Trump’s second term will look nothing like his first

Donald Trump’s election victory this week will return him to the White House, but both his allies and detractors have made clear his second time around will look nothing like the first.

Donald Trump’s election victory will return him to the White House, but both his allies and detractors have made clear his second time around will look nothing like the first. With the Republican Party now entirely his, its anti-Trump figures banished for good, Trump will enter the Oval Office with both the experience of having done the job before and a wealth of resentments over how he believes the system failed him. Unlike his first Electoral College win in 2016, Trump is on track to win the popular vote this year — providing him an opening to claim a mandate of nationwide support that eluded him last time, much to his frustration. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump told an ecstatic crowd in West Palm Beach, Florida, early Wednesday morning. He summed up his approach to a second term as such: “I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.” That makes the coming four years uncertain ones that cannot be easily predicted by the first Trump presidency. His rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, tried warning voters of the risks. But to his supporters, the promises of fixing what he called a broken country — even if it means abandoning long-held principles — was the whole point. Figures who once hoped to act as stabilizing forces — including a string of chiefs of staff, defense secretaries, a national security adviser, a national intelligence adviser and an attorney general — have abandoned Trump, leaving behind recriminations about his character and abilities.