Trump Uses Old Tricks to Sell a New Agenda

John Harris: “When the 2024 election turned an ex-president into the next president, most Americans — no matter their feelings about Donald Trump — must have quite reasonably assumed they knew exactly what they were getting.”

“It turns out they didn’t know — not exactly.”

“The 43 days of his second term have revealed a president in the grip of a set of large ideas that were an occasional but far from a paramount feature of his first term. This version of Trump is more serious — determined to dismember large parts of the federal government and upend relations between the United States and the rest of the world on trade and security. He is ready to pursue these ideas in a sustained and pitiless way, all the while asserting vast new powers for himself as president.”