Trump 2.0 Heralds an Aggressive Flexing of Power

For all of the shock and awe of President Trump’s first weeks back in office, much of it should come as little surprise. Many of his actions are extensions of his first-term agenda, when he pledged to crack down on immigration and bolster the country’s advantage in international trade.

But in a few important ways, Mr. Trump’s return to power has been signified by some profound ideological swings as he moves to remake Washington, America and the world. On both the domestic front and in foreign affairs, Mr. Trump has shifted to a different, even more aggressive approach toward the role of government and the posture of the United States on the global stage.

The 45th president was never much of a shrink-the-government conservative; in fact, he was as free spending as many Democrats and, thanks in large part to Covid-19 relief, left behind the largest peacetime government in history. But now the 47th president has unleashed Elon Musk to put the federal government through his “wood chipper,” as the billionaire put it, one agency after another. “BALANCED BUDGET!!!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last week.

Likewise, the first President Trump denounced overseas nation-building and sought to extricate the United States from the Middle East to focus the country’s resources inside its own borders. The second President Trump seems determined to expand those borders by swallowing up foreign territory, including a Middle East enclave in desperate need of nation-building, as America First isolationism gives way to a form of America First imperialism.

“In these particular ways, Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 look very different,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton historian who edited a book on Mr. Trump’s first term. “If we look back at the first term, there’s room for some of this — he was against government but he didn’t do much about it; he was against nation-building but he wasn’t entirely isolationist. It’s very Trumpian. There’s room for lots of stuff, but it’s where the emphasis is.”

Indeed, Mr. Trump has never been particularly rooted to one ideology for all that long. He switched political parties five times before first running for president as a Republican in 2016, and at one point or another was for abortion rights, gun control, higher taxes on the rich and the invasion of Iraq before he was against all of them.