During his inaugural address on Monday, President Trump made sure to tell the country that he has learned “a lot” over the past eight years.
The four and a half days that followed revealed what he meant.
Gone are the outsiders in Washington who took over the reins of government in 2017 She struggled to get her wheels turning. Instead, we witnessed a firestorm of actions that reflects how Trump’s advisers have become masters of the government bureaucracy they promised to overthrow.
My colleague Charlie Savage has covered law, government, and the way presidents use their power for more than two decades. He has reported extensively on the first Trump administration as well Trump plans for his second termI asked him to explain how different this time is, and what it might mean for the next presidency.
Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
JB: You covered the first Trump administration, and now you’ve covered the first week of the second. What was different in the inauguration days of the second Trump, compared to the first Trump?
CS: The opening of the first Trump administration was chaotic and dysfunctional. Trump did not enjoy much support from the Republican establishment during the 2016 campaign. He and many of the officials he gathered around him when he took office simply didn’t know what they were doing to begin with — and it shows. Trump issued Only four executive orders In his first five days in office in 2017. Even when the pace later increased, Many of his early directives were press releases that did not provide much substance; Or it was so poorly developed that it did not make sense for the courts to block it.
By contrast, the second Trump administration began with a storm of successive executive orders. A few of them are nothing obscure – like burgers He called on the government to think about ways to reduce prices – But most of them are very subjective. Many of his policy changes will strike many people as extreme. Some, as I wrote this week, Exceeding the limits of legitimate executive authority He may not survive court challenges. One is about ending birthright citizenship It has already been blocked for now. But there is no doubt that Trump is moving more quickly to achieve his goals.
This is partly because he and his advisors learned a lot about how government works during his first term. This is partly because, over the past eight years, Trumpism has become the conservative establishment, and Washington policy think tanks are now allied with and helping him — such as Project 2025.
To be sure, things are still bumpy, but Trump’s advisers have been carefully planning this takeover.
What, specifically, does Trump — or the people around him — seem to have learned since 2017? Have they figured out how to become bureaucrats?
Here’s one example of how they can work more intelligently. One executive order that received less attention this week was Fr Foreign visitors to the United States. It contains a section requiring the government to take two months to study screening and vetting procedures in countries around the world, and then submit a report identifying what is so deficient as to supposedly justify banning entry into the United States of any citizen of those countries. countries.
The administration appears to be planting a seed to revive Trump’s controversial travel ban for people from several Muslim-majority countries. The last time, he suddenly imposed this policy days after taking office without careful planning. The courts immediately stopped him. Showing consideration of this issue first may make it easier to defend the new travel ban in court.
Who was most responsible for putting these changes into effect?
One person seems to have learned a lot Stephen Miller, a senior Trump domestic policy adviser who has long been the architect of his policies of immigration suppression. A Senate aide before 2017, he learned over the course of Trump’s first term how to avoid pitfalls and get things done within the executive branch bureaucracy. He spent the four years out of office cultivating donor and relationships, both on Capitol Hill and with lawyers and others who now work in the administration. He also helped get certain allies into key positions around the new administration, putting them in a position to keep the bureaucracy running the way he wanted them to.
Trump clearly wanted to put a stamp on the first week of his presidency. But, in some way, is it actually Miller’s fingerprint that we are witnessing, given the amount of preparation and strategy he put into this opening attack?
No president personally performs the primary task of drafting the executive orders and proclamations he signs. However, I have no doubt that Miller played a major role in developing the package of immigration measures we saw this week. He had See many of these same steps In the fall of 2023, when my colleagues Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and I were working on… A series about the political risks of Trump’s potential return to power.
A lot of other people were heavily involved as well. For example, Russell Footewho was head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget in his first term and is set to repeat that role, was very interested in other policy topics that we saw reflected in these early orders, such as Efforts to impose tighter political control over the federal bureaucracy. In Project 2025, Vaught was responsible for drafting executive orders that Trump could consider issuing early if he returns to power. Of course during the Trump campaign He tried to distance himself from the 2025 project; We don’t know yet whether or not these early orders are due to this effort.
In sum, what does Trump’s first week in office tell us about how he now views power and his grip on the reins of government? What can it tell us about how he will handle the next four years?
Trump has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, and that party controls Congress, so he does not fear accountability. He cannot run for president again, so he does not fear voters will reject him. He has appointed a large number of federal judges during his first term, meaning that he now faces a federal judiciary that is much more tilted in his favor than it was when he first took office. He managed to evade federal indictments and survive an assassination attempt. The decision last summer by the six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices to declare a constitutional principle of broad immunity for presidents can only give him more confidence.
And against the backdrop of all of that, I think the scope and aggressiveness of his early executive orders and his decision to even grant clemency Those January 6 rioters who violently assaulted police officers These are clear signs that he feels little restrictions.
What did Elon Musk’s greeting from Germany look like?
You have now witnessed the gesture made by the richest man in the world during President Trump’s inauguration celebrations. You may have also seen prominent advocates for it. But my colleague Katrin Benhold, former Berlin office director, He writes that there was not much debate in Germany about the meaning of Musk’s outstretched arm.
In Germany, gestures like those made by Musk are illegal, along with other symbols and emblems from the Nazi era. So for the German establishment, the situation was very clear.
“Hitler salute is Hitler salute is Hitler salute” The prominent weekly Die Zeit he wrote in an editorial.
“There is no need to make this unnecessarily complicated,” the editorial said. “Anyone on a political stage who makes a political speech to a partly right-wing extremist audience” – Present at the inauguration were several far-right politicians from Germany, Italy, France and Britain – “Anyone who loudly raises his right arm” in a swinging and angled manner several times giving the Hitler salute.
Return to disaster policy
President Trump also traveled To North Carolina and California on Fridayto view damage from Hurricane Helen, in Asheville, North Carolina, and from the ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles, seemed to show a tendency I wrote about it just a few weeks ago: Mixing politics in a politically neutral disaster zone.
As a candidate, Trump made a series of false claims about the response to the Helen disaster as he sought to portray the Biden administration’s efforts as ill-fated. He said Friday in Asheville that former President Biden did a “bad job.” He was considering shutting down FEMA completely. He had previously threatened to withhold disaster aid from California He said today that he wants insurance New voter ID laws and new water management policies while he was there.
California officials are already concerned about how he might treat their state.
Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said: “He has infected many members of the Republican Party in Washington so that they see us not as the United States of America, but as red states and blue states.” I told my colleague Annie Carney. “We’ll have to deal with that.”
