“For those who may have crossed President Donald Trump, the message is sinking in: Payback is coming, and coming fast,” NBC News reports.

Said former prosecutor David Laufman: “There are plenty of early warning signs that confirm the worst fears of people who were concerned about a second Trump administration and what it would mean for the rule of law. The real question remains what checks and balances will there be to prevent the creeping establishment of an authoritarian state in the United States.”

“Even before Donald Trump’s portrait could be restored to the walls of the Justice Department, interim officials began driving a conservative U-turn at the agency,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“They replaced a Biden-era memo telling prosecutors to show leniency to some drug offenders with a new policy calling for the pursuit of the most serious charges and the stiffest penalties for all crimes. They halted much of the department’s civil-rights and environmental work. And they transferred more than 15 career employees to relatively marginal positions, part of a broader effort to ultimately thin the workforce. That was just the first week.”

“A new administration always brings changes in personnel and policy. But current and former department officials said the pace, scope and tone of Trump’s early moves in his second term are unusual and signal that a more dramatic transformation lies ahead.”

“Job-seekers hoping to join the new Trump administration are facing a series of intense loyalty tests, with White House screening teams fanning out to government agencies to check for ‘Make America Great Again’ bona fides and carefully parsing applicants’ politics and social media posts,” the AP reports.

“President Donald Trump has long said he believes the biggest mistake he made during his first term was hiring what he considered to be the wrong kinds of people. Now, aides are working aggressively to ensure the government is filled only with loyalists.”

Ezra Klein: “There’s nothing new about the problem of money in politics. We’ve been warned for decades that America is or is becoming an oligarchy. But something has felt different about the early days of President Trump’s second term, and I think it’s this: Attention, not cash, is the form of power that most interests him.”

Jeffrey Toobin: “In simple terms, this means that in a few days, there will be no one in prison or facing any sort of criminal penalty for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Some, including Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who was pardoned after being sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, have already been released from their sentences.”

“The cases against them now disappear, as if they had never been brought, and the consequences of those convictions vanish as well. Former convicts, including those who assaulted police officers, will now have no restrictions on their right to purchase firearms; they will be free to bring guns to their next confrontation with authorities.”

“The pardon recipients now join Mr. Trump himself as former Jan. 6 defendants who are in the clear for their actions on that day.”

“President Trump is surprising — even frustrating — some longtime friends in his second administration’s early days with fewer leaks, a lack of exploitable rivalries, and tighter restrictions on access to him,” Axios reports.

“No modern president has done more — across more areas of American policy, culture and life — than Trump in the past six days. This new operating style and system enabled a strategy of flooding the nation with so many huge moves that it’s hard for critics to attack specific ones.”

CNN: “A deep familiarity with the trappings of the West Wing and the Executive Residence helped keep the president in a good mood all week, several people who spoke with him said, a sentiment that came alive in one appearance after another.”

Dan Balz: “For President Donald Trump, the first week of his second term was everything he had promised, with multiple attacks on executive agencies, undocumented immigrants, perceived enemies and other obstacles. It was, however, only Week 1 of a four-year term and far too early for him to hang up any banner proclaiming mission accomplished.”

“The opening directives included scores of orders, actions and statements designed to disrupt agencies across the federal government and beyond. Together the week of activity underscored Trump’s determination to try to bring about wholesale changes far more radical and punitive than what he tried in his first term…”

“No single order in his first days in office was more alarming than the pardons. Ahead of the election, his opponents worried openly that there would be no real guardrails around Trump in a second term, that he would stock his White House and administration with loyalists and banish the types of advisers he regretted hiring in his first term. The pardons were proof that Trump will act as he wishes.”

Politico: “His first nearly five dozen executive actions are more numerous, go further and are better engineered than the ones he made in the earliest days of his first term in 2017, when he only signed one executive order on his first day and five in his first week.”

“This time around, many of Trump’s early actions took Biden-era policies directly to the paper shredder with rapid fallout or led to the immediate dismissal of some federal workers, for instance.”

For members: Breaking Down Trump’s Executive Actions