Gram Slattery
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump has been in office for five days and yet he has imposed his will on Washington with ruthless speed and efficiency, showing that even his most radical campaign promises were far from flashy.
The Republican president has taken the first steps toward fulfilling a pledge to overhaul a federal bureaucracy he believes has been hostile to him during his 2017-2021 presidency, moving or firing hundreds of civil servants in simultaneous moves against some agencies.
He led the military to the southern border, fired the head of the US Coast Guard and challenged decades of constitutional law with a series of sweeping executive orders – 26 of which were issued within hours of taking office – covering everything from environmental regulations to US citizenship rules.
In perhaps the most obsessive move of all, he pardoned some 1,500 supporters who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, the global symbol of American democracy.
Trump’s allies likened his shock-and-awe opening crackdown to the work of special forces that caught federal workers, unions, advocacy groups and even the media off guard in its scope.
They credit careful, years-long action by conservative allies who have spent much of Trump’s time out of office crafting detailed policy plans that would allow him to hit the ground running.
“This is the Beachhead team taking over the federal government,” Steve Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist during Trump’s first term and is close to many of Trump’s core policy advisers, told Reuters.
Trump’s opponents say he is distorting the US Constitution and expanding the limits of executive power beyond its intended limit. They also say Trump’s opening moves show he is less interested in uniting the country than radically transforming it — and in many cases exacting revenge.
In one of his opening moves, Trump removed the security clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials who attributed infamous media reports about former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to a Russian influence operation.
Trump also removed three former national security officials from his security detail, even in the face of credible threats from Iran. His aides found time to remove a portrait of one of his harshest critics, General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from a Pentagon hallway.
He was cleaning up the Career Council, the White House National Security Council that Trump’s team deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. The move allows him to import loyalists into over 100 national security roles.
“He’s clearly not a man who dismisses his troubles easily,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has worked in and out of government for more than 40 years.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Years in the making
Even Trump’s enemies say the past five days represent a stark contrast to his first term, when conflict and ill-preparedness sidelined many of his most ambitious policy initiatives.
“In terms of just the scale of it all and the speed of it, his team showed the results of extraordinary preparation,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library.
Many of Trump’s policies have been brought up by those behind “Project 2025,” a consortium of conservative organizations that has spent more than two years crafting policies in anticipation of Trump’s possible return.
Trump distanced himself from the project last year, saying he knew nothing about it, even though many former aides were deeply involved. But his influence on his new White House operation is all too clear.
Project 2025 advocated for a purge of career officials on the National Security Council.
Another policy pushed by the project that Trump has already enacted, making hundreds of thousands of government employees easier to fire by creating a new category of federal worker known as “Annex F.”
Trump has also floated an overhaul of the federal emergency management agency that would shift many FEMA functions to the states, another 2025 project proposal.
“There were hard-line policies and political people who believed in Trump … and they started working right away in 2021 to get Trump back in the White House,” Bannon said. “And that’s what you see dipped in fruit.”
Height of power?
Trump’s agenda is facing roadblocks moving forward. The opening weeks of his administration may represent the height of Trump’s power, some supporters concede.
Many of Trump’s executive orders test the limits of constitutional law. The order to end citizenship by right — the constitutional doctrine that holds that almost everyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen — has already drawn federal court.
Several other promises and orders immediately faced lawsuits from states and advocacy groups, and the shock and awe of his first week could be squeezed into litigation that has spanned much of his tenure.
Trump can face a challenge by maintaining a narrow congressional Republican majority in the House of Representatives in two years. The current president’s party often loses seats in the middle. If that happens, it would result in an already narrow legislative path being completely closed to Trump.
“Trump has a decisive mandate from American voters to bring dramatic reforms to Washington,” said Mike Davis, a close adviser to Trump on judicial affairs.
“That political mandate will fade if he doesn’t deliver — and deliver fast.”
