Exhausted yet? It’s been three full days since Donald Trump He returned to the presidencySo far, he has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Climate Treaty and the World Health Organization; He announced the unilateral abolition of the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship; Repeal the order to reduce prescription drug prices for seniors; He threatened a trade war with Canada and Mexico starting on February 1, and an actual war with Panama if it did not hand over the Panama Canal; It declared a state of emergency on the southern border and moved to issue orders to thousands of American military personnel there. Eliminated federal government programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and required employees to report anyone within the bureaucracy who might be tempted to continue doing that work anyway; The vast majority of them were pardoned Pro-Trump insurgents Who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 at his request. This was between dancing with a sword on stage in front of the villagers at the inauguration ceremony; Taking advantage of the presidency by marketing the dollarTrump Cryptocurrency, which is currently worth billions of dollars; And getting into a pissing match with an Episcopal bishop who dared to question him face to face.
Eight years after Trump’s first inauguration, we know the drill. He loves to drown us in anger. The sheer scale is the point – too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overburdened that it is collapsing. He can’t concentrate. Can’t resist. Distractions are just too damn distracting. And who has time to point out that Trump also promised to end the war in Ukraine and lower inflation on his first day in the Oval Office? However, drones are still shooting at Kiev, and eggs are still insanely expensive. In the days leading up to the inauguration, Trump’s allies promised “shock and awe” — a quick, decisive, transformative measure to seize control of the government and rewrite its rules before opponents, the “enemies within,” were blindsided. As Trump calls themYou have a chance to respond. But, speaking as someone who was in Iraq in those early days after the 2003 US invasion, I would caution against planning an attack on Washington based too closely on Donald Rumsfeld’s playbook. The rebels may have barely begun to regroup. But they will regroup. On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship decree, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional,” and later in the afternoon, Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski announced their opposition to the decision. Pete HegsethTrump’s controversial nominee for Secretary of Defense.
If it is too early to draw conclusions about the success of Trump’s multi-front offensive, his frenetic return to the White House has already provided endless revelatory 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 boxer who sees politics as a series of battles, both consequential and very stupid; I have already shown that, in Trump 2.0As in his first term, he will seek to fight battles where he can, picking new battles as necessary to put himself at the center of the action. It is also true that Trump, like all bullies, gravitates toward weaker targets — Panama and Canada rather than Russia and China. He punches it down.
The other conclusion so far is that Trump sees his second term as a rare second chance to make a first impression. on The day of his first inaugurationIn 2017, Trump Only one occurred Executive order, compared to twenty-six executive orders last Monday, which is still far fewer than the 100 he told senators was in the works during the pre-inauguration briefing. Trump has always preferred the dramatic flourishes and royal implications of an executive order to the messier business of working with Congress to pass bills — he passed two hundred and twenty in his first term — but now it appears he plans to embrace them in a more royal way. He announced his plans to preside over an empire far beyond anything we’ve seen before. It’s worth noting here that despite a torrent of words from Trump this week, his inaugural address never mentioned his campaign promise to persuade Congress to pass sweeping tax cuts, or any other legislative agenda of consequence. And by flood, I mean an absolute torrent: On his first day alone, Trump gave that formal speech (which was longer than any of his previous speeches in the modern era); A second ad hoc speech to a packed hall in the Capitol; A third set of impromptu remarks at Capital One Arena; An extended press conference in the Oval Office during the signing of the above executive orders; And two long toasts at the opening balls. He may have spoken more publicly on his first day in office than he did Joe Biden He did it all last month.
