How different are Trump's first and second terms?
I just wrapped up the first of what will likely be several American presidency courses taught during the second Trump term. Like most observers – those teaching this material professionally and those who made better choices – I was generally surprised and overwhelmed at the pace of news and high volume of events requiring, or defying, explanation.
But one challenge I hadn’t really thought about was how to consider Trump’s first and second terms. I instinctively broke them down into very distinct entities, products of different politics and times, and with different political approaches. My students were more likely to blur them and to see the questions of the first terms through the lens of what’s happening now. One likely reason is that younger people are less familiar with the first term and likely encountering a lot of the material for the first time. I assigned some reading that emphasized the relationship between Trump’s first term policies and the standard GOP approach – a chapter on foreign policy from this volume, and a chapter from John Graham from the forthcoming Trump Legacy book that Bert Rockman, Andrew Rudalevige and I edited for this series, which explains how Trump’s first-term domestic policies on taxes, deregulation and immigration diverged from standard Republican politics but also resembled them.
My thinking was that we will be much less likely to see assessments of this term that are grounded in “ordinariness,” and my instinct was to stress the differences between Trump’s two non-consecutive terms. But it poses an interesting question – how should we think about these two terms? They are undoubtedly different. How political analysts think about these differences is relevant for how we think about the presidency: a reflection of the individual in the office; party dynamics, social movements and other political factors; and the role of timing and context.
Continuities in the Trump project
There are, of course, a number of important continuities: the constant news cycle, and the uncertainty and instability. The “cruelty is the point” approach to immigration, with a side of reducing legal immigration as well. This week’s big news has been the Qatari plane, and the self-dealing and emoluments violations are familiar themes as well.
The source of these continuities can be traced to two related factors: Trump’s own temperament and disposition, and the Trumpist project. We might see some of the main differences as ones in degree and not in kind, and we might conclude that the individual in the White House is the most important variable.
What a difference four years makes
One question I kept asking my students (not really having a fully developed answer myself) was why Trump seemed to be experiencing fewer political constraints in the second term. Political constraints on the presidency are a major theme of the course; looking at them helps to explain a lot about the other presidents this century that we study – including Trump’s first term to a large extent. One question that I think remains sort of open is how much following the troubled Biden presidency has empowered Trump. Biden ran in 2020 promising to be the anti-Trump. He delivered a slow, policy-focused, unflashy presidency that restored norms and normal practices – even those that may not have met the coalition or the moment. The Democratic coalition wobbled. The electorate narrowly chose, it seems, their rosier memories of the Trump presidency. It’s less clear that this particular dynamic is what has contributed to the subsequent. Trump presidency being so different from its first term.
But it is clear that the Trumpist movement has grown and expanded, becoming a stronger force both within the formal GOP – organizational leaders, members of Congress, governors, and also in ideological media and online spaces. In his first term, Trump was a unique figure because he had come from outside the party establishment and set so many party figures on edge, exacting uneasy support from figures like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. Now Trump’s GOP opponents have largely been coopted or left politics. In the second term, he’s unique because he leads a movement that both exists in the usual channels outside party politics, and has significant influence on the party. This is an enormously powerful position for a president to be in, and the opposite of Biden’s slippery hold on the Democratic coalition. This comparison has the potential to teach us a lot about the importance of such coalitions in presidential politics.
Minoritarian vs. authoritarian
As the last section suggests, the most obvious and important difference between Trump’s first and second terms has been the extent to which he’s gone far beyond the limits of norms, laws and the Constitution. There are numerous examples of this, which are well-catalogued, but one thing that I keep coming back to is the way that the administration’s substantive agenda has been largely pursued through executive action. Congress has played a very small role. The authoritarianism has come from ICE detentions without due process, renditions of individuals – including US citizens – to foreign countries, and verbal denials of basic Constitutional protections. Trump on law piece Some of this was present in the first term, including the eventual refusal to accept election results and participate in a peaceful transfer of power. But when we compare May 2025 to May 2017, the current situation looks a lot more like a dictatorship. Here I think there’s a useful, if fine, distinction between minoritarian and authoritarian. The first term agenda was largely a minoritarian one. This was true almost by definition since Trump had lost the popular vote. And we still see a minoritarian agenda in the Congressional GOP’s actions to cut Medicaid, an unpopular move.
The tariffs and dismantling of federal programs by the procedurally questionable DOGE are also unpopular – but I’d argue that they’re part of an authoritarian agenda. In addition to running roughshod over institutional boundaries, they seem designed to exact economic pain across the board and create uncertainty. The job losses and termination of grants not only impose an ideological agenda, of a piece with the pursuit of law firms and ActBlue – they also serve to weaken civil society, and make Americans used to the idea of their government acting upon them, creating constraints on their daily lives. The signs of these ideas were there in the first Trump administration. Administration officials used highly undemocratic language and approached the voters as subjects, not citizens. Trump has never expressed much support for legitimate opposition or Constitutional boundaries). But in the second term, these statements are reflected in actions that have so far had a profound effect.
So one answer to the question of how we should think about the second Trump administration in relation to the first is one about institutions and structure. Trump’s style and basic politics might be the same. But his party, and his relationship to it, have changed in important ways. Furthermore – and perhaps as a result of this – the administration’s approach has undergone a subtle but real shift from minoritarian to authoritarian politics, reflecting an argument by both critics and supporters that suggest not only a change in leadership, but a change in regime.