He’s emboldened, he’s organized and he’s still Trump: Takeaways from the U.S. president’s opening days

U.S. President Donald Trump, from left, takes the oath of office as son Barron Trump and wife Melania Trump watch during the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque/Pool Photo via AP)

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump’s first week in office isn’t over yet, but already it offers signals about how his next four years in the White House may unfold.

Some takeaways from the earliest days of his second term:

He’s emboldened like never before

Within hours of being sworn in, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people who were convicted or charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters. Those pardoned include people who attacked, bloodied and beat police officers that day. The Republican president’s decision was at odds with earlier comments by his incoming vice president, JD Vance, and other senior aides that Trump would only let off those who weren’t violent.

The pardons were the first of many moves he made in his first week to reward allies and punish critics, in both significant and subtle ways. It signaled that without the need to worry about reelection — the Constitution bars a third term — or legal consequences after the Supreme Court granted presidents expansive immunity, the new president, backed by a Republican Congress, has little to restrain him.

Trump ended protective security details for Dr. Anthony Fauci, his former COVID-19 adviser, along with former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his onetime deputy. The security protections had been regularly extended by the Biden administration over credible threats to the men’s lives.

Trump also revoked the security clearances of dozens of former government officials who had criticized him, including Bolton, and directed that the portrait of a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, retired Gen. Mark Milley be removed from the Pentagon walls.

He’s way more organized this time

In his first days in office, Trump demonstrated just how much he and his team had learned from four often-chaotic years in the White House and four more in political exile.

A president’s most valuable resource is time and Trump set out in his first hours to make his mark on the nation with executive orders, policy memoranda and government staffing shake-ups. It reflected a level of sophistication that eluded him in his first term and surpassed his Democratic predecessors in its scale and scope for their opening days in the Oval Office.

Feeling burned by the holdover of Obama administration appointees during his first go-around, Trump swiftly exiled Biden holdovers and moved to test new hires for their fealty to his agenda.

In a matter of days he uprooted four years of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government, sent federal troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and erased Biden’s guardrails on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency development.

In his first term, Trump’s early executive orders were more showpieces than substance and frequently were blocked by federal courts. This time, Trump is still confronting the limits of his constitutional authorities, but is also far more adept at controlling what is within them.

But Trump is still Trump

An hour after concluding a relatively sedate inaugural address in the Capitol Rotunda, Trump decided to let loose.

Speaking to an overflow crowd of governors, political supports and dignitaries in the Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall, Trump ripped in to Biden, the Justice Department and other perceived rivals. He followed it up with an even longer speech to supporters at a downtown arena and in more than 50 minutes of remarks and questions and answers with reporters in the Oval Office.

For all of Trump’s experience and organization, he is still very much the same Donald Trump, and just as intent as before on dominating the center of the national conversation. If not more.

Courts may rein Trump in or give him expansive new powers

He has acted to try to end civil service protections for many federal workers and overturn more than a century of law on birthright citizenship. Such moves have been a magnet for legal challenges. In the case of the birthright citizenship order, it met swift criticism from U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, who put a temporary stay on Trump’s plans.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is,” Coughenour, who was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan, told a Justice Department attorney. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

How those court cases play out will determine not only the fate of some of Trump’s most controversial actions, but just how far any president can go in pushing an agenda.

Trump is betting that oil can grease the economy’s wheels and fix everything

The president likes to call it “liquid gold.”

His main economic assumption is that more oil production by the United States, the Saudis and the rest of OPEC would bring down prices. That would reduce overall inflation and cut down on the oil revenues that Russia is using to fund its war in Ukraine.

For Trump, oil is the answer.

He’s betting that fossil fuels are the future, despite the climate change risks.

“The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we’re going to use it,” Trump said in a Thursday speech. “Not only will this reduce the cost of virtually all goods and services, it’ll make the United States a manufacturing superpower and the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto”

The problem with billionaires is they’re rivals, not super friends

Trump had the world’s wealthiest men behind him on the dais when he took the oath of office on Monday.

Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault were all there. SoftBank billionaire Masayoshi Son was in the audience. Later in the week, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and OpenAI’s Sam Altman appeared with Son at the White House to announce an artificial intelligence investment of up to US$500 billion.

Musk, the Trump backer who is leading the president’s Department of Government Efficiency effort, posted on X that SoftBank didn’t have the money. Altman, a rival to to Musk on AI, responded over X that the funding was there.

By surrounding himself with the wealthiest people in tech, Trump is also stuck in their drama.

“The people in the deal are very, very smart people,” Trump said Thursday. “But Elon, one of the people, he happens to hate. But I have certain hatreds of people, too.”

Trump has a thing for William McKinley

America’s 25th president has a big fan in Trump. Trump likes the tariffs that were imposed during Republican William McKinley’s presidency and helped to fund the government. Trump has claimed the country was its wealthiest in the 1890s when McKinley was in office.

But McKinley might not be a great economic role model for the 21st century.

For starters, the Tax Foundation found that federal receipts were equal to just three per cent of the overall economy in 1900, McKinley’s reelection year. Tax revenues are now equal to about 17 per cent of the U.S. economy and that’s still not enough to fund the government without running massive deficits. So it would be hard to go full McKinley without some chaos.

As Dartmouth College economist Douglas Irwin noted on X, the economic era defined by McKinley was not that great for many people.

“There was a little something called the Panic of 1893 and the unemployment rate was in double digits from 1894-98!!” Irwin wrote. “Not a great decade!”

Zeke Miller And Josh Boak, The Associated Press