President Donald Trump’s pace since returning to the White House has surprised the president’s friends, perhaps even more than his enemies.
On the 66th day of his administration, Trump signed the 100th executive order of his second term, breaking FDR’s record of 99 executive orders in the first 100 days. While Trump plows ahead, the leftist lawfare complex that once sought to imprison the president is attempting to handcuff his second term by filing more than 130 lawsuits against the administration.
As a deputy assistant to the president and Trump senior policy strategist, May Mailman is one of those administration staffers tasked with executing President Trump’s game plan. She sat down for a special episode of “The Signal Sitdown” filmed at the White House.
“I think actually the president’s speed has always been this fast,” Mailman said of the offensive posture of the administration. It has always been, ‘I need this, I need this, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’”
Mailman said this strategy emerged during the transition to ensure that on Day One, President Trump was keeping his promises. “Everything that he said he was going to do on Day One, we’re going to do on Day One. So there was just that capturing of promises and making sure that that was executed.”
The added advantage to the strategy? The president’s opponents are caught off guard: “They can’t keep up if you just keep executing,” Mailman said.
The second Trump administration’s personnel, she suggested, are reflecting the dynamism coming from the Oval Office. “I think what you’re seeing with personnel this time is people who are oriented toward action. And so a lot of people are oriented towards process, they’re oriented toward contemplation, they’re oriented toward a lot of other things. But these people? They want to get things done.”
In this administration, “a staffer recognizes that we are here to execute the president’s agenda,” Mailman said. “That is your job, and you should do it smart, and you should do it right, and you should ask questions, and you should do it in a way that’s not idiotic, but your job is to execute.”
But, as a four-year veteran of the first Trump White House, Mailman didn’t anticipate coming back to the White House in 2025. “I wasn’t going to do it, but then I worked on the transition and there was so much momentum,” Mailman told The Daily Signal. “So how could you not? And so here we are.”
Nevertheless, the administration’s opponents would like nothing more than to kill the president’s momentum. That much has been made clear by the more than 130 lawsuits, an overwhelming majority of them filed by leftist groups, against the administration. Some activist judges are granting these leftist groups injunctions blocking Trump policies.
“The lawfare has been alarming,” Mailman said.
“The number, I think, is probably to be expected [because] everybody loves to fundraise off of this,” Mailman explained. “The problem is what happens next… If the Supreme Court continues to allow nationwide injunctions, which is before any trial, before any evidence, before any final legal determination… I think it will forever harm the standing of the judiciary in the minds of the American public.”
Part of solving the problem of rogue judges lies with Congress. It’s not only the executive branch being challenged by the judiciary, either. Mailman argued, “the Legislature [is] seeing their laws just get totally shredded by the judiciary,” as well.
Now, Republicans on Capitol Hill are currently weighing impeachment, investigations, and legislation, among other potential solutions.
“It is catastrophic for [Congress] to not act and to let individual judges nullify laws nationwide in a preliminary posture,” Mailman said. “And they need to carve back this power if they care at all about their own power.”
“The Legislature kind of needs to think about that as an institution,” she told The Daily Signal. “Do we care about the people? Because … when judges take over, who loses? The people.”
