Amid the chaos of a week when the world nearly witnessed its first global depression caused by the caprice of a single man, Donald Trump took some time to reflect on another recent demonstration of Presidential power—his January order for the Army Corps of Engineers to unleash billions of gallons of water from federally controlled reservoirs to fight wildfires in California. The water was unnecessary and will likely cause major problems for farmers who had been expecting to use it this summer, as officials knew at the time, but Trump was the boss, so they sent it anyway. In Trump’s telling, this was both “a beautiful thing to see” and a “long fought Victory,” all the more savored because he had tried and failed to make it happen the last time he was in the White House. At a White House event on Tuesday afternoon, he explained, “My first term, I said, ‘Do it.’ And I don’t know. I think the second term is just more powerful. They do it. When I say, ‘Do it,’ they do it, right?”
It’s hard to find a simpler and clearer statement of the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. The second time around, Trump is doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants, with little regard for the constraints that held him back before. This applies to tariffs and the unleashing of an international trade war—and to many far less consequential personal obsessions of the President. Whether it’s ending globalization or personally dictating the water flow on federal land in the West, unfinished business is the business of Trump’s second term; it’s a do-over Presidency with no precedent in America’s modern history.
The problem with this as a guiding principle for understanding Trump is the sheer volume of scores he wants to settle and battles he wants to refight—an agenda he’s pursuing with manic intensity now that he’s back and unimpeded by Congress or his own pesky aides. It’s as though he has a checklist of all the things that he was stopped from doing before and is running through them in whatever haphazard order they spring to mind: Global tariffs? Check. Take away John Brennan’s security clearance? (Again.) Check. There’s little rhyme or reason to how this is playing out, but I’d suggest a rule to make some sense of the randomness: the more Trump felt frustrated by the refusal to enact one of his disruptive policies or petty diktats last time, the higher the priority he will make of it now—and the more delight he will take in demanding that it be executed.
Trump’s digressions in his speeches could be laughed away in his first term. So what if he hated windmills or water-saving toilets? Did it really matter if he vented some spleen about bad press coverage? This time, Trump has courtiers who understand that he is not kidding when he says all those crazy things; they are orders, not the brain farts of a petulant septuagenarian. On Wednesday afternoon, at the height of the week’s Trump-induced market confusion, he convened an afternoon ceremony in the White House to sign an executive order on “maintaining acceptable water pressure in showerheads,” citing “the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.” Jesus could turn water into wine; Trump has figured out how to transmogrify his bathroom rants into legal decrees.
The grievance, like so much of what he is spending his time on, goes back to his first term, when Trump ordered the easing of a rule that limited the amount of water that showers with multiple nozzles could use; the Biden Administration then reversed his decree and now he’s reversing the reversal of his reversal. Got it? More ominously, Trump signed two other executive orders at the ceremony targeting individuals who ran afoul of him in his first term—Miles Taylor, a former Trump Homeland Security official who, as Anonymous, wrote a critical book about the President, and Christopher Krebs, the election-security chief who was fired by Trump in 2020 for the sin of refusing to call that year’s election “rigged.” Trump is demanding that his Justice Department investigate both men, which is a clear abuse of power as well as a revealing example of Trump’s escalation from nasty tweets about his political opponents to unleashing federal prosecutors on them.
Trump’s showerhead executive order wasn’t even the first event this week dedicated to a dubious do-over. On Tuesday, he held a big White House photo op with a couple dozen coal miners in hard hats to sign executive orders that he said would revitalize the coal industry—a vow he also made in his first term, though his plan to offer subsidies to keep coal plants in operation was rejected by regulators in 2018 and the percentage of U.S. power generated by coal has been steadily sinking since Trump initially came to office. It was in the middle of his speech at the coal event that Trump began talking about his great victory in unleashing water from California reservoirs—the apparent connection being that he had pursued both causes over the opposition of environmentalists and despite having been rebuffed from taking similar actions during his first term. “I’m very proud of the fact that we did it,” he said. “We did that against a lot of heat and a lot of environmental nonsense.”
Throughout Trump’s first term, one of his long-standing grievances with the Pentagon was its reluctance to go along with his idea for a grand military parade in Washington, which was inspired by a trip he took to Paris on Bastille Day, in 2017. With Trump looking on, President Emmanuel Macron had commemorated the U.S. entry into the First World War with an impressive celebration of thousands of troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers rolling down the Champs-Élysées, as military planes flew overhead. When he returned, Trump demanded his own parade, even after then vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Paul Selva, a military kid who spent part of his childhood in Portugal, warned the President, in the Oval Office, that such a display was better suited to the type of dictatorship he had grown up with overseas. “You don’t like the idea?” Trump asked him, incredulous. “No,” Selva replied. “It’s what dictators do.”
You might have missed the news during the whole global economic meltdown, but reports emerged this week that Trump may now finally get his military parade—on his seventy-ninth birthday, no less. The Pentagon, it turns out, has been planning a fortuitously timed celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Army on June 14th. A parade, parachutists landing on the Ellipse south of the White House, and a fireworks display are being discussed, though, after the initial report appeared in the Washington City Paper, Administration officials claimed no final decision had yet been made about the parade.
If only all of Trump’s unfinished business fell into that category—at the end of the day, just an expensive boondoggle that will quickly be forgotten by everyone except the birthday boy himself. Unfortunately, a military parade and a trade war are not Trump’s sole longtime obsessions. My own short, far-from-complete list of other things that he wanted to do in his first term and may well revive this time around includes having the federal government take over running the District of Columbia; using the Insurrection Act against domestic protesters; withdrawing from NATO if members did not spend a higher percentage of their G.D.P. on defense; eliminating thousands of civil-service jobs in the government and turning them into partisan political positions; making a long-term security pact with Saudi Arabia; and lifting sanctions imposed on Russia after its 2014 occupation of Crimea. When my husband and I interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021 for a book about his first term, he told us that his regrets included not going after the German automotive industry with tariffs and not following through on his demand that South Korea pay five billion dollars in payment for the American troops stationed there. He said that he planned to pursue both in a second term.
Many of his other first-term ideas, once dismissed as too wacky, extreme, or illegal, have already been set in motion, including everything from an order banning transgender troops in the military (again) to one decreeing the end of the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. The Pentagon is again considering the withdrawal of troops from Europe. Journalists who Trump doesn’t like are again being banned from White House events. The point is this: if you want to know his second-term agenda, look at what he tried and failed to do in his first—the more radical the idea the better, as far as he’s concerned. In Trump’s first term, his public proposal to buy Greenland was taken as a joke; now he refuses to rule out a military takeover. Does anyone seriously doubt he’s coming for NATO next? Windmills, watch out. ♦
