How Trump’s Second Term Has Already Gone Beyond His First

Five examples out of many.

Good morning! It’s Monday, February 3, 2025. President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress is 29 days away. Election Day 2025 is 274 days away. Election Day 2026 is 638 days away.

Photo by the Trump campaign

In his first term, President Donald Trump briefly employed a low-level speechwriter named Darren Beattie. A former Duke professor, Beattie entered the public eye in 2018 after CNN reported that, two years before, he had attended a conference attended by several prominent white nationalists. Within days of CNN reaching out to Trump’s aides about the story, Beattie was fired from the White House.

Beattie has not exactly shied away from controversy in the years since. On January 6, 2021, he repeatedly praised the Capitol rioters — “The forgotten man speaks,” he cheered — and sent a series of tweets calling for various Black people on both sides of the aisle to “take a KNEE to MAGA.” He has since referred to the riot as a “fedsurrection,” becoming a key promoter of the disproven conspiracy theory that the Capitol attack was planned by the FBI.

Last night, the news outlet Semafor reported that Beattie had been named Acting Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. It was notable that the appointment was being made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, considering Beattie and Rubio appear to agree on very little: while Rubio sponsored legislation in the Senate to punish China for its “grotesque campaign of genocide against Uyghurs and other minorities,” Beattie has said that the Chinese “aren’t genocidal” and simply “object to Uyghur supremacy and Uyghurness.”

Beattie has also said that “Taiwan will inevitably belong to China” and “it’s not worth expending any capital to prevent” that outcome (then-Sen. Rubio introduced several bills to protect Taiwan) and that “NATO is a greater threat to American liberty than the Chinese Communist Party” (Rubio, in an ironic twist, co-authored the law that prevents presidents from unilaterally pulling out of NATO).

Rubio’s decision to tap Beattie (assuming that it came from Rubio) appears to be an attempt to curry favor with the MAGA right, which was aggressively opposed to his appointment as Secretary of State. (Rubio has also named Michael Anton, another major MAGA figure, as the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning.)

Out of the gusher of news emerging from Washington the past few days, the Beattie appointment is an admittedly minor development. But his trajectory — from being fired as a speechwriter job in Trump I to being named to a top State Department post in Trump II — is a simple illustration of a broader phenomenon: Trump is moving to reshape the U.S. government in his second term in ways that he never could or did in his first.

This is true of both policy and personnel in several major categories:

TARIFFS

In his first term… Trump imposed sectoral tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico, but the only time he tried to impose across-the-board tariffs on either neighbor, he ultimately pulled back from his threatened 5% tariffs on Mexico after backlash from Republican senators, White House aides, and business leaders (as well as a handful of concessions from Mexico).

↪ Now… Tariffs five times as large are set to go into effect against both Canada and Mexico tomorrow morning (along with smaller tariffs against China), in “the most extensive act of protectionism taken by a U.S. president in almost a century,” as Bloomberg put it. His staff is fully on board; barely a peep has been heard from most Republican lawmakers.

FBI

In his first term… When Trump mused about firing Chris Wray as FBI director and replacing him with Kash Patel, then-Attorney General William Barr responded that it would happen “over my dead body.” Trump never removed Wray, who was confirmed with near-unanimous support and respected on both sides of the aisle.

↪ Now… Wray stepped down before Trump was even sworn in, knowing he’d be fired. Patel has been nominated to succeed him, and appears poised to be confirmed. As the bureau prepares for his ascension, several top FBI officials have already been ousted and Trump’s team has demanded the names of thousands of others, preparing to potentially purge all agents who worked on the January 6th investigation.

INTELLIGENCE

In his first term… Trump named former Sen. Dan Coats, a longtime fixture of the Republican establishment, as his first Director of National Intelligence (DNI). When Coats stepped down, Trump tried to nominate John Ratcliffe to succeed him, but Trump withdrew the pick after a number of Republican senators expressed concerns. (A few months later, Trump re-nominated Ratcliffe and the Senate confirmed him, 49-44.)

↪ Now… Ratcliffe is what passes for a moderate Trump pick. He was confirmed with bipartisan support, 74-25, to become CIA Director last month. Meanwhile, Trump’s pick for DNI — Tulsi Gabbard — is about as far from Dan Coats as one could stray, every bit as critical of America’s intelligence establishment and foreign policy norms as Coats was representative of them. It remains to be seen whether Gabbard will be confirmed, although the fact that she was even nominated speaks to how many fewer guardrails Trump feels constrained by this term compared to last.

FOREIGN AID

In his first term… Trump’s director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was Mark E. Green, a mainstream former Wisconsin congressman.¹ Before taking the job, Green labored to receive assurances from his bosses “that the agency won’t be gutted or devoured by the State Department during Trump’s tenure”; when he left in 2020, he received bipartisan plaudits for upholding USAID’s mission, although his successor for the final months of Trump’s administration didn’t prove as popular.

↪ Now… USAID is in turmoil. The agency’s website and social media accounts have been turned off. Employees received an email telling them not to come into work this morning; some who did were prevented from entering the building. Rumors are flying around Washington that Trump is preparing to do exactly what Green feared (and succeeded in staving off) in the first term: shut down USAID and place the currently independent agency under the State Department umbrella, despite legal questions about whether he can do so by executive fiat.

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And then there’s the other major change of Trump’s second term: the presence of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who — despite not having received Senate confirmation to any administration post — appears to wield influence with little parallel to any figures from Trump’s first term or, indeed, from administrations past.

Musk’s fingerprints have been evident in many of Trump’s most radical attempts to implement aggressive change, from his efforts to block the flow of federal dollars (Musk’s team has been granted access to the Treasury Department’s payments system) to his campaign to shrink the federal workforce (an email offering employees the opportunity to accept a “deferred resignation” used the same subject line, “Fork in the Road,” as an email Musk sent to Twitter employees when he bought the app.)

Musk’s deputies have also sought to take control at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the government’s HR agency, and the General Services Administration (GSA), its real estate arm. Most recently, he has focused his attention on USAID, where top officials were placed on administrative leave after trying (unsuccessfully) to block Musk allies from accessing classified systems on Saturday.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk wrote on X, the platform he owns on Sunday, offering no evidence of criminal activities. “Time for it to die.”

In an X livestream later in the day, Musk announced that he had discussed the matter with Trump and the duo had agreed that the agency should be eliminated. “And so we’re shutting it down,” the billionaire announced.

1. Not to be confused with Mark A. Green, the much more controversial sitting Tennessee congressman, who Trump was forced to withdraw as his Army Secretary nominee in his first term after reports of his comments about transgender people, including that “transgender is a disease.” Another great example of comments that sunk a nomination in Trump I but would barely rate as a controversy in Trump II.