Do you remember last month, when President Trump said he was rescinding all executive orders that President Biden signed with the “autopen” machine?

Trump declared in a social media post that any documents Biden signed with the autopen are “hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect.”

“I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally,” Trump alleged. “Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

It’s absurd, irrational, and also darkly funny (“Thank you for your attention to this matter!”). But behind all that, it was a way for the President to make substantive changes to the law by pointing to a supposed process problem. A more capable person could have dressed it up in sober prose with a pseudo-argument about how there was no “autopen” in 1789 and therefore the use of the “autopen” is illegal.

Yesterday, the new mayor of New York was inaugurated, and he immediately issued an executive order rescinding all executive orders that the prior mayor had issued after his indictment on corruption charges (the charges were later dropped in an obviously corrupt bargain for Mayor Adams’s political support).

Which executive orders were rescinded? Well, there was the executive order that prohibited the city government from participating in boycotts of Israel. There was the executive order that directed the police department to evaluate regulation on protests within 15 to 60 feet of houses of worship, following the antisemitic “globalize the intifada” protest outside a Manhattan synagogue hosting an event about aliyah,¹Aliyah, which means “ascent” in Hebrew, is the return of Jews from the diaspora to Israel. after which the new mayor’s spokesman said he “discouraged the language” the protesters used (“It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events … We need to make them scared“) but also that he thought “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law,” like Jews immigrating to Israel. And there was the executive order adopting the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which has been widely adopted and endorsed worldwide.

Mayor Mamdani is more capable and articulate than President Trump, and he justified his move by asserting that the public had lost confidence in Mayor Adams when he was indicted. Nevertheless, the new mayor’s act was a way to change the law by pointing to a process concern, an attempt to enact new policies on Israel and the Jews without having to pay a political price. And it was a way to give a very Trumpian wink and a nod to his supporters while keeping up an appearance of concern about process so as to avoid the obvious criticisms.

It would be better and more honest for Mayor Mamdani to stand behind his policies and not to cloak major changes like allowing the city to participate in BDS efforts or abandoning the IHRA working definition in concerns about process. If you don’t like the IHRA definition because you are concerned that it might cast certain critiques of Zionism that you endorse as antisemitic, say so. If you think the New York city government should boycott the Israeli state, say so. If you don’t want the Police Department to figure out how to prevent a mob from threatening Jews at a synagogue, say so. To be fair, Mayor Mamdani has said a lot of this before, while he was a minor figure on the political fringes. That’s why his election was so concerning to the Jewish community. But he’s the mayor now.

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  Aliyah, which means “ascent” in Hebrew, is the return of Jews from the diaspora to Israel.