On his first full day back in the White House, President Trump reveled in his return to power and vowed to do what no president had ever done before. “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at,” he declared.
Of all the thousands of words that Mr. Trump uttered during his fact-challenged, talkathon-style opening days as the nation’s 47th president, those may have been the truest. No matter that much of what he was doing he had promised on the campaign trail. He succeeded in shocking nonetheless.
Not so much by the ferocity of the policy shifts or ideological swings that invariably come with a party change in the White House, but through norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.
He freed even the most violent of the rioters who assaulted the Capitol in his name four years ago. Out of pique over questions of loyalty, he stripped former advisers facing credible death threats of their security details. Disregarding a law passed with bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court, he allowed the Chinese-owned TikTok app to remain in use in the United States despite serious national security concerns.
Not satisfied to simply eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along or face “adverse consequences,” a practice familiar to anyone of a certain age who lived in Russia. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitor departments for corruption and abuse in a late-night purge on Friday, ignoring a law requiring him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.
In doing so, Mr. Trump in effect declared that he was willing and even eager to push the boundaries of his authority, the resilience of American institutions, the strength of the nearly two-and-a-half-century-old system and the tolerance of some of his own allies. Even more than in his first term, he has mounted a fundamental challenge to expectations of what a president can and should do, demonstrating a belief that the rules his predecessors largely followed are meant to be bent, bypassed or broken.
“He’s using the tools of government to challenge the limits on the post-Watergate presidency,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College. “Some of these efforts will be turned back by the courts, but the level of anticipatory obedience we’re seeing from business, universities and the media is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Not everything that shocked people in Mr. Trump’s first week necessarily violated presidential standards. Any time a president from one party takes over from one of the other, the shifts in policies can be head-snapping, and Mr. Trump has been particularly aggressive in reversing the country’s direction ideologically and politically.
It is broadly within a president’s power, for instance, to order mass deportations, to pull out of an international climate agreement or to fire holdover political appointees, however debatable the decisions might be. But as so often happens with Mr. Trump, he takes even those decisions one step further.
“The theme of this week was vengeance and retribution when all other presidents have used their inaugurations to heal wounds, bring people together and focus on the future,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of several books on the presidency. “That sounds like a norm, but it’s actually fundamental to the survival of the republic.”
Mr. Trump has never been too impressed with the argument that he should or should not do something because that is the way it has previously been done. As a government novice during his first term, he found himself flummoxed at times by how Washington worked and unable to exert his will to achieve major priorities.
He returns for this second term more prepared and more determined to crash through obstacles and any supposed “deep state” that gets in his way. Ideas that establishment advisers talked him out of the last time around, he is pursuing this time around with a new cast of more like-minded aides who share his willingness to disrupt the system.
He decided to rewrite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as it has been understood for more than a century to declare that it does not guarantee automatic citizenship to all children born in the United States. It took just three days for a federal judge to step in and temporarily block the move, which he called “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” but the issue will surely go to the Supreme Court.
While other presidents put their assets in a blind trust or otherwise distanced themselves from their personal business interests upon taking office to avoid even the whiff of a conflict of interest, Mr. Trump exploited his political celebrity to make enormous amounts of money in a scheme that could potentially be fueled by investors with a stake in federal government policies.
Just three days before his inauguration, he released a crypto token called $Trump that together with other family tokens rose to around $10 billion in value on paper. The tokens create new opportunities for companies and other financial players inside and outside the United States to curry favor with the new administration.
Moreover, while other presidents had wealthy patrons who enjoyed access to the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has gone so far as to surround himself with billionaires on the inaugural platform and give Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a mandate to revamp the federal government that puts billions of dollars in his pocket through various contracts.
“The imperialist policy was not on the ballot, and so it represents a challenge to democratic norms,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University. “Under no definition of the term could President Trump be said to have a mandate to take the Panama Canal treaty away from Panama or Greenland from Denmark.”
Mr. Naftali, who was founding director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and is currently writing a biography of John F. Kennedy, said Mr. Trump had single-handedly altered the terms of the national conversation in less than a week in office in a way that none of his predecessors did.
