A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
CNN
—
The 47th president is in many ways a different man than the 45th president, even though they are both Donald J. Trump.
He’s unafraid to swear in public or on social media and he’s more emboldened, willing to directly challenge the Constitution and the courts and capable of demanding more loyalty from Republicans.
But Trump 2.0 is also in direct competition with his former self in several important ways, starting with the fact that he can’t seem to remember appointing people he now loathes.
Trump’s aides are looking at ways to oust Jay Powell, the Fed chairman Trump nominated to the role during his first term. Trump told House Republicans he had drafted a letter to take the unprecedented step of firing the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Markets beware.
At the White House Wednesday, Trump seemed to forget that he had nominated Powell.
“I was surprised he was appointed,” Trump said. “I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him, but they did.” Biden renominated Powell. Either Trump can’t remember or he is willing himself to forget his role in the process.
If Trump ultimately tests the Fed’s independence and tries to fire Powell, he’ll point to a building renovation that got underway during Trump’s own first term.
Before Trump took office for the second time, the FBI director appointed during his first term, Christopher Wray, quit early rather than wait to be fired.
On the Supreme Court, CNN has reported on Trump’s gripes behind closed doors about his nominee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in particular.
When Trump today threatens burdensome tariffs on Canada and Mexico, who he accuses of “taking advantage” of previous US presidents, he’s also talking about his prior self.
Trump’s first-term administration negotiated the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement — a reboot of NAFTA. Back then, it was hailed as the major accomplishment of his trade policy.
He has also evolved on issues including bitcoin and cryptocurrency, although that could have something to do with his family’s business interests.
And Trump used to support banning TikTok in the US, but now, after making inroads with young men in the last election, he very much wants a US-based company to step up and buy the platform.
“He’s undoing himself with a vengeance,” the CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali told me.
The relatively moderate mainstream policy hands who marked the first Trump term are on the outs. Outsiders and MAGA figureheads are in.
“Donald Trump clearly is angry about what his advisers forced him to do in the first term,” Naftali said, pointing specifically to trade policy.
“His approach to Canada and Mexico is inexplicable given his first term, unless you realize that he wasn’t happy with what he ended up doing in the first term,” he said.
Naftali said Trump deserves credit for Operation Warp Speed, the effort to quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine at a time when the country was largely shut down by the pandemic.
But rather than build on that legacy, Trump selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his Health and Human Services director, elevating a vaccine skeptic to a top policy role.
Kennedy fired all the members of a CDC vaccine advisory panel and brought in vaccine skeptics to review the vaccine schedule.
I put the idea of Trump 2.0 correcting Trump 1.0 to a number of CNN reporters and anchors who pay close attention to foreign affairs, the economy and the environment.
On world affairs, he’s more erratic and is taking less advice
CNN’s Jim Sciutto, who wrote a book, The Madman Theory, about Trump’s first-term foreign policy, notes that Trump is more aggressive this time, and appears to be more inclined to listen to his own gut.
SCIUTTO: In his second term, President Trump is proving less likely to be deterred by advisers or advice against his more aggressive moves in international affairs. And, so for instance, while (former White House Chief of Staff) Gen. John Kelly and (former national security adviser) John Bolton were able to counsel him away from summarily withdrawing from NATO in 2018, many — including those who served in his first administration — fear his current advisers won’t stand in the way.
From foreign officials, the concern I hear most often is one of uncertainty. From tariffs to military support for Ukraine, they express doubts that what the president says today will hold tomorrow. Trade deals become fleeting agreements subject to where the financial markets are on any given day or how the White House reads domestic politics. And support for Ukraine — which European officials see as central to the security of the whole continent — rises and falls based on Trump’s current interpretation of where Putin stands on peace talks.
Trump has proven his willingness to make hard decisions his predecessors avoided — the US strikes on Iran stand out. What observers at home and abroad are waiting for is a consistent and predictable worldview.
Allison Morrow, who writes the Nightcap newsletter for CNN Business, agrees there’s a difference to this president, but he remains the same in one very important way.
MORROW: I agree with Tim Naftali, though I wonder how conscious Trump is of his attempts to undo USMCA, which itself was just a reshuffling of NAFTA. The Trump 2.0 tariff strategy, such as it is, doesn’t make any sense in practice. If you really want to use tariffs to bring back US manufacturing, you can’t be cutting deals, because then there’s no incentive for companies to invest in domestic production. We’ve written about the contradictions at the heart of his tariff ideology dozens of times at this point, and there’s just no response from the White House about how they think they can make tariffs do everything they claim, all at once. I think the thing that jumps out at me between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 is what hasn’t changed.
Fundamentally, I think Trump wants to avoid accountability. And that’s why he has sort of slow-walked the tariffs into the market’s collective consciousness, and backed off when the bond markets shuddered. He’s testing to see what he can get away with without causing a financial or economic catastrophe.
Trump and his aides also clearly learned from his first term. Instead of trying repeatedly to repeal Obamacare, they cut future spending from Medicaid, which will have a similar effect by pushing millions of lower-income Americans off their health insurance in the years to come.
CNN’s Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter noted that in this term, Trump is acting more forcefully against news outlets.
STELTER: Instead of merely tweeting insults at independent media outlets, he is taking concrete actions to penalize those outlets, while at the same time promoting and empowering MAGA commentators. Take the media story in the news right now: the imminent defunding of PBS and NPR. In Trump’s first term, he harshly criticized public media, but those were just words, not actions. His administration also proposed annual budgets that would have zeroed out the funding, but didn’t successfully pressure Congress to follow through.
In Trump’s second term, he seemingly knows which buttons to press. He (or, probably more accurately, his aides) targeted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in several different ways and sold Republican lawmakers on a DOGE-branded rescission that passed both the House and Senate.
CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes isn’t sure Trump is undoing his first term as much as he is better prepared this time.
HOLMES: Trump and his allies had four years to prepare for him to be president again. His allies used that time to create a framework for a second term agenda, as well as brainstorm potential roadblocks and work-arounds to those roadblocks, to ensure that they could start enacting his agenda on Day 1.
The first time around, even members of Trump’s own campaign were surprised he won. They had almost no real transition and Trump had to rely on Washington Republicans, many of whom did not have the same ideas as him, to help fill out the cabinet and guide him. And while he knew what he wanted to do, he had no real understanding of how to get it done. Now, he is working in unison with almost every inch of his administration to get what he wants done — and it’s working.
Holmes’ point carries over to immigration, Trump’s signature issue. He is more effectively carrying through with mass deportations than he did in his first term. With a more pliant Congress, he has money for his border wall, the go-ahead to turn ICE into the nation’s largest and best-funded police force, and the help of Republican governors to create new detention centers to hold undocumented immigrants — not just violent criminals — he wants to deport. When he leaves office, the country will look a lot different after his second term than it did after his first.
