Trump's second term will not look like his first

CNN
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Donald Trump's election victory will return him to the White House, but both his allies and his critics have made it clear that his second appearance will have nothing to do with the first.

With the Republican Party now entirely his and its anti-Trump personalities finally banished, Trump will enter the Oval Office with both the experience of having done the job before and a wealth of resentment about having done so In his opinion, the system has failed him.

Unlike his first Electoral College victory in 2016, Trump is on track to win the popular vote this year – giving him the opportunity to claim a mandate of nationwide support that eluded him last time, much to his frustration was.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump told an enthusiastic crowd in West Palm Beach, Florida, early Wednesday morning. He summed up his approach to a second term this way: “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”

That makes the next four years uncertain and not easily predicted by the first Trump presidency. His rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, tried to warn voters about the risks. But for his supporters, promises to fix what he called a broken country — even if that meant abandoning long-held principles — were the point.

Figures who once hoped to act as stabilizing forces — including a succession of chiefs of staff, defense secretaries, a national security adviser, a national intelligence adviser and an attorney general — have failed Trump, leaving accusations about his character and abilities.

They were replaced by a cohort of advisers and officials who had no interest in keeping Trump under control. Rather than acting as a bulwark against him, those working for Trump this time share his views and are eager to keep the extreme promises he made as a candidate, without concern for norms, traditions or laws that previous aides upheld tried.

Trump's axis of influence has shifted significantly since he left office in January 2021. While his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner were once prominent campaign officials and senior White House staffers, they have since retreated from the daily hustle and bustle of politics. Ivanka Trump has made clear she has no plans to return to the West Wing, and although Kushner has been involved in the transition effort, sources familiar with his thinking said he is unlikely to leave his private equity firm.

Instead, Trump has relied on the likes of Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk and Susie Wiles during his third run for the White House.

The former president also appears eager to reward those who have supported him – like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – even if their viewpoints are far outside the mainstream. Despite his belief in vaccine conspiracy theories and his anti-Semitic comments, RFK Jr. recently said Trump told him he would “fight like hell” for him if Kennedy wanted to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Given his experience dealing with law firms, Trump will try to staff the government this time with lawyers who will work to find legal justification for even his most radical ideas, rather than raising concerns.

Already, Trump has bypassed the traditional transition process and refused to sign ethics agreements that would allow his campaign to work with the Biden administration on the handover, a process that typically begins six months before the election. The reason for the delay is Trump's deep distrust of federal authorities, especially those not run by his own supporters. This means his team was not required to disclose donors to his transition process, but was also excluded from national security meetings and from receiving millions of dollars in funding to support the transition.

Because the dispute over the wording of the agreements has dragged on and important deadlines have not been met, Trump's advisors are unable to obtain security clearances. (Some have begun conducting their own operations without the FBI.)

In Congress, where moderate Republicans once occasionally criticized Trump's most outlandish behavior, loyalty to Trump among Republicans is now almost unanimous. Efforts to limit presidential power over the past four years have largely failed, and anti-Trump Republicans have either retired or been voted out.

The federal courts have also been reshaped since Trump's term, including the Supreme Court, which now has a conservative supermajority that could potentially uphold measures that would have been overruled by the Supreme Court when Trump took office. He is also reclaiming his position at the top of the federal government and has significantly expanded powers after the Supreme Court ruled that presidents enjoy immunity from official acts. Trump's victory will likely allow him to get out of most, if not all, of the legal cases he faced.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump himself has changed, say people who know him. He has aged four years since leaving Washington in 2021, and while he has not provided detailed information about his health, he has appeared tired or unsteady at times.

Now a convicted felon, he still faces dozens of additional charges in separate cases whose future is now uncertain.

And he is engaging publicly and privately with questions of retaliation in ways that were not as visible, at least in the early days of his first term. He is angrier and barely tries to hide his anger.

The four years of Trump's first presidency were marked by constant personnel turnover, chaotic decisions made on a whim and constant frustration on the part of the president over the federal government's inability to bend to his will.

For example, he at times became angry at the Justice Department for what he saw as its failure to properly investigate or bring charges against his political enemies. And while he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election — and was later impeached for doing so — his efforts failed.

Politically, much of what Trump tried to do was also undone, either by aides who bypassed the president to blunt the impact of his orders or by incompetence from staffers, most of whom came from outside the government.

This time, many of the protections against the most extreme measures that Trump has proposed will be missing. And the people who work for him have become more adept at pulling the levers of government to wield power more effectively.

Two sources familiar with the plan said Trump would begin a series of executive orders, policy papers and regulatory changes as soon as he takes office.

In filling the new administration, Trump and his aides have made it clear that they value loyalty above all else, which angers senior figures in the last administration who turned against Trump. Trump has described his personnel decisions as perhaps the biggest mistakes of his first presidency.

That means personnel decisions this time will be deliberately targeted at people who won't work to undermine his agenda from within – a charge Trump has leveled at those he fired from the White House.

His former attorney general, Bill Barr, warned in an interview on CNN last summer that loyalty “is a two-way street for him” and that Trump would “just put this whole carnage behind him.” Still, many young professionals have expressed interest in working for Trump.

His transition co-chair, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, has recruited thousands of potential employees for the newly elected president. Trump famously reshuffled his transition team just days after winning the White House in 2016.

Trump has also made clear in recent weeks as he considers potential high-level positions that he doesn't mind bypassing Congress and the typical Cabinet confirmation process for appointments. Trump has repeatedly asked candidates whether they would be willing to serve as acting secretaries, believing it gives him more flexibility should he change his mind.

The search for these people began long before the election, when various Trump-aligned organizations began compiling lists of loyalists to represent Trump's transition team should he win. Trump had begun taking steps in the final year of his first term to root out government employees deemed insufficiently loyal, an initiative led by his former bodyguard John McEntee; Now these efforts will be in place from the start of the administration.

Trump himself has promised to take the lessons from his first time in the White House and apply them now, including to avoid mistakes that he said hindered his ability to govern the way he wanted.

“I didn’t know anyone (during my first semester). I wasn't a Washingtonian. I was rarely there,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News last week. “I know everyone (now). I know the good, the strong, the weak, the stupid. I know that – I know everyone. And we’re going to make this country great again, and we have to save our country.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.