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Trump’s Second Coming Is Worse Than the First
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.
Feb 24, 2025
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 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.
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.
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'DOGE-Affiliated Goons' Accused of Locking Career Civil Servants Out of Key Databases
"Congress famously has the power of the purse," wrote one expert. "But it looks like DOGE is trying to snatch it."
Jan 31, 2025
Reporting Friday that aides to Elon Musk—the billionaire backer of Republican President Donald Trump who runs the Department of Government Efficiency—locked career civil servants out of computer systems containing the personal data of millions of federal employees raised alarms among observers who said the move is consistent with the administration's efforts to assert authoritarian control over the federal government.
An unnamed official at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) toldReuters that "we have no visibility" into what Musk aides "are doing with the computer and data systems," and "that is creating great concern."
"There is no oversight," the official said, adding that "it creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
No one elected Musk and he holds no official position—and yet: “Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the US government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” www.reuters.com/world/us/mus...
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— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath.bsky.social) January 31, 2025 at 12:50 PM
The Reuters report came on the same day that The Washington Post reported that David Lebryk, who has worked in nonpolitical positions at the U.S. Treasury Department since the George H.W. Bush administration, will retire following "a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems."
As the Post noted:
Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses, and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate.
On Friday, the Trump administration ordered the General Services Administration to create a plan to slash 50% from the independent agency's budget, according to journalist Ken Klippenstein, who reported senior officials were left looking "shell-shocked'" by the directive.
Lebryk's announcement underscored what critics have warned is an aggressive push by Musk and other unelected Trump acolytes to sideline civil servants as part of an agenda in which MAGA sycophants are empowered to weaken government checks and balances and ensure total loyalty to the president, who has repeatedly flirted with authoritarianism.
In a Friday article highlighting Lebryk's announcement, Gizmodo's Matt Novak reported that "while it's not clear why [Department of Government Efficiency] wants access, experts are alarmed because there's basically no plausible explanation that doesn't involve tinkering with critical government functions by sidestepping Congress."
"Lebryk's departure is apparently related to the interference by DOGE-affiliated goons to access these payment systems," Novak asserted.
Common Dreamsreported earlier this week that Trump loyalists in the OPM and Office of Management and Budget associated with Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right takeover of the federal government—are leading a sweeping effort to purge career civil servants and replace them with officials who will do the president's bidding without question.
Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy, toldReuters Friday that "this makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on."
Despite its name, DOGE is a presidential advisory committee, not a federal department—and critics including Novak have accused the billionaire Trump supporter of reaching "his tentacles into virtually every agency."
"Congress famously has the power of the purse," he wrote. "But it looks like DOGE is trying to snatch it."
Earlier this week, Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, warned that Trump "is trying every trick he and his Project 2025 cronies can think of to circumvent established civil service protections so they can purge the civil service of experts and replace them with political loyalists."
"The victims here, as is always the case with Donald Trump, are the American people who will see government services and benefits allocated not by nonpartisan civil servants, but by partisan hacks," Connolly added.
Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations, told the Post Friday that the prospect of government officials using the federal payments system in service of personal political motives is without precedent.
"It's never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda," Mazur stressed. "You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case."
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Unscrubbed PDFs Reveal Authors of Trump Memos Are Project 2025 Heavy Hitters
"Trump has denied or downplayed links to Project 2025," said the researcher who exposed the memos' authors. "These documents show that implementation is well underway."
Jan 28, 2025
A U.S. tech researcher on Tuesday revealed that the authors of policies published by Republican President Donald Trump's Office of Personnel Management have links to the far-right Heritage Foundation and its most infamous initiative, Project 2025.
On her [citation needed] website, Molly White exposed Noah Peters as the true author of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) acting Director Charles Ezell's Tuesday memo providing guidance on policy strikingly similar to Schedule F—which White described as "an effort to enable Trump to purge civil servants and replace them with loyalists."
White also revealed that James Sherk wrote a pair of joint OMP/Office of Management and Budget memos forcing federal workers to return to in-person work and implementing a government-wide hiring freeze.
According to White:
As far back as 2023, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was recommending Peters for a position in Trump's second administration. Peters had previously been appointed in 2019 as the solicitor at the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), where he "aided and defended Trump appointees' anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency's own precedents," according to Court Accountability Action and State Democracy Defenders Action. Peters returned to private practice in 2022, but recently quietly updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new title of "senior adviser" to the Office of Personnel Management. This appointment does not appear to have been announced anywhere else...
James Sherk was announced as assistant to the president for domestic policy on January 18. A White House official during Trump's first term, Sherk was a key figure in Trump's Schedule F endeavors. After [former Democratic President Joe] Biden was elected and he quickly repealed Schedule F, Sherk slunk off to the America First Policy Institute to continue efforts to advance Trump's policies. Prior to these positions, he was a staff member at the Heritage Foundation.
White pointed to an unverified Reddit post by someone claiming to be an OPM employee and federal worker for nearly 20 years as cause for alarm.
"I've never witnessed anything even remotely close to what's happening right now," the poster wrote. "In short, there's a hostile takeover of the civil service."
"Let me say this in no uncertain terms—OPM has been compromised and taken over... by outside politicals," the Reddit user continued. "In just five days, they managed to push aside dozens of nonpolitical, career civil servants who were there specifically to prevent the civil service from becoming the president's henchmen."
"The nonpolitical civil servants here at OPM are watching helplessly as our government is being systematically dismantled bit by bit," the poster warned. Even the [inspector generals] are being fired to prevent them from investigating the numerous whistleblower complaints we've filed."
Returning to the memos written by Peters and Sherk, White noted: "While Project 2025 and similar initiatives have been public about their plans to reshape the federal workforce, Trump and other figures in his administration have denied or downplayed links with the initiative. These documents provide further evidence that the implementation is already well underway, with designated personnel quietly drafting policies that were intended only to be publicly attributed to those in charge of the federal agencies."
At least 140 people who worked in Trump's first administration—including six former Cabinet secretaries—have been involved with Project 2025.
On Monday, the National Treasury Employees Union—which represents approximately 150,000 workers across 35 federal agencies—sued the Trump administration over its moves to politicize the civil service and disempower employees.
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