The source is the Federal Register, which documents all published EOs going back to the 1930s, in addition to The American Presidency Project, which documents recent and historical EOs going back to Washington. I used ggplot2 in R to make the graph and added the annotations in Adobe Illustrator.

Posted by zezemind

37 comments

  1. I mean, he’s gotta run out of things to order soon right?

  2. Remember when they said Obama was ruling by executive order?

  4. Ironic considering FDR basically built the middle class whereas Trump has basically double tapped it.

  5. I mean. What else is he going to do? Nothing legal…..

  6. i think the x axis lines on the second graph can be made more visible/thicker/darker

    i looked at it for a second and thought “3000 orders per day, jesus christ” and then realized how dumb that was

  7. Isn’t this the executive over reach they tried to blame on Biden and Obama.

  8. Historically speaking, the right wing has been molding the culture to make sure that a president like FDR never happens again. The days of robber barons have returned, and the great depression will most likely come with them.

  10. I think this is sorta the point people are missing – a lot of these actions haven’t faced legal scrutiny yet and are basically just instructions for what the executive branch should do. I feel like this falls apart by the fall. It’s like when they say “illegal DEI” based on his executive order- that’s just plain false.

    Of course if the Supreme Court gives him leeway then we are pretty f-ed.

  11. can someone explain the graph to me? why is Herbert Hoover at 1003 and his bar is higher than Woodrow Wilson with 1803?

  12. I particularly like this, because it show how it is impossible to rule by executive order.

  13. The labels on the second chart are really confusing. Is the number above the bar the total number of executive orders?

    Edit: Yep, I should have just read the full chart.

  14. What’s wrong with graph 2? The labels don’t match the size of the bars.

  16. Come on man the bias is a little on the nose lmao

    To fight bad ideas you need good ideas not cheap visual tricks.

  17. Holy shit. Trump and FDR could not possibly be more opposite.

  18. The second graph is a bit confusing. Vertical axis is EO/day, but the bar labels are total EOs. Would prefer bar labels match axis for clarity. Took me a second to figure out why 143> 3721

  19. It takes a lot to undo 1460 days of Biden – or I should say, Bidens puppet master behind the scenes.

  20. Wait til 2028! And 2032! This is the new normal, because the next guy will have to undo all of these by executive order, and so on, and so on…

  21. You should do number of executive orders in the first 100 days. In the last 20 years the majority of executive orders happen early in a term so that is going to skew the data. Not saying that Trump hasn’t signed a shit ton of them, but you are comparing apples to oranges here

  22. Did I miss Eisenhower or the second chart or is he missing?

  23. Thank you for providing your sources and methodology. From skimming the comments, I’m not the only one who finds the bar chart confusing. To make the bar chart more useful and informative, I’d suggest limiting the scope to each presidents’ EOs within their first 100 days (rather than full term). 

  24. The different facial expressions from 2017 Trump and 2025 Trump are spot on lol. This man has nothing left within his head other than vengeance and grift.

  25. If you guys want to stop this madness we need a Democratic Party that wants to scale back the federal government and especially claw back the executive branch.

  27. And he has the house in Congress. He can pass legislation he’s choosing not to. Wait till he loses the house + or Congress.

  28. Aren’t many of these EOs unconstitutional or meaningless?

  29. I guess the Bunkers got their 🎶 “man like Herbert Hoover agaaaaaaaain.” 🎶

  30. I remember the right melting down when Obama said “I have a pen and I have a phone” when asked how he planned to get anything done with a Republican Congress. They were convinced he was violating the constitution with his insane number of EOs.

  32. Interesting that FDR, Hoover and Truman were surrounded by the Great Depression and WW2. I’m guessing history will look back on this moment as a pivotal one in our Nation’s story as well. Here’s to hoping the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

  33. I feel like I’m missing something here. On slide 2, you’ve got Bush I signing 166 orders but his bar is higher than Bush II, who signed 291 orders. What am I missing?

  34. Number of EOs tell half the story. What the EOs actually are are much more important. Trump signed an EO to “engage in talks with Greenland to acquire them and name them Red White and BlueLand.”

    His EOs are more his stream of consciousness than executive orders.

  35. FDR’s orders were related to fighting WWII and the New Deal which helped people make money during the depression, stabelized the economy, and eventually ended the depression.

    I don’t know much about Hoover but that song in Annie blames him for the Depression.

    Truman was a bit of a mixed bag. He desegregated the army and helped America transition into a space-age economy after WWII, but he also was a major actor in the clusterfuck that was the Cold War and McCarthyism

  36. Its interesting Biden’s numbers were higher than Trump’s first presidency, yet everyone was calling Trump a Fascist and leaving Biden alone to do whatever he wanted.

Comments are closed.