On February 5th, President Trump signed an executive order regarding transgender athletes and their participation in women’s sports, effectively outlawing the practice. But is it law?
While the President has tremendous power, especially when it comes to directing the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) interpretation of statutes, his executive order likely won’t survive.
In truth, it’s more of a symbolic gesture. To actually create law, the President needs Congress—and he’s not likely going to get a divided Congress to pass Transgender Athlete legislation. Even then, any legislation passed could easily be reversed with the next changing of the political winds. In reality, the President’s actions, whether one agrees or disagrees with them, will not change the status of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. Even his calling upon governing bodies to change their respective policies on competition rules will likely only have a temporary impact.
To that point, the NCAA announced they had changed its policy to prohibit male participation in women’s sports. On the surface, it looks like a victory, however, the NCAA is dealing in legalese. Their policy toward transgender athletes has not changed, as trans-individuals identify as female. If the NCAA actually wanted to change their policy toward participation in women’s sports, it would have made it a requirement to be born a female. They didn’t do that.
Moreover, what happens when President Trump leaves office? Will the next President reverse his executive order? Just look at his own actions in reversing President Biden’s executive orders or his predecessor’s tossing out of his executive orders. It becomes a futile game, where nothing changes.
Ultimately, presidential executive orders are ephemeral. They exist in the time of that particular President. Furthermore, politicians have rarely had an appetite to tackle societal issues, especially those that are contentious. One needs to look no further than abortion.
If there is going to be any level of permanence to U.S. policy on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, the change must come from the people. The only means this takes place is through the State referendum process, where each citizen gets a voice and vote. After all, the creation of the rule of law affects everyone, therefore it should have been determined by the masses, not the few.
For those championing President Trump’s efforts to purge women’s sports of non-female competition, they will likely find their victory is short-lived. In some respect, the few (presidents, politicians) shouldn’t be asked to make the hard choices. The people have the right and burden to determine the code of conduct they choose to live by.
In the end, whether one agrees with President Trump, his executive order on transgender athlete’s participation in women’s sports will be short-lived. It’s merely symbolic.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.