If you really want to know someone, look not just at their public appearances but at what they worry about late at night and early in the morning—an impossibility with ex-presidents, but an inescapable reality with this social media-obsessed reality. On his first night in the White House at 12:28 I amTrump posted on Truth Social about his plans to “identify and remove” more than a thousand government employees “who do not align with our vision to Make America Great Again.” He then selected a random group of four people he had already expelled from various honorary government committees and boards — activist chef Jose Andres, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, his former top envoy to Iran Brian Hook, and former Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The message here was clear: Trump isn’t just seeking petty revenge, it’s what he dreams of when he’s alone. On his second evening in the White House, he posted at 12:39 I am About the Episcopal bishop who confronted him at an interfaith prayer mass that morning at the National Cathedral, urging him to show compassion and compassion toward those who were “afraid” of his policies. In his late-night response, Trump called her “undignified,” “bad,” “not convincing or intelligent,” and “not very good at her job!”
Meanwhile, during Action Day, his administration issued orders to remove Milley’s photo from the Pentagon, where it had been hung days before; revoking the security clearances granted to dozens of former national security officials who angered him; And canceling government protection details for his National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo despite Iranian threats against them — after both Bolton and Pompeo broke with Trump, Bolton publicly and Pompeo privately, over his false claims about the 2020 election. This is a reminder, as clear as possible, that he is For all of Trump’s displays of masculine dominance this week, he is still a man plagued by insecurities and consumed by his grievances — perhaps the difference this time is his much greater willingness. To use the powers of his position to exact revenge that he now sees as his due.
For Trump specialists, one occupational hazard has been to rely too much on the guidance of this or that anonymous source familiar with the president — always a risk in Washington, but even more dangerous for a man for whom a decision is never final until it is final. Really announced it. On his first day back in office, Trump essentially lied to his incoming vice president, his appointed attorney general, and the Speaker of the House when he announced the pardon on January 6, which turned out to include even the most violent criminals — extremists. Militia leaders and thugs who beat police officers and attacked them with flagpoles. J.D. Vance’s statement, the other day, was so significant that Trump “obviously” would not include them on the list. The president has a long history of embarrassing those who expect he wouldn’t do something so extreme. The safest bet, looking ahead to the next four years, is to expect that he will choose it, whatever the most controversial and divisive option.
Another challenge in covering Trump in the White House is understanding, at any given moment, who is at the top and who is in his orbit — a perennial problem made all the more difficult by this president’s tendency to encourage advisers with sharply divergent views into the fray on this issue. In front of him. Infighting has been endemic in Trump’s first term, one reason he has four chiefs of staff, four national security advisers, and a revolving Cabinet. And that pattern seems to persist in Trump 2.0: already this week, the billionaire former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy He resigned, or was fired, from the new budget-cutting advisory agency Trump created with great fanfare, called the Department of Government Efficiency. its leader, Elon MuskAt the same time, he dropped an ad Trump made at the White House on his second day in office, touting a supposed $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure by some of Musk’s Silicon Valley rivals. “They literally have no money,” Musk posted on his social media site, X, shortly after. An angry, but unnamed, Trump ally responded to Politico, saying: “He clearly abused his proximity to the president.” the Wall Street JournalMeanwhile, he reported DougNewly appointed lead attorney, Bill McGinley, will leave after just a few days on the job; McGinley was originally hired to be Trump’s top White House lawyer before being named one of Musk’s staff. Ah, the plot.
The world’s richest man still appears to have almost unlimited access to Trump and a coveted office in the White House complex; At the inauguration, Musk and his fellow billionaires took seats in front of Trump’s Cabinet appointees. How long can it last? Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief ideologue for Trump’s first term and a self-described policy watchdog Maga Flamm has already publicly gone to war with Musk over his support for special immigrant visas for talented foreigners, calling Musk a “really evil person.” Bannon promised, inaccurately as it turned out, that he would “knock” Musk out of Trump’s good graces by Inauguration Day. He was wrong about the timing, but his own experience is instructive – in February of 2017, he appeared on the cover of a magazine time As “the second most powerful man in the world.” By the end of August of that year, he was out of the Trump White House.
The point here is that Trump was back, and so, just a few days later, all his ailments were back. The second verse is the same as the first? As the man himself He likes to sayWe’ll see. ♦
