What US president’s first four days tell us about next four years

Washington: Walking around central Washington in sub-zero temperatures on inauguration day, Nannette Piccolo, a bar-admitted lawyer from Florida, was keen to inform me that many non-Americans have the wrong impression of Donald Trump.

“Here’s a man who doesn’t have to do what he’s doing. That means a lot,” she said. “He actually loves America, he cares about America. We understand it because we live it every day You’ve got to live in America to really understand America.”

She was right. The scenes in the US capital and around the country – tens of thousands of people dressed up in Trump-branded gear, chanting a politician’s name, honking their car horns, singing and dancing and cheering the “greatest political comeback of all time” … for many onlookers, it might have seemed like another planet.

But Trump has changed America. He changed it in 2017, he changed it again on January 6, 2021, and he changed it considerably on his second inauguration day when he picked up a black Sharpie and began an unprecedented and chaotic display of presidential power. “Shock and awe,” was how his press secretary sold it the next morning. Or as a bank teller in Washington put it to me: “He kicked the door down.”

Just how much America will change over the next four years – and in what ways – is the question now before us. Does Trump’s frenetic start signal the gloves are off for good? Or will he run out of steam after acting on his promises? How significantly will he be cruelled by Congress and the courts? And will the rolling chaos that subsumed his first administration befall this one too?

Of course, Trump will also change the world. He claims to have done so before even taking office, taking credit for the Gaza ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas despite the Biden administration’s work in sealing the deal. Now he is attempting to pressure Russia’s Vladimir Putin into a fast “deal” to end the war in Ukraine, through a mix of flattery, shame and ultimatum.

His tariff program threatens to upend global markets and supply chains, with even close allies targeted, and his reincarnation of American manifest destiny – this time running through Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada and Mars – has morphed from an amusing motif to a serious unknown.

“The handbrake is off,” as former Australian ambassador Joe Hockey said this week. Trump 2.0 has no future election to worry about, Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, a sympathetic Supreme Court, Democrats in disarray and, as Trump told global business leaders in a virtual address to the World Economic Forum, “a massive mandate from the American people”.

Australia, meanwhile, is trying to walk on a tightrope above the chaos. After scoring a rare-as-hen’s-teeth seat inside the intimate Capitol Rotunda for the inauguration, Foreign Minister Penny Wong met Secretary of State Marco Rubio just hours after he was sworn in; first as part of the Quad group of Australia, the US, India and Japan, then one-on-one.

It was an important meeting and a signal, Wong said, of the priority the Trump administration places on the Indo-Pacific. The Quad wanted to be more ambitious, she said, though where that ambition would be directed was unclear. She also left the meeting satisfied Rubio recognised the importance of the economic relationship between the two countries, especially its advantages for the US. Every new administration has a view on trade policy that Australia has to work with, Wong said, “and this is no different”.

Such is the language of diplomacy. But the meeting was certainly noticed. Steven Marshall, a former premier of South Australia and now president of the American Australian Association, said the group was thrilled with the meeting and the resulting communique. “It talked about co-operation economically … that certainly gave us some comfort around some of the scaremongering about tariffs,” he told this masthead.

Still, the second Trump presidency will be anything but business as usual, and already the sequel is looking more determined, more righteous and perhaps more organised than the original. “This is a very different administration from the early days of President Trump’s first administration,” Marshall said.

In 2017, it took Trump six months to act on his campaign pledge to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, and when he did, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk quit in protest from his positions on two White House advisory councils. Musk also tweeted: “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

But things are different in 2025. Trump took just hours to sign an executive order once again withdrawing the US from the pact the Biden administration had rejoined. As a news story, it rated just a mention, squeezed out by his dramatic pardons for the January 6 rioters, his border security crackdown and his war on diversity and inclusion policies. This time Musk said nothing, busy defending his on-stage gesture that resembled a Nazi salute.

Much of Trump’s flurry of activity this week involved rolling back Joe Biden’s legacy and reviving policies from the first Trump administration, such as the “remain in Mexico” policy on the southern border, which he introduced in 2019 and Biden suspended on his first day in office. Trump gave immigration agents expanded power to enforce “expedited removal” of anyone believed to be in the US unlawfully for less than two years – without a hearing – and allowed immigration raids inside “sensitive areas” such as churches or schools. The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, on Friday issued a statement condemning a raid by immigration agents on a local business that resulted in the detention of “undocumented residents as well as citizens, without producing a warrant”.

A vindictive streak ran through many of the orders Trump gave in his first few days back in the Oval Office. He revoked Secret Service protection for his former national security adviser John Bolton, now a Trump critic, as well as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and a key aide, despite them facing ongoing threats from Iran. “You can’t have it for the rest of your life,” Trump said. The aide, Brian Hook, was also among 1000 Biden-era appointees to government posts whom Trump’s team started to identify and dismiss as they were “not aligned with our vision” for America.

While enemies were purged, loyalists were set free. Trump pardoned nearly all 1600 people convicted of crimes relating to the January 6, 2021, riot when the MAGA mob, incited by the now-president, stormed the Capitol to protest against the democratic results of the 2020 election. Outside jails, supporters sang, danced and waved American flags as they awaited the release of what Trump called “hostages”.