“Some of this is evanescent, but the vibe has changed,” Mr. Naftali said. “Our political and cultural vibe, to the extent that we have a national one, has changed in a matter of days. Yes, F.D.R. made people feel better about banks reasonably fast, but he didn’t alter the political culture in the first four days, and even after the first 100 days it took a while.”
Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to push the limits of presidential power, of course. Mr. Nixon comes to mind, among others. Indeed, some of Mr. Trump’s allies see a more immediate precedent for violating the conventions of the office in his own predecessor: President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who spoke strongly in favor of traditional standards even as he stretched his authority.
In his final days in office, Mr. Biden issued pre-emptive pardons to a half-dozen members of his own family and other targets of Mr. Trump’s wrath, a first-of-its-kind move he described as a means to prevent political prosecutions against them. Mr. Trump has in fact made such threats, but even some Democrats objected to the pardons, describing them as self-serving and a terrible precedent.
Mr. Biden also declared in his final days as president that the Equal Rights Amendment had met the requirements of ratification and therefore was, in his view, now the 28th Amendment of the Constitution. In doing so, he disregarded time limits established by Congress that were exceeded. Some analysts asked how it was different for Mr. Biden to declare his interpretation of the Constitution in this way than for Mr. Trump to try to impose his own interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
“Joe Biden vastly expanded the presidential parameters of everything from executive orders to border nonenforcement to Biden family pardons, all to implement policies and agendas that for the most part did not enjoy popular support,” said Victor Davis Hanson, a scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “The Case for Trump.” He added that Mr. Biden “thereby ironically empowered Trump to follow that latitude, but to enact agendas that did earn public approval.”
Not all of Mr. Trump’s assertions are popular. A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found widespread disapproval of the Jan. 6 pardons and not much support for eliminating birthright citizenship.
But Jonathan Madison, who studies democracy and governance at the R Street Institute, a free-market research organization in Washington, said that Mr. Biden “used executive power in unprecedented ways” after the election and that “Trump’s first week in office has reinforced this shift” in power.
“Notably,” Mr. Madison added, “members of Congress from both parties have shown little inclination to challenge executive overreach when it comes from their own side.”
But Mr. Trump, so far, has proved far more effective at squelching opposition than Mr. Biden ever was. He dominates his own party as no president in generations. Through force of will and fear of reprisals, Mr. Trump has compelled Republicans to bend to his wishes repeatedly since his re-election, and even give support to cabinet nominees who would not have passed muster in the past, like Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.
Beyond his own party, Mr. Trump has forced technology billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, corporate executives and media owners who previously opposed him to show newfound deference and, in many cases, flood his political accounts with millions of dollars. The resistance that sprang up when he was first inaugurated eight years ago has faded, with many progressives and anti-Trump conservatives deflated or afraid of being targeted.
That leaves Mr. Trump as the single most important player in any decision he cares to involve himself in, whether it be who is the speaker of the House or what the fact-checking policies should be at Meta’s Facebook. Even the bureaucracy is to be tamed if he has his way, as he moves to convert nonpartisan civil servants into political appointees answerable to him.
“We’re not talking about drilling for oil, where obviously he’s going to pursue different policies; we’re not talking about supporting Ukraine,” said Michael J. Klarman, a professor of legal history at Harvard Law School. “These are all signs that he’s not going to have opposition from the Republican Party, he’s not going to have opposition from the civil service, he’s not going to have opposition from the media. Those are all part of the authoritarian playbook.”
Mr. Trump’s allies reject the notion that he has authoritarian aspirations. After all, he is still subject to the 22nd Amendment, which bars him from running again in four years. Yet just last week, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee, introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Mr. Trump to run for a third term.
It has no realistic chance of passing, but as it happens, the congressman’s campaign finances are under investigation by the F.B.I., a bureau overseen by the new president. “It would be my greatest honor to serve not once but twice,” Mr. Trump told an audience on Saturday. “Maybe three times.”
