At the end of the last Trump presidency, the New York Times declared: “The terrible experiment is over – President Donald J Trump: The End.”
That didn’t age well. If Trump 1.0 (2016-2020) was the experiment, then maybe Trump 2.0 (2024-2028) will be the real deal.
In 2016, Donald Trump was a political novice. That was the attraction for those who chose him. He didn’t know how Washington worked, and he didn’t know how to govern. But he learned on the job as he meandered chaotically through that first term.
US election latest: Trump begins selecting top team
With Apprentice precision, he fired those who crossed him. They were largely people drawn from the establishment and in the end, that was their downfall.
This time, Trump watchers here in Washington believe he will be more organised. He will know who to hire. They will be loyalists – the people he’s eyed up and got to know over the past eight years.
The first appointment has already come.
Susie Wiles will be his White House chief of staff. She is the veteran political consultant who ran his winning campaign. In his shadow for many years, she is an astute political operator whose career began as a junior staffer on Ronald Reagan’s election campaign.
She had the Apprentice treatment once – fired by Mr Trump in 2020 in the run-up to that presidential election after a falling out. But he soon saw her value again. He trusts her and she knows precisely how he ticks.
Mr Trump knows Ms Wiles better than any of the four chiefs of staff he hired during his first term, and crucially she is credited for trying to keep his campaign disciplined. She may be a guardrail in the next White House.
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Her appointment is an indication of what his other appointments will look like. They will be people well-known to him or they will be fully signed up surrogates like Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Expect family members to be signed up too. Last time his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were key figures.
For good or bad, and with little experience, Mr Kushner played a central role in moulding Mr Trump’s Middle East policy which culminated with the historic Abraham Accords.
And so the first difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 will be the hires. The second will be the power he has.
The landslide victory and likely control of both Houses of Congress gives Mr Trump a powerful mandate to govern. It also gives him a huge confidence in his conviction to do what he wants to do.
A far-reaching agenda is now much more achievable than it was in his last term. He also has a clearer idea of what he wants to achieve.
His manifesto, which has always been a little opaque and subject to change, is likely to include scrapping the department of education and making education a state, not federal, issue.
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It would include a pledge for “mass deportations” of illegal immigrants, tax cuts, the imposition of tariffs on foreign goods and an overhaul of the mechanics of the federal government.
On that last pledge he hopes to reintroduce a plan, unimplemented in his first term, called Schedule F which would see the removal of thousands of non-partisan federal civil servants and replacing them with loyal political appointees.
Some of his policies would require the approval of Congress, which is easier if the Republicans hold control in both Houses.
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Other policies could be implemented via presidential executive orders.
This privilege gives the American president broad executive and enforcement authority to use their discretion to determine how to enforce the law or manage the resources and staff of the executive branch of government.
A few months ago, I had lunch with a top Trump advisor who told me that if re-elected, Mr Trump would sign a pile of executive orders on inauguration day. Only half joking, the official said the president would take the pile to the inauguration ceremony and sign them there and then. Quite the image.
Above all, governance is about confidence. In 2016, Mr Trump didn’t have that confidence. You could see it was missing on his face when outgoing President Obama welcomed him to the White House for transition talks.
Trump meeting with then-president Barack Obama in the Oval Office after his 2016 win. Pic: Reuters
This time, Mr Trump has supreme confidence because he just pulled off the most remarkable comeback in political history.
