Inauguration Day has arrived, and what was once nearly unimaginable is now our reality — Donald Trump is returning to the Oval Office.
For both supporters and detractors of Trump, one question looms over the nation today: What’s next? Trump’s first term offers some clues, and I witnessed it up close as a national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. However, much has changed since then.
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Trump begins his second term as a convicted felon, but for all intents and purposes, he’s free from legal entanglements over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and his hoarding of top-secret national security documents.
I fully anticipate that Trump will hit the ground running on three priorities: retribution, immigration reform and deconstructing the federal bureaucracy.
He’s emboldened not only by escaping any real legal accountability, but also by the 2024 Supreme Court ruling granting the president near-total immunity. Furthermore, Trump views his narrow victory in November as a public mandate, a sanctioning of his MAGA agenda that many in his first administration resisted. And naturally, Trump is predictably unpredictable.
In short, this will be a very different administration from the one I served in.
Working in Trump’s White House, I learned quickly to take him at his word. He isn’t as enigmatic as he is made out to be and typically says exactly what he plans to do. I fully anticipate that Trump will hit the ground running on three priorities: retribution, immigration reform and deconstructing the federal bureaucracy. These are the promises he campaigned on and is most motivated to pursue. And he will, aggressively.
Trump being Trump, political warfare will take precedence and will be easiest to initiate from the executive branch. Trump’s enemies list would make Richard Nixon blush, as it includes current and former elected officials (yes, even presidents), military and intelligence officers, prosecutors, judges, journalists, political operatives, corporate entities and others. Anyone who has publicly criticized, challenged, scrutinized, blown the whistle on or brought suit against Trump is a potential target. His weaponized Justice Department will be busy from the jump, with high-profile investigations launched immediately.
Policy is more complicated, and immigration policy especially so. Consider that Trump’s first term saw a sharp rise in border encounters, despite harsh policies that were poorly planned but devastatingly effective in sowing fear and pain. His executive orders tore migrant families apart with no plan to reunite them and inflicted unspeakable trauma on children, with many still separated today. The intent was clear: dehumanize immigrants and create a chilling effect to deter others from seeking refuge in the United States.
Punitive policies like these will make a swift comeback, with fewer voices willing to push back against the machinery of cruelty.
Alongside the cruelty was the chaos. I was at the epicenter of it, working firsthand on the travel ban in the harrowing early days of Trump’s first term. Policies were rolled out with little notice, zero coordination and no regard for their human toll, never mind the impact on our international relations. This unrelenting chaos wasn’t a bug of the administration but a feature — a deliberate strategy to sow division, test the limits of power and dismantle norms in the name of political theater.
Alongside the cruelty was the chaos. I was at the epicenter of it, working firsthand on the travel ban in the harrowing early days of Trump’s first term.
As Trump takes office in a new era of unrestrained leadership, the cruelty and chaos will evolve into a more calculated agenda. Having nixed the bipartisan border bill last year to make mass deportations the crown jewel of his campaign, Trump will lean hard on Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to make a show of it. Count on institutionalized brutality and the deportation of naturalized or even native-born citizens. We can probably expect to see an uptick in vigilantism and hate crimes. These will abate only if Trump’s supporters perceive that the human and financial costs outweigh any benefits.
Then there’s the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. With DOGE, Trump will be more effective at breaking the system than in his first term. Expect a federal hiring freeze to be at the top of the executive orders Trump issues right out of the gate.
My greatest fear is the risk of foreign-driven terrorist attacks as cuts to our intelligence and national security weaken defenses and allies grow hesitant to share critical intelligence. In the aftermath of such an attack, Trump would be likely to follow his familiar pattern: spreading misinformation, making premature accusations and politicizing tragedy for his own agenda. Even more alarming is the potential for him to militarize law enforcement, pushing the United States toward a police state. Under the guise of security, this could lead to excessive force and the suppression of civil liberties, threatening the very freedoms he claims to protect.
The crippling of federal law enforcement will also fuel the ongoing rise in domestic terrorist threats. Trump’s choice for FBI director, Kash Patel, has openly vowed to gut the FBI, focused on downsizing the workforce and flirted with the idea of closing the agency’s headquarters and turning it into a museum — the very agency tasked with identifying and defeating domestic terrorists. Trump, as president, often ignored or downplayed these threats, though he at times he openly expressed fondness for far-right extremists — like the ones who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. But a second Trump administration is likely to be more focused on personal grievance investigations rather than legitimate domestic threats.
Trump voters who hoped dismantling the federal government would translate into “draining the swamp” will be sorely disappointed. Instead, midlevel bureaucrats will lose jobs, and government functions will be disrupted or outright eliminated while Trump’s billionaire tech allies funnel public dollars into private pursuits. Some things never change.
This isn’t just another inauguration. It’s the start of a darker chapter in