Though expected, the pardons came more quickly than many thought, and they were more numerous. Just 14 people had their sentences commuted rather than receiving a full pardon. Many violent offenders were pardoned, which riled some Republican lawmakers, though they expressed unease rather than condemning Trump outright – an indication of the president’s unfettered power in the party at this moment.

The most affecting response came from police officers injured or otherwise caught up in the January 6 riots, including Harry Dunn, a former officer stationed at the Capitol that day, who later sought Democratic preselection for Congress.

“Many of the officers that were brutally assaulted that day are the same officers that protected Donald Trump [at his inauguration] on Monday. Think about that for a minute. Sit with that for a minute,” Dunn said this week.

“The Republican Party has long claimed to be the party of law and order. However, many lawmakers’ silence and refusal to push back against Donald Trump’s actions make it incredibly hard to take that claim seriously. Donald Trump told you exactly what he was going to do. My outrage lies with Donald Trump, absolutely, but I think I’m more upset at the people who are all surprised now and shocked now that Donald Trump did what he said he was going to do.”

The crackdown on employment policies favouring minorities – known as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – also commanded attention, though not shock. Any DEI activities, mandates or preferences within the federal government were to be stopped, and anyone working on such programs put on paid leave and soon laid off, according to the executive order. Success in the US would be based on hard work and merit, Trump said, not policies that discriminate in favour of someone based on colour or background.

Along with that, Trump issued an executive order declaring there are only two sexes – male and female – and there is no such thing as gender identity or changing one’s gender. This is to be official US government policy and filter down through agencies, policies, signage and documents, such as passports. While the full impact of the order is difficult to immediately gauge, particularly for public schools and health facilities, the American Civil Liberties Union said it was “a plan to erase transgender people’s existence under the law”.

US conservatives applauded these moves to overturn the new liberal consensus on gender and inclusivity as the symbolic end to the march of “wokeness” through American companies, universities and institutions. But, like so many of Trump’s initial actions, they have the capacity – perhaps they are even likely – to change the direction of the zeitgeist around the world.

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Marshall said the executive order on DEI was immediately topical in business circles and that there were many Australian companies that valued diversity and would need to work out how they would respond. Meanwhile, The Australian Financial Review reported on a backlash to new diversity requirements for directors of ASX-listed companies that was escalating following Trump’s actions.

Asked on Sky News about the DEI issue, Nationals leader David Littleproud said the failure of the Voice referendum – backed by many big companies – stood as a lesson for corporate Australia that their job was to create wealth and jobs, not “determine the moral compass of this country” or appease minorities.

So many changes were rushed across the Resolute desk in this historic week that their significance could easily be lost. There was the withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, a lifeline for TikTok, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and declassifying records about the assassination of JFK. One executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponisation of the Federal Government”, asks the attorney general and director of national intelligence to review the activities of their departments and agencies over the four years of the Biden administration to determine if they targeted “perceived political opponents” – i.e. Trump and his supporters.

Then, during his first sit-down interview since returning to the White House, Trump would not rule out a criminal investigation into Biden, noting the former president did not pre-emptively pardon himself, and remarking that Biden or people close to him should have to “go through” what he went through during his (Trump’s) prosecutions.

On The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart drily called the inauguration a “historic vibe shift of a day”. The term, as deployed by writer Sean Monahan in 2021, refers to a realignment in the culture towards new norms. But it has also been used to describe a political pivot supposedly happening in the Western world, led by the US, against “wokeness” and “softness” – especially among men resentful of the rise of women. Hence their embrace of the strongman in Trump.

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Writing in The New York Times, Ezra Klein noted that, on paper, Trump’s victory was thin; he won the popular vote by a tiny margin. But there was more to it than votes. “Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” Klein wrote. “The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.” Trump seemed to sense this in December, after winning the election, when he observed: “The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

For all the fanfare in the streets, the mania behind the desk and the vibes in the air, we cannot yet know how successful the Trump takeover will be. His promise to end the war in Ukraine hinges on a deal with Putin. His demands that OPEC nations reduce oil prices and central banks lower interest rates may well go unanswered. Domestically, the pushback has already begun, with a judge temporarily blocking Trump’s executive order to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented migrants, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”. Dozens more legal challenges are expected.

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Trump’s bromance with billionaire Elon Musk has shown early signs of tension after Musk criticised the new administration’s major AI infrastructure announcement, dubbed Stargate. The president brushed it off as a consequence of Musk’s feud with one of the tech billionaires involved in the project, OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Nonetheless, sudden bust-ups with cabinet members and staff were a regular feature of Trump’s first stint.

Marshall noted one factor in Trump’s favour this time: his respected chief-of-staff Susie Wiles, known as a careful and quiet achiever. “She’s running a tight ship,” he said. “That contrasts very much with his first term.”

Donald Trump always said he would put America first. His barnstorming first few days back in power show he intends to do so with an American fist.

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