Trump Aims for Show of Strength as He Returns to Power

 

Trump Aims for Show of Strength as He Returns to Power

 

The incoming president has told allies he wants to seize momentum and avoid the missteps of his first administration.

 

President-elect Donald J. Trump arriving at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on Saturday night. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Jonathan Swan Maggie Haberman

By Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman

Jan. 19, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/19/us/politics/trump-return-power.html

 

Donald J. Trump sat in the middle of a U-shaped table, surrounded by his hard-right allies. It was a Friday night, 10 days before his inauguration, and Mr. Trump was hosting a couple of dozen members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus in the white and gold ballroom at Mar-a-Lago and explaining how he views this moment of power.

 

The 45th (and soon-to-be 47th) president said the Democrats were damaged, demoralized and disorganized, according to two people in the room. And while he conceded that “sometimes a wounded animal is the most dangerous,” he signaled that he wanted to exploit their weakness. It was time to go big.

 

Whether it’s his idea for “one big, beautiful bill” to ram through his multitrillion-dollar legislative agenda, his hunger for a deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war (and perhaps fulfill his first-term dream of a Nobel Peace Prize), his desire to acquire Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada for the United States, or his insistence to an adviser that he will keep signing executive orders on Inauguration Day “until my hand breaks” — Mr. Trump has indicated that he wants to begin his presidency with a demonstration of strength.

 

He knows from experience that he must move fast; he begins his presidency as a lame duck. And after the 2026 midterms, when attention will turn to his successor, Mr. Trump will be unlikely to command the same sway with congressional Republicans and corporate America.

 

“We had a 40-seat Republican margin in the House in 2017 and yet there was trouble ticking off the list of accomplishments,” said Kellyanne Conway, his 2016 campaign manager who served as a senior White House counselor in his first term. “This time there is a slimmer majority, yet larger mandate. President Trump knows he can move with alacrity and immediacy.”

 

Interviews with more than a dozen people who have recently spoken with Mr. Trump describe a president-elect who views his power much differently than he did on the eve of his first inauguration in 2017. Back then he was on the defensive; the resistance to his presidency was fierce after his shock win and he was more deferential to Washington veterans, heeding their advice on whom to pick and what to prioritize. Now, he smells weakness all around — on Capitol Hill, in the C-suite and in the news media. And he sees himself as his own best adviser.

 

Mr. Trump has told people he wants to sign around 100 executive orders at the outset, including what he has touted as “the largest deportation operation in American history,” starting with ousting undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Aides say he is likely to take an early trip to Southern California to visit areas devastated by the recent fires, and to North Carolina to visit areas flattened by Hurricane Helene last year.

 

The way Mr. Trump sees it, his biggest concern as he heads into a second term is not the Democrats. He is far more worried about his own party. So tight are the G.O.P.’s congressional majorities that it would take only a handful of disobedient Republicans to kill his chances of fulfilling his major campaign promises.

 

He told the House Freedom Caucus members at the Jan. 10 meeting that “we’ve got to stay unified,” one of the people in the room said, and he lamented that, in his view, Democrats were far better than Republicans at sticking together.

 

Another concern weighing on Mr. Trump is a looming congressional game of chicken over the debt ceiling. He has told advisers that he believes a default on U.S. debt would “be 1929” — his shorthand for another Great Depression. Mr. Trump pressured Republicans to lift the debt ceiling or abolish it before he took office, to clear the problem from his plate, but they did not deliver for him.

 

Mr. Trump’s advisers know well that the Republican Congress, especially the House, is internally divided. Nor does the president-elect have a complete hold over the Senate, where two prominent senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, have broken with Mr. Trump over enforcing the ban on TikTok. Mr. Trump’s threats of retribution or primary challenges sometimes work, but not always. Burned into his mind is his first failed effort at major legislation — his decision to follow Speaker Paul Ryan’s advice to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

 

Still, Mr. Trump knows that he has never had as much power as he does right now. He intends to make the most of it, to extract its full financial value. He has been calling chief executives, asking for their support. And they are obliging, many without even being asked. He has received at Mar-a-Lago a procession of tech billionaires whom he once denounced — including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos — all of whom have offered private respects and public praise.

 

“Everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump has remarked to aides.

 

Mr. Trump is obsessed with how to apply leverage globally, as well. He initially believed that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had a stronger hand to play, before the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Since then, he has told people close to him that he thinks Mr. Putin is in a weak financial position right now and that additional sanctions might force him into negotiating an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

 

He also sees opportunity in Iran’s weakness; Israel has taken out the country’s air defenses and decimated its proxy force, Hezbollah. Iran is vulnerable and the time could be right, Mr. Trump believes, to force Iran’s leaders into major concessions, a grand deal he had hoped to secure if he had won a second term in 2020.

