By Joshua Arnold

The first year of the second Trump administration has brought a whirlwind of activity to Washington, reshaping national policy, national politics, and even the national map. Many Americans have been confused by this change, wondering what makes the behavior of this Trump administration so much different than the last. In hopes of making sense of this topsy-turvy year, this article aims to articulate the most important reasons behind this change in behavior. Some of them have to do with Trump himself and some with his opponents.

1. Trump is a veteran now.

First and foremost, the second Trump administration is different because it is his second administration. When Donald Trump assumed the office of president on January 20, 2017, he had never held public office before. He faced an enormous learning curve about nearly every aspect of government — how to select department heads, how to manage agency activities, how to negotiate with Congress, how to wield executive power.

The process of learning implies mistakes on the way, and Trump faced a hostile media and a political opposition eager to exploit his every mistake. Far into his first year, Trump was still firing cabinet officials. 

But this January, a far different man took the oath of office. After four years of experience with trial and error, court victories and defeats, Trump reassumed the office of president with a solid grasp of what he wanted to do, how he wanted to do it, and who he wanted to aid him in the process. Many of his aides are also veterans of his first administration, who are themselves more experienced than they were eight years ago.

This base of experience enabled the second Trump administration to hit the ground running with an energy far greater than that of his first administration. It would seem that this breathtaking energy is a feature of the president’s personal style, but that its application to politics was muted in his first administration by the general chaos that prevailed.

Likely every second-term president enjoys a boost in competence that comes with veteran status. However, the effect of this boost was more pronounced for President Trump because his terms were non-consecutive, a first since Grover Cleveland. In other words, most second-term presidents already have a smoothly running executive apparatus, so they are incentivized to make minimal changes by continuing in office. Trump, by contrast, demonstrated what power a modern president has to reshape Washington when he enters as a non-incumbent veteran.

2. Trump has reshaped the Republican Party.

Second, President Trump has now dominated Republican politics for a decade, reshaping it in his own image through both his strong personality and the premium he places on loyalty. Figures who object to Trump or his policies have exited the political scene or been pushed to the sidelines. Current officials who embrace Trump and his agenda win his support, providing a strong incentive for them not to challenge him. And new figures have debuted on the political scene, using Trump’s brash personality as a roadmap for success.

On a deeper level, Trump has also reshaped the Republican coalition, losing some upper-class suburbanites who object to Trump’s personal style, while gaining ground among blue-collar voters, even among groups like union workers and ethnic minorities who have long voted for Democrats.

These changes have had the effect of loosening the hold of the Republican “establishment,” giving Trump a freer hand to redirect party policy — and even personnel — in his own preferred direction. Thus, President Trump brought in an eccentric billionaire to audit the government’s books, embraced an innovative legal theory on tariffs, and pursued hardball tactics on immigration, wokeness, and international drug trafficking.

3. Trump has reshaped the Supreme Court.

Third, Trump’s first term laid the groundwork for many aspects of his second administration by reshaping the Supreme Court. In his first four years, Trump nominated Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett; the three conservatives replaced a conservative (Antonin Scalia), a progressive (Ruth Bader Ginsburg), and a liberal (Anthony Kennedy), thus swinging the court in a more conservative direction.

The court’s new conservative majority has redirected decades of jurisprudence, overturning controversial precedents like Roe v. Wade and the Lemon test. On some issues (unborn life, for instance), these new precedents have served the second Trump administration as an excuse to place the issue on the back burner. On other issues (such as defending biological sex, redistricting, and the scope of executive actions), the new court landscape has emboldened the Trump administration to press for further precedent-setting change.

4. The anti-Trump lawfare tactics imploded.

A fourth important reason why the second Trump administration has proceeded differently from the first is the failure of Democrats’ aggressive campaign of lawfare. For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, Democrats managed to maintain a stench of scandal over the administration, thanks to the media’s relentless promotion of the Russia collusion hoax. A wide-ranging investigation weeded out some of Trump’s slimier allies, while his more upstanding deputies were intimidated into not rocking the boat. If nothing else, it was hard for the administration to get its own messaging across when the media airwaves were stifled with discussions of, as the president likes to put it, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” But a scandal based on nothing could not be kept alive endlessly, and the power of the Russian collusion hoax eventually decayed.

Democrats were not deterred. Flushed with what they saw as the success of their mud-slinging, they tried the same tactic on any issue that came to hand, even past the end of Trump’s term. First, they impeached Trump for a single phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump tried to get to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in that corrupt country. Then came the J6 committee farce (and a second impeachment), the Mar-a-Lago raid, and no less than four separate criminal prosecutions that faced Trump at the time of the 2024 election.

By this time, voters were sick of the obviously politicized attacks, and they handed Trump an electoral victory by margins that he interpreted as a mandate to take the gloves off. And taken the gloves off he has.

5. The Biden administration was extreme and ineffective.

Finally, the second Trump administration has behaved differently from the first because Americans suffered under President Biden in the intervening four years. President Biden oversaw historically high inflation, an unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants, and the international erosion of American power, which led to the start of two wars in Ukraine and Israel.

At the same time, the Biden administration also behaved in extreme ways, promoting the most radical left-wing proposals in Congress, implementing radical gender ideology to the hilt through executive action, and persecuting Americans who disagreed.

In many ways, the Biden administration simply continued the policies that the Obama administration began to adopt in 2016 at the very end of his term. But Biden took them much further, and his four years in office gave more time for Americans to witness the effects.

This, coupled with Trump’s strong electoral victory, gave the second Trump administration solid ground for simply reversing the radical and ineffective policies of its predecessor, and doing so as quickly as possible. At least in the early weeks, the Biden administration’s embrace of a policy gave the Trump administration rhetorical cover to reject it entirely, and the Trump administration did so at an unprecedented rate.

These five factors help explain the unrelenting, aggressive pace of the second Trump administration’s first year. The question is, what comes next? Will the Trump administration slow down its sprint to a sustainable jog? Or will it keep up the frenetic pace, hoping to cement as many changes as possible before Republicans lose power? Will the next Democratic administration use Trump’s aggressive pace as cover to take the same aggressive approach, only in the opposite direction? These questions can only be answered by events that unfold in the years ahead.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.