostile to that kind of disruption.
And I do think we need to, you know, I don't treat the military in my book the same way I treat the national security agencies, the Department of Justice, the NSA, the CIA.
I say that those departments need to have a complete overhaul.
The leadership of those departments needs to be fired.
They are politically corrupted and so forth.
I don't think the military has gone that far.
I do think that most of the people in the officer corps and in the enlisted ranks, they care about the country.
They have sacrificed for the country.
But there needs to be an understanding that the role of the military is not to be a social engineering platform for democratic left-wing cultural policies, that the military needs to protect the country.
And also that things that happened in the past with Admiral McRaven and General Milley and General McChrystal coming out and playing political roles once they've retired General Mattis, it's completely unacceptable.
I mean, they're as susceptible, interestingly, to fake news as the rest of us.
And Mattis apparently believed a lot of the nonsense that was said about Trump and so forth.
We have to make clear that that's unacceptable.
I actually was stunned that Trump didn't do more in his first term to discipline people like General Milley when he spoke out against Trump's walk across Lafayette Park, for example, even though he had participated in it himself.
So I do think there's some reform that's necessary.
I don't think it's quite the wholesale cleaning out that needs to happen in some of the other agencies.
Now, you mentioned faith, and I was interested to see that you have a chapter on faith.
I think it is one of the biggest problems in the country, but I never kind of occurred to me that the government should take it on.
How can, given our First Amendment rights and the right of people to worship as they please or not worship as they please, what can the government do?
What can a president do about the crisis of faith in the country?
Well, as I like to say, he needs to put the pulpit back in the bully pulpit.
And look, the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting religion.
It doesn't say the White House can't make religious statements or can't hold an invocation before press briefings, can't hold a moment of quiet reflection.
You know, that moment of quiet reflection is constitutionally permissible in schools.
And I don't see why the White House shouldn't model that so that it can be demystified so that people understand it's not some method of religious coercion.
I think children need to grow up with a sense that there's a higher authority to whom the teachers and the parents are also bound because people are growing up completely ruthless and lonely.
And I think that the president can set the example in a spiritual sense.
There can be invocations at the White House.
There can be members of the clergy from all different faiths invited to present their ideas at the White House to the country.
And you can listen or not listen as you please.
But I do think that the president can return faith to the center of the American experience.
We've seen a steep drop off in church attendance.
I think the president can encourage church attendance.
I think it's necessary.
I think people need to form families under the wing of the church, speaking broadly, of course, about faith in general.
And I think it's something we need to do.
Look, our enemies believe very fervently.
They know what they believe.
And they're taking advantage of us because we don't know what we believe.
And I think it's necessary for the president to at least point in that direction.
We're not talking about religious coercion or imposing the Ten Commandments.
But, you know, I talk about this in my book.
Why can't the Department of Education prepare a basic curriculum of the essence of the Old Testament and the New Testament?
Why should American school children leave 12 years of public education without ever having read the Sermon on the Mount?
I mean, these are fundamental texts to who we are as Americans, and we're leaving them out.
So I think that that's not coercion to require that for children.
It's not coercive to lead the way in the White House.
I think the president can do that.
And that's why I recommend several steps about faith.
Yeah, no, I think it is important.
It's just a minefield because of the Constitution.
And the Constitution is likewise important.
But I think you're right about this.
You put a lot of topics under the heading of identity politics.
I mean, this thing, I think that the culture is something that the news media does not really like to engage in.
And Republicans don't really like to engage in.
And yet I think it is one of the most corrosive parts of the left's agenda.
How does the president address that?
Well, the president has to do what Harvard just did, which is to get rid of DEI statements for employment.
There should be no DEI loyalty oaths in the federal government.
There should be no critical race theory in the federal government or mandatory critical race trainings and things like that.
And you just go through all of the agencies and you root that stuff out immediately.
It is so corrosive.
And I think there are positive things to do as well to encourage the country to get to know its history and its black history or history of other groups that have contributed to the country in a way that's positive.
One of the suggestions I make is that we put Harriet Tubman on the $200 bill.
We make a $200 bill.
We put Harriet Tubman on it and honor her contributions to the freedom of slaves.
We don't have to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
So there are ways to encourage a kind of positive conversation about diversity and identity.
You know, we don't want to force everybody to conform to some notion of what identity is supposed to be.
But I do think we need to get rid of this corrosive, which is a great word, corrosive sense that our demography is our destiny.
It really isn't.
And I think that there's a lot the president can do in that regard.
Encouraging Positive Change00:02:30
Yeah, and it's interesting.
I've only got a couple of minutes left.
So there's one more question I want to ask you, which is about, you talk about reining in the power of social media.
And I've been pounding this drum for a while.
Obviously, the First Amendment is incredibly important, you know, but new technologies do need new regulations.
What is the answer?
I mean, you're at Breitbart.
It's an amazing site.
What do you do about social media to keep it from becoming a system of control rather than a system of information?
So one recommendation I did not include was to ban TikTok because even though I favor banning it, Trump doesn't.
And I didn't want to include anything that Trump won't do.
I mean, I have disagreements with him.
I wanted this to be something that would actually be realistic.
I think, as a Jew who observes the Sabbath, that encouraging Americans to take a break from TikTok and from Instagram is healthy.
It doesn't mean you have to give it up or ban anything.
You don't have to force anyone to do it.
But in my family, having 25 hours where the kids are off of screens, and we're all off of screens, we are all bound by the same code, is very helpful.
I find it has an effect on the rest of the week.
They are interested in screens, just like other kids are, but they're not addicted to them, and they know they can live without them.
So I think just having that kind of a break, that sort of national Sabbath is helpful.
All right.
I got to stop there, Joel.
It's really nice talking to you.
Joel Pollack, the book is called The Agenda, What Trump Should Do in His First Hundred Days.
And unlike Agenda 2025, it's very readable, very quick, and really, really interesting.
I hope it makes its way into the campaign.
Have you any sense that it's going to reach the campaign?
Well, you know, Steve Bannon, my old boss, who's now in prison as a political prisoner, he's close to the Trump people.
I didn't know he was going to write the forward.
So it's possible he will pass it along.
Of course, he's unable to communicate right now, but this was the last thing he wrote before he started his sentence was the forward to my book, which I was very honored by.
And hopefully it makes some inroads there.
Well, you know, Steve said he didn't want anyone to contact him, but I hope if you do talk to him, you'll give him my best.
I think he is really a martyr and a political prisoner, as you say.
Will do.
Thanks a lot, Joel.
It's good talking to you.
Thank you.
You too.
All right.
Once again, the book is the agenda, what Trump Should Do In His First Hundred Days.
I hope he gets to see it, but I also hope he gets to use it.