With Donald Trump has a much better chance of fulfilling his tough promises and threats in the second season than before.
In the past, the impulsive Trump was shackled by many parties. It’s different now.
1. The Republican Party is controlled by Trump
Trump’s grip on the party is now iron. Republicans do not dare to stand up against the president.
In 2015, when Trump sought the presidential nomination for the first time, he was a complete outsider. When he unexpectedly won the presidential election the following year, he had little hold on the Republican Party.
He had great difficulty recruiting people for his administration, as some heavyweight Republicans were downright afraid of being stigmatized in the Trump administration.
Now the situation is completely different.
Numerous Republicans who opposed Trump have either given up politics or lost the election.
The Republican Party has changed completely in less than ten years. It no longer represents traditional conservatism, but Trumpian populism.
Most Republicans know that angering Trump would spell the end of their own political careers.
2. Plans and personnel are ready
Trump’s goal is to firmly centralize the federal government under the control of the president. Plans have been made for years.
In the first term, Trump did not have very precise plans about what he would do with his power and who he would appoint to his administration.
Now the program has been prepared for years.
The main drafter of the plans is the Heritage Foundation, which has become a strong bastion of Trumpian ideas. It is an old and very influential Republican-run think tank, but now it has been purged of representatives of traditional Reaganite Republicanism.
Executive Director of the Heritage Foundation by Kevin D. Roberts said a year ago in the New York Times that he considers the main task of the think tank to be “the institutionalization of Trumpism”.
The think tank already published Project 2025 a couple of years ago –the reportwhich is practically a very detailed plan for Trump’s rise to power. At the heart of it is precisely increasing the power of the president.
When there was an uproar over the report last summer, Trump announced that the project was not his and did not represent him.
In practice, however, it appears that the Trump administration intends to implement many of its core points.
Project 2025 offers a concrete plan on how to bring the entire federal machinery under the control of the president as directly as possible.
The report includes, among other things, a chapter on the president’s power over agencies. Section author Russ Vought is himself emerging as an important budget and administration director in the Trump apparatus.
The essence of the plan is to eliminate the independence of officials and agencies as far as possible.
And that’s exactly what Trump has been promising for years with colorful turns of phrase.
In Trump’s first term, American democratic institutions faltered but endured. The second season may be different.
3. Brake men are not tolerated
Unconditional loyalty to Trump is more important than any other selection criteria.
Many key officials in Trump’s first term have said in retrospect that they felt it was their duty to prevent the president from carrying out his most radical whims.
For example, Trump’s justice ministers intervened in decisions they considered illegal, and security advisers tried to curb Trump’s NATO positions.
Now such people are not allowed into the administration, various sources and members of Trump’s team have been saying for a long time.
Already in 2023, one of Trump’s creditors Stephen Miller was tasked with to look for absolutely loyal lawyers for the future administration. Miller, who is known as a supporter of an extremely tough immigration policy, is about to become the deputy chief of staff of the White House.
The head of Trump’s election campaign is becoming the actual chief of staff of the White House and the head of the entire Trump administration Susie Wiles.
The goal is to have 2,000 key administration officials appointed by Trump’s inauguration day, Wiles told the New York Times in the interview.
In Trump’s first term in 2017, the corresponding number was 25 people.
Changing key officials with a new president is a long tradition in the United States. But Trump is going to take this to the extreme. The goal is to replace at least 11,000 civil servants.
Project 2025 has tried to collect a data bank of up to tens of thousands of suitable persons. Used in recruitment questionnaire shows that the goal is to elect sworn Trumpians to office and not traditional Reaganite conservatives.
Trump himself has already said a couple of years ago that he plans to implement a reform that will make it possible for every official to be fired by the US president.
Trump has branded many key ministers of his former administration as traitors.
Among other things, the former minister of justice is the target of particular hatred William Barr and former foreign minister Mike Pompeo.
Trump’s new administration preparation team is highly suspicious of any official with any personal relationship with these former ministers, New York Times told last week.
According to the newspaper, the lawyer William Levi even a US Supreme Court judge had to apply for support last week From Samuel Alito to prove himself trustworthy. Levi’s sin was working in Trump’s own, former attorney general’s office.
This week, Trump’s team has begun to investigate the political orientation of longtime officials of the US National Security Council.
4. Mandate of the Supreme Court
Trump plans to order judicial officials to go after his opponents.
During Trump’s first term, courts often placed limits on things like his immigration orders.
That may happen this time as well, but now Trump has a real wild card in his hand.
Republican-appointed justices hold a 6-3 majority on the US Supreme Court.
And last summer, the Supreme Court ruled with conservative votes that the president enjoys full immunity from prosecution for the decisions he makes while in office.
That decision took away the ground from the lawsuits filed against Trump. It also makes it possible that at least Trump will hardly be held criminally liable, no matter what he did in office.
In the United States, the political independence of the Department of Justice and its subordinate federal police, the FBI, has been considered very important.
Trump believes that because he was indicted after his term in office, he has the right to divert judicial authorities to go after his own political opponents.
Trump has even spoken openly about revenge.
Trump has cultivated conspiracy theories when he became the director of the FBI Kash Patel. Patel said in December 2023 Steve Bannon’s in the interview like this:
– We will look for the conspirators, not only from the administration, but also from the media.
In 2023, Patel published the book Government Gangsters, which contains a long list of these “enemies“.
Likely to become Minister of Justice Pam Bondi denied this week at a Senate hearing that such lists would begin to be applied. But previously he has said that “the prosecutors will be prosecuted”.
Courts can still try to block Trump’s decisions that he considers illegal, but that requires a tough character from an individual judge in the current situation.
5. Trump is no longer running for election
Trump can also make unpopular decisions without fear of consequences.
In the first term, Trump evaluates almost every decision he makes based on how they affect his reelection.
Trump cannot run for a third term, as the Constitution clearly forbids it.
Trump is also now more experienced in terms of foreign policy. In 2019, a TV camera caught a group of world leaders laughing at Trump at the NATO summit.
Now in Europe, Trump is not laughed at even behind his back, but the atmosphere is dominated by fear about, for example, tariffs and the future of NATO.
Sources: WP, NYTimes, Reuters, AP, ABCNews, Axios, Guardian, Newsweek.