He’s baaack ... Donald Trump returns, rested and ready to take no prisoners. As the president-elect prepares for his second inauguration on Monday, separated by four years from the end of his first term, Republicans are kicking up their heels in joy while Democrats gird their loins for the return of the greatest show on Earth. Only one thing is certain regarding the four years ahead: It will be another wild, energizing, rip-roaring ride akin to The Beast, Ohio’s legendary roller coaster.
The challenge for his supporters will be not to expect too much too soon. During his campaign, Trump made a bunch of promises he pledged to fulfill on “day one.” Most prominent among the promises he will likely fulfill on his first day as the 47th president is closing the southern border shortly after he is sworn in at the Capitol Rotunda and the inaugural parade squeezes into frigid Washington’s pro basketball and hockey arena. It is among the writer's cramp-inducing 100 executive orders he told Senate Republicans he is prepared to sign immediately. But another day-one promise near the head of the list, ending the war in Ukraine, is obviously not going to happen on Inauguration Day. Democrats, who famously take Trump literally rather than seriously, are already blasting him for “backing out” of that commitment – as if the American people actually expect a permanent cessation of hostilities in Ukraine before the clock strikes midnight.
The point is, when the first president ever to come from the private sector rather than the political class or the military seeks to radically reform the very way the federal government does business, he will meet with equally radical opposition from the insular and hidebound status quo. Those whose lives revolve around DC’s permanent bureaucracy – otherwise known as the administrative state or, most famously, the Swamp – surely have many tricks up their sleeves for throwing sand in the gears of the Trump machine. After all, the true definition of a bureaucrat is a person whose job is to stop you from doing whatever it is you intend to do, to throw up rules, regulations, and roadblocks to protect the precious bureaucratic, well-worn turf. Put another way, bureaucracy amounts to rule by people sitting at desks – the exact opposite of the Trump modus operandi.
Swamping the Swamp
A couple of the key strategies Trump is likely to employ to counter the inevitable bureaucratic resistance are re-classifying thousands of civil service employees as political appointees, per Schedule F, and moving entire agencies out of Washington and dispersing them across the land. The 47th president is in a far better position to produce such permanent, game-changing reforms than he was as the 45th president. When he first arrived in Washington with precious few allies, Trump had no idea of the ferocity of opposition he would face, even from his own party. His election was widely viewed as an unrepeatable fluke, and he was treated accordingly. Even after racking up millions more votes and almost pulling off his run for re-election in 2020, the ugliness that followed his loss made Washington elites feel all warm inside, certain that he was gone for good. But after he decisively reclaimed the presidency in 2024, even Trump’s most savage enemies were forced to reach the opposite conclusion. The fluke was not Trump’s election in 2016; it was Joe Biden’s in 2020.
The likelihood that Trump would soon return, this time hardened by four years of experience in the job, was enough to win the unequivocal support of left-leaning tech magnate Elon Musk. The certainty of his return with the wind at his back was enough to compel the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who were key to resisting the 45th president in 2017 and forcing him out in 2020, to reverse course and bend the knee to the 47th president-elect. Trump’s threat that there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages held by Hamas were not released by the time he assumes office was enough to force a deal that had never come close to materializing in the 15 months of Biden leadership after the October 7, 2023, attack.
Trump’s imminent return and promise of mass deportation of illegal immigrants, supported by a solid majority of Americans, was enough for 48 Democrats in the House and 33 in the Senate to join unanimous Republicans in doing what was unthinkable before November 5: sign on to the advancement of the Laken Riley Act, allowing the government to detain illegal aliens arrested for non-violent crimes such as theft, whether they have been convicted or not. And it was enough for multiple world leaders to break long-standing precedent and all but ignore Joe Biden in favor of negotiating with Trump days after the election.
Trump Breaking From the Starting Gate
So, in addition to securing the southern border – and perhaps the northern one as well – what can we realistically expect from Trump as he breaks from the starting gate? Given that he famously promised during the presidential campaign to be “a dictator, but only on day one,” we can certainly expect him to generate glaring headlines before the calendar turns to January 21. He has promised to “restore the travel ban [on people from some Muslim-dominated countries], suspend refugee admissions … and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country.” He has pledged to immediately order the roundup and deportation of criminal aliens and end birthright citizenship [per the Constitution’s 14th Amendment]. And he says he will pardon non-violent participants of the January 6 uprising.
The list of Trump’s planned executive orders hardly stops there. He also intends to reverse many of the climate policies instituted by Biden, ending the electric vehicle mandate and climate subsidies. He will order federal agencies to eliminate regulations that drive up the cost of goods, a major initiative in his first administration when he required two regulations be eliminated for every new one introduced by federal agencies. In his second act, Trump intends to make that ten to one. He pledges to slash federal funding to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) or enforce vaccine mandates. And he has pledged to ban males, regardless of how they identify, from competing in women’s sports.
So Many Obstacles, So Little Time
When Trump was first elected, he might have rightfully believed, as all presidents do, that he would have eight years to achieve all his uber-ambitious objectives. Consequently, some of his initiatives, such as completing the Wall and implementing Schedule F civil service reform, did not take shape until his first term was reaching its conclusion. But instead of winning a second term in 2020, he had to wait until 2025 after Joe Biden – recently depicted by a commentator on Fox News as a bad halftime show between the two Trump presidencies – did everything in his power to undo what Trump had put in place. The border was flung wide open, two ground wars took hold, and the economy has been strangled by unnecessary post-COVID inflationary spending and overregulation. Thus, instead of starting with a relatively blank palette, much of Trump’s energy and political capital must be devoted to reversing Biden-era policies designed specifically to lay waste to the incoming president's earlier achievements.
A case in point is mass deportation, a heavy lift fraught with the inevitable peril of his enemies and their allies in the Fourth Estate crying about the inhumanity of it all. Expect to see many tear-inducing stories of those deported by the brutal hand of incoming Border Czar Tom Homan. Environmental alarmists will be outraged over the reversal of the Green New Deal empowered by the falsely titled Inflation Reduction Act. Viral footage of individuals pardoned for their participation on 1/6/21 will inevitably be released, and the whole issue will be re-litigated in mass media. And after leaving a world at relative peace in his first term, Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine are bound not to be nearly as easy as he has made it sound. Fortunately, he may have less worry about the evil regime in Iran now that they and their proxies have been neutered thanks to the Israel Defense Force. Trump will do his best to pay no attention to the sniping critics, but as he does the heaviest lifting, his stature will inevitably take hits that stand to reduce his current all-time high popularity.
At the same time, while Republicans control both chambers of Congress along with the presidency, Trump will be working with an extremely fragile, razor-thin majority in the House. As we witnessed in what should have been a no-brainer re-election of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, the likes of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) have repeatedly proven their willingness to behave not as a team member but as a high-on-his-horse holdout gumming up the works in opposition to the vast majority of his colleagues. Trump can do much by himself with executive orders, but when it comes to re-upping his first-term tax cuts and other matters requiring congressional legislation, he will often have to thread the needle, especially with the live possibility that Democrats could seize control of the lower chamber in 2026. The best news for Trump is that, with a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, his judicial nominations will likely sail through unimpeded.
So much to do, and so little time. In his second bite at the presidential apple, Donald Trump is undoubtedly far better positioned to execute his remarkably far-reaching agenda with a decisive mandate and, unlike his first time around, unquestioned allies at his side. The one thing of which we can be certain is that after the wild ride ahead, the country will look very different on Trump’s last day in office than it will on his first.
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