Utahns' favorite and least favorite Trump executive orders

SALT LAKE CITY — President Donald Trump did not ease into his second term; no one would describe his first days as lazy celebration. Trump has signed 83 executive orders since his first day in the White House on Jan. 20.

During his address to a joint session of Congress last week, Trump said, "I have signed nearly 100 executive orders and taken more than 400 executive actions, a record, to restore common sense, safety, optimism and wealth all across our wonderful land."

"The people elected me to do the job, and I'm doing it."

Utahns appear to be more supportive of the commander in chief than the rest of the country. A recent Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted by HarrisX revealed that 59% (3 in 5) of Utahns approve of Trump's job as president, including 83% of Republicans, 18% of Democrats and 39% of independents.

While Utahns fall roughly in line with the rest of the country on which of Trump's executive orders they like best, Utah Republicans are typically more socially conservative on issues like gender and abortion than other Republicans, and a little less supportive of Trump's moves on immigration, while finding common ground on issues such as tech regulation and declassifying documents.

Where Utahns were opposed to executive intervention was Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the dismantling of the Department of Education.

Utahns more conservative on social issues

Gender issues, specifically Trump's decision to ban biological males from participating in women's sports, was the most popular executive order nationally and in Utah.

Trump's executive order, "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports," garnered 60% overall support and 83% support among Republicans nationally. Utahns showed more substantial support for the ban with a combined 76% approval rating and 90% support from Utah Republicans.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee has been vocal for years about his opposition to transgender individuals participating in women's sports. On Sunday, he shared statistics on X comparing track and field records between teenage boys and women's world records, arguing that it is unfair to allow biological males in women's sports.

Last week, when U.S. Senate Democrats blocked a vote on a bill seeking to ban transgender women from female sports, he responded on social media, "Why do Senate Democrats insist on forcing female athletes to accept hostile, unfair, and abusive conditions in sports?"

The polling shows that many of his Republican constituents agree, and not just on the issue of transgender participation in sports. Utah Republicans were also significantly more supportive of Trump's ban on gender medical treatments and gender transition for those under age 19 (88%) and the declaration of federal government recognition of only two genders: male and female (89%), compared to national Republicans (both at 82%).

Utah Republicans less conservative on immigration

On Trump's executive orders related to immigration, Utah Republicans were slightly less supportive than Republicans nationally.

While 68% of a national sample of Republicans supported ending birthright citizenship, only 57% of Utah Republicans agreed.

On whether the refugee program should have been suspended for 90 days by Trump, 63% of Utah Republicans supported his decision, while 69% nationally said the same.

When asked whether they supported Trump's executive order opening up a detention facility for immigrants at Guantanamo Bay, 77% of Republicans nationally said they support his decision compared to 69% of Utah Republicans.

Utah's interest in tech and crypto

Dubbed the "startup state" by the Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity and home to Silicon Slopes, Utah showed more interest in Trump's executive orders regulating cryptocurrency and reviewing artificial intelligence, with 84% of Republicans, 57% of Democrats and 64% of independents saying they supported this executive order, compared to national polling (77% of Republicans, 41% of Democrats and 49% of independents).

But it's unclear if they support how Trump is proceeding on cryptocurrency and AI regulations.

Trump signed an order last week establishing the nation's first-ever Bitcoin reserve, as he previously said in a Truth Social post: This will ensure that "the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World." He also criticized the Biden administration for being too critical of the digital currency.

"One argument supporters of such a fund make is it will be used to support good industrial policy, funneling money to worthy projects and away from duds," American hedge fund manager and co-founder of AQR Capital Management, Clifford Scott Asness, said, per The Free Press.

Trump's order suggested that, up to this point, there had been no definitive policy for managing digital currency assets, leading to a lack of accountability and insufficient "exploration of options to centralize, secure, or maximize their value."

But Asness argued that "it is dangerous hubris in a free market capitalist society, which luckily we still claim to be, to think the central government could or should be responsible for investing the wealth of its citizens rather than those citizens themselves, and similarly arrogant to believe they can choose which industries and firms are to be winners and losers better than the marketplace."

Declassification of assassination documents

The declassification of documents, such as the assassination files of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., was the state's second most favored executive order in both national and state polling, with 80% of Utah Republicans, 64% of Democrats, and 71% of independents wanting to see the documents released, compared 81% of U.S. Republicans, 37% of Democrats and 54% of independents.

On Jan. 20, Trump signed the declassification order to "Provide Americans the truth after six decades of secrecy."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of Robert F. Kennedy and a close confidant of Trump in his role as the newly appointed United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, expressed his full support for the order.

"The 60-year strategy of lies and secrecy, disinformation, censorship, and defamation employed by Intel officials to obscure and suppress troubling facts about JFK's assassination has provided the playbook for a series of subsequent crises — the MLK and RFK assassinations, Vietnam, 9/11, the Iraq war and COVID — that have each accelerated the subversion of our exemplary democracy by the Military/Medical Industrial Complex and pushed us further down the road toward totalitarianism," he posted on X.

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