 

The word he keeps repeating — in public and in private — is “mandate.” How Mr. Trump understands his 2024 victory, and the lessons he has drawn from it, could define his second term.

 

He places great importance on the fact that he won the popular vote, something he did not manage in his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.

 

But he has characteristically tried to rebrand a relatively tight election victory as a “landslide.” Roughly half of the American electorate did not vote for Mr. Trump, but he has claimed that his victory amounts to an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

 

Some close to Mr. Trump worry that he will swiftly test the extent of his support. A recent Wall Street Journal poll indicated that while the public backs many of his broad goals, most are uncomfortable with the more extreme proposals. Most Americans like the idea of deporting immigrants who have criminal records, for example, but would be far less comfortable with raiding the homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants who do not.

 

When it comes to Mr. Trump’s plans to quickly pardon people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a Monmouth University survey in December found that just 34 percent approved and 61 percent disapproved. Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately argued over how broad to make these pardons, and whether to extend them to people such as Enrique Tarrio, the convicted seditionist and former leader of the Proud Boys.

 

People who worked with Mr. Trump in his first administration note that the times when he does self-harm are often when he feels flush with confidence. The day after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III testified before Congress about his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump called the president of Ukraine and pressed him to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son — a call that eventually set in motion Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.

 

Still, Mr. Trump has reasons to believe that he will face fewer obstacles this time around.

 

He has put forward candidates for senior administration and Cabinet positions whose personal background and policy views would have triggered stiff opposition, at minimum, in the past. But with the exception of the flameout of his first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, Mr. Trump’s most controversial picks — including Kash Patel for F.B.I. director and Pete Hegseth for defense secretary — have a good chance of being confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate. Republicans used Mr. Hegseth’s hearing, at which he was grilled about extramarital affairs and drinking, to accuse Democrats of conveying a false sense of moral superiority.

 

The only top official about whom Mr. Trump is still privately expressing concern is Tulsi Gabbard, his choice for director of national intelligence, who has blamed the United States and NATO for provoking the war in Ukraine. (It is still possible that other cabinet nominees could run into confirmation trouble, in particular Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

 

Mr. Trump is hoping for a different experience this time in the capital. He has dour memories of Washington, a time when he complains he was persecuted by the “witch hunt” of the Russia investigation.

 

The first Trump administration was known for a stream of eye-popping insider accounts from the West Wing; this time around, the new president is determined to command fealty. He plans to bring back an executive order known as Schedule F, which makes it much easier to fire career government officials — such as those he may deem disloyal.

 

He has told advisers he wants no “leakers” this time, and nobody who would write a tell-all book. He has empowered aides to quiz candidates for top government jobs about their views on the Jan. 6 attack and Mr. Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election.

 

Gwenda Blair, one of Mr. Trump’s first biographers, said he has maximized the model he used while a real-estate developer, on a much smaller stage, of pitting people against each other to keep them in line.

 

“The first time in the White House, he hadn’t made the leap to the amount of bureaucracy and inertia that’s inherent in the federal government,” Ms. Blair said. “This time, it appears that he’s that much closer to figuring it out so he can follow up with what he tried to do the first time — making them afraid, keeping any horizontal alliances from forming, making people report vertically to him.”

 

The incoming president has remarked that the media is treating him better since his victory, and he is taking calls on his cellphone from anchors at networks he has called “fake news,” such as CNN and NBC. But he has also threatened other reporters and outlets with lawsuits for coverage he dislikes, and has hinted that he wants to take TV licenses away from unfriendly broadcasters.

 

He has a notion that he might change Washington, even visually. He is seeking to repurchase the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and turn it back into a Trump hotel — a safe space for his supporters in a city where he only captured about 7 percent of the vote in November. Other allies are looking to create a social club for Trump insiders. And Mr. Trump recently told D.C.’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, that he wants to see graffiti cleaned up.

 

He also has some ideas to redesign the White House; he has told associates he likes the idea of turning a room near the Oval Office dining room into a hangout space for his friends. Elon Musk, who has been asking for several days about whether he could have West Wing office space, is considered a likely presence on the couch if Mr. Trump follows through on the idea.

 

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. More about Jonathan Swan

 

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent, reporting on the second, nonconsecutive term of Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman