US President Donald Trump’s return to office has been marked by a sense of confidence and organisation, with a slew of executive orders and actions that signal his team has returned considerably more prepared than when they first arrived in January 2017.
Confident, Organised, Still Freewheeling: Trump 2.0 Shows Lessons Have Been Learned
US President Donald Trump’s return to office has been marked by a sense of confidence and organisation that was lacking in his first term. In the six days since he returned to the presidency, Trump has signed a raft of executive orders, pardoned over 1,500 of his supporters who were charged over the violence at the 2021 Capitol riot, and taken steps to reshape the country.
A New Era for Trump
When Trump first met Barack Obama after winning the 2016 election, he appeared to be awed by the office he was inheriting. However, this time around, Trump is no longer a Washington outsider and has shown in the early days of his White House return just how much he plans to wield executive power to reshape the country.
Advisers who cautioned the president to move slowly and respect political norms during his first term are long gone. The second Trump administration is stacked with true believers who never turned on him, with the lower ranks being filled by younger aides who do not know a Republican Party without Trump as its leader. On top of that, his party holds – at least for the next two years – a firm grip on Congress.
A Slew of Executive Orders
During his first day back in office, Trump made his desire to overhaul the status quo in Washington and erase the work of his predecessor abundantly clear by signing 26 executive orders. This number far exceeded the quantity of any past president, including Joe Biden‘s nine in 2021.
“It’s supposed to be a grace day in which you heal the country from a partisan divide or a bitter election,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. Instead, Trump’s first day represented the “largest punch to the face of his opponents he could deliver”.
Lessons Learned
Former administration officials say Trump’s slew of first-week executive orders and actions signal his team has returned considerably more prepared than when they first arrived in January 2017.
“It’s been much more disciplined, on-point and issue-focused,” said Lawrence Muir, a former official in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “They did not have a great idea about what they were supposed to be producing, or how to produce it,” he added. “[Trump’s] doing much better this time in terms of what he’s getting out, getting it out efficiently, and knowing how it has to be enforced down through the agencies.”
Trump allies say they believe the new administration appears to have learned lessons from that early public defeat in 2017, as well as other legal battles the administration faced.
“They had four years in exile to prepare for a potential return,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA. “And now they have a plan that they can implement.”
A New Approach
The Trump team has “hit the ground running”, particularly on the immigration agenda, said Mr Muir. On Inauguration Day alone that entailed declaring a national emergency at the southern border, deploying troops and quickly moving to arrest hundreds of undocumented migrants with criminal histories.
“That’s partly because [new border czar] Tom Homan was there [in the first term], knows what went wrong and what went right, and now how to actually get things done,” he said.
In Trump’s first presidential term, many of his attempted reforms did not survive court challenges, often the victim of poor planning and execution from a team of political novices. This time around, his team are more optimistic they are laying the groundwork for more durable change and that they have a friendlier judiciary, stocked with Trump-appointed judges.
A New Era for US Politics
But even if some of Trump’s executive orders are ultimately struck down, the president has already sent a signal, both to his allies and his adversaries: that the motto “move fast and break things”, ubiquitous inside tech companies, now applies to the US government.
