Exhausted yet? It’s been three full days since Donald Trump returned to the Presidency, and so far he has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty and the World Health Organization; announced the unilateral cancellation of the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship; reversed an order lowering prescription-drug prices for seniors; threatened a trade war with Canada and Mexico starting February 1st and an actual war with Panama if it doesn’t hand over the Panama Canal; declared an emergency at the southern border and moved to order thousands of U.S. military personnel there; eliminated federal government programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and demanded that employees snitch on anyone inside the bureaucracy who might be tempted to continue doing such work anyway; and pardoned the vast majority of the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, at his behest. And that was in between sword-dancing onstage to the Village People at an inaugural ball; cashing in on the Presidency by marketing the $TRUMP cryptocoin, currently worth billions of dollars; and getting in a pissing match with an Episcopalian bishop who dared to question him to his face.
Eight years after the first Trump Inauguration, we know the drill. He loves to drown us in outrage. The overwhelming volume is the point—too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus. It can’t fight back. The distractions are just too damn distracting. Who has time to point out that Trump also promised to end the war in Ukraine and bring down inflation on his first day back in the Oval Office? And yet drones are still firing on Kyiv and eggs are still crazy expensive. In the days leading up to the Inauguration, Trump’s allies promised “shock and awe”—fast, decisive, transformational action to seize control of the government and rewrite its rules before stunned opponents, “the enemies within,” as Trump calls them, have a chance to react. But, speaking as one who was in Iraq in those early days after the 2003 U.S. invasion, I’d caution against planning an assault on Washington that is based too closely on Donald Rumsfeld’s playbook. The insurgents may have hardly begun to regroup. But regroup they will. On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s birthright-citizenship decree, calling it a “blatantly unconstitutional order,” and, later in the afternoon, the Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski announced their opposition to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s controversial nominee for Secretary of Defense.
If it’s too early, then, to draw conclusions about the success of Trump’s multi-front attack, his frenetic return to the White House has already offered endlessly revealing material about the man himself at the start of his second Presidency. One clear observation from his first few days back in office is that Trump remains a pugilist who sees politics as a series of battles, whether consequential or very, very stupid; he has already shown that, in Trump 2.0, as in his first term, he will seek out fights wherever he can, picking new ones as necessary to put himself at the center of the action. It’s also true that, like all bullies, Trump gravitates toward weaker targets—Panama and Canada rather than Russia and China. He punches down.
Another conclusion so far is that Trump sees his second term as a do-over, a rare second chance to make a first impression. On his first Inauguration Day, in 2017, Trump signed just one executive order, compared with twenty-six this past Monday, which was still far fewer than the hundred he told senators were in the works during a pre-inaugural briefing. Trump always preferred the dramatic flourish and kingly implications of the executive order to the messier business of working with Congress to pass bills—he issued two hundred and twenty in his first term—but it now seems that he plans to embrace them with even more monarchical vigor, announcing his plans for an imperial Presidency far beyond any we’ve seen before. It should be noted here that, while a flood of words has poured forth from Trump this week, his Inaugural Address never even mentioned his campaign promise to get Congress to pass sweeping tax cuts, or any other legislative agenda of consequence. And by flood, I mean an absolute torrent: in his first day alone, Trump gave that official address (which was longer than any of its modern predecessors); a second, ad-hoc speech to an overflow room at the Capitol; a third, extemporaneous set of remarks at the Capital One Arena; an extended press conference in the Oval Office while signing the aforementioned executive orders; and two long toasts at inaugural balls. He may have spoken in public more in his first day in office than Joe Biden did in his entire last month.
If you really want to know someone, look not just at his public appearances but at what he worries about late at night and early in the morning—an impossibility with previous Presidents, but an inescapable reality with this social-media-obsessed one. On his first night back in the White House, at 12:28 A.M., Trump posted on Truth Social about his plans for “identifying and removing” more than a thousand government employees “who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.” He then specified a random group of four people he’d already ousted from various honorific government commissions and councils—the activist chef José Andrés, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, his former chief envoy for Iran Brian Hook, and the former Democratic mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms. The message here was clear: Trump not only goes in for petty revenge, it’s what he dreams about when he’s all alone. On his second evening at the White House, he posted at 12:39 A.M. about the Episcopalian bishop who had confronted him at an interfaith prayer service that morning at the National Cathedral, urging him to show compassion and empathy toward those who were “scared” of his policies. In his late-night response, Trump called her “ungracious,” “nasty,” “not compelling or smart,” and “not very good at her job!”
During the workday, meanwhile, his Administration issued orders to remove Milley’s portrait from the Pentagon, where it had been hung days earlier; to revoke the security clearances of a couple dozen former national-security officials who had drawn his ire; and to cancel the government protective details for his first-term national-security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo despite Iranian threats against them—both Bolton and Pompeo having broken with Trump, Bolton publicly and Pompeo privately, over his false claims about the 2020 election. This is a reminder, as clear as any could be, that for all Trump’s displays of macho dominance this week, he remains a man beset by his own insecurities and consumed by his grievances—the difference this time being, perhaps, his far greater willingness to use the powers of his office for the vengeance he now sees as his due.
For Trumpologists, one of the occupational hazards has been relying too much on the guidance of this or that anonymous source familiar with the President—always a risk in Washington, but all the more so with a man for whom a decision is never final until he’s actually announced it. On his first day back in office, Trump essentially made liars of his incoming Vice-President, Attorney General-designate, and the Speaker of the House when he announced the January 6th pardons, which turned out to cover even the most violent offenders—extremist militia leaders, thugs who beat police officers and attacked them with flagpoles. So much for J. D. Vance’s statement, days earlier, that “obviously” Trump would not include them. The President has a long history of embarrassing those who predict he won’t do something so extreme; a safer bet, looking ahead to the next four years, would be to expect that, whatever the most contentious, divisive option, he will choose it.
Another challenge in covering Trump in the White House is understanding, at any given moment, who is up and who is down in his orbit—a perennial problem made more difficult by this President’s penchant for encouraging advisers of sharply divergent views to battle it out in front of him. Infighting was endemic in Trump’s first term—one reason he had four chiefs of staff, four national-security advisers, and a revolving-door Cabinet. And the pattern looks to be holding in Trump 2.0: already this week, the billionaire former Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy quit, or was pushed out, of the new budget-cutting advisory agency Trump has created with much fanfare, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Its leader, Elon Musk, meanwhile, dumped on an announcement that Trump had made at the White House on the second day of his tenure, promoting a supposed five-hundred-billion-dollar investment in A.I. infrastructure by some of Musk’s Silicon Valley rivals. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk posted on his social-media site, X, soon after. A furious, albeit unnamed, Trump ally responded to Politico: “It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the President.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that DOGE’s newly installed top lawyer, Bill McGinley, is quitting just days into the job; McGinley had originally been tapped to be Trump’s chief White House lawyer before being bumped down to the post on Musk’s staff. Ah, the intrigue.
The richest man in the world still appears to have nearly unlimited access to Trump and a coveted office in the White House complex; at the Inauguration, Musk and fellow-billionaires commanded seats in front of Trump’s Cabinet appointees. How long can it last? Steve Bannon, the chief ideologue of Trump’s first term and self-styled keeper of the MAGA flame, has already publicly gone to war with Musk over his support for special immigration visas for talented foreigners and called Musk a “truly evil person.” Bannon, inaccurately as it turned out, promised he’d get Musk “kicked out” of Trump’s good graces by Inauguration Day. He was wrong on the timing, but his own experience is instructive—in February of 2017, he was on the cover of Time as “the second most powerful man in the world.” By the end of that August, he was out of Trump’s White House.
The point is this: Trump is back, and so, after only just a few days, are all of his pathologies. Second verse same as the first? As the man himself loves to say, We’ll see. ♦
