Comparing Trump’s First and Second Terms
Washington Watch
February 24th, 2025
Dr. James J. Zogby ©
President
Arab American Institute
Among the significant differences between Donald Trump’s first term as president in 2017 and his return to the White House in 2025, this time around he appears more in control and better prepared. And despite the drastic measures of his first weeks in office, the opposition he is facing appears more subdued and less focused.
Though he won the presidency in 2016, Trump was not yet master of the Republican Party. The party’s “old guard” found him not conservative enough, a personal embarrassment, and too erratic to lead the Grand Old Party. His Make America Great Again movement, though substantial, had not yet demonstrated its capacity for mobilizing its ranks to sway members of Congress to fully embrace Trump and his agenda.
That has clearly changed. Trump’s control of the Republican Party, its apparatus and congressional cohort are complete. His opponents have been silenced or faded into the background.
In 2017, to bolster confidence in his administration, he brought on board a number of older, respected individuals to fill sensitive posts in the White House and Cabinet. Some of them, at times, served as a check on his penchant for unpredictable behavior.
The cast of characters in the 2025 Trump White House and Cabinet are themselves more unpredictable and less qualified to serve in their assigned posts than the 2017 appointees. The number one qualification is being a longtime Trump devotee—or having made amends and groveled sufficiently for any past opposition.
The most significant difference between Trump 2017 and Trump 2025 is that he now has a more clearly defined agenda and is more prepared to impose it.
When Ronald Reagan won in 1980, he arrived in Washington with a well-developed conservative game plan designed by the Heritage Foundation to transform the federal government according to conservative principles. In 2017, Trump entered the Oval Office with an array of ideas, complaints, and actions to be taken, but without a plan to implement them.
In 2025, many of the ideas, complaints, and actions are the same as 2017, but they are now bigger, bolder, more thought-through and backed up by extensive plans for implementation developed by the very same Heritage Foundation that helped guide Reagan’s time in the White House. And just as Heritage helped populate Reagan’s administration with hundreds of staff in agencies to help implement the conservative agenda, this year Heritage boasts of having tens of thousands of vetted individuals waiting to serve in the new Trump administration.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, his “hatchet-man,” are running roughshod over the federal government’s institutions and workforce. Entire agencies have been shuttered, and tens of thousands of workers have been fired or placed on indefinite leave, setting the stage for the kind of Trump takeover in 2025 that he was unable to accomplish in 2017.
There’s one final difference to be noted. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was greeted by an eruption of mass protests. They came in waves with advocates for women’s rights and immigrants, and those calling for more restrictive gun laws and an end to police brutality each in turn making their mark. While there have been protests since last November’s election, they’ve lacked the numbers and emotional intensity of those in Trump’s first term.
Much has been written about the threat posed by Trump 2025 for democracy and the impact of the programs and staff that have been terminated by the Trump/Musk wrecking-ball approach to reform. Much less attention has been given to the public’s reaction to these developments. Opinion polls are one way to measure that—a recent Washington Post poll indicates that the American electorate is as divided as ever. 45% approve of Trump’s job performance as opposed to 53% who disapprove. What also comes through in this poll is that there are significantly more respondents who say they “strongly disapprove” than those who say they “strongly approve” of Trump’s job in office.
Given this, why the lack of intensity in the public’s reaction to White House’s actions? One reason may be that the Trump/Musk “shock and awe” assaults on so many targets in just a few days have left the opposition disoriented and demoralized. Add to this the lack of Democratic leadership. In a recent discussion, an elected Democratic leader outlined his party’s approach as simply to keep proposing amendments to Trump’s budget bills to demonstrate how the GOP wants tax cuts for the rich while placing greater burdens on the working class. This, he said, would drag Trump’s favorable ratings down, enabling Democrats to win back the Congress in 2026. This isn’t leadership. It’s crass opportunism and yet another reason why no coherent or effective opposition has been mounted to President Trump’s efforts to take excessive power in his second term.
In the end, it will most likely be Mr. Trump’s own hubris and the contradictions between his promises and his policies that will prove to be his undoing. Just one example: polls show that while his supporters love his bold actions, what they most want to see is the drop in prices and inflation that Trump promised during the campaign. But his use of tariffs and the mass deportation of migrants (who perform essential tasks in the agricultural and service sectors) will inevitably cause prices to rise, without the results that Trump voters were promised. If the improvements in the daily lives of his supporters don’t come, Trump2 could end worse than Trump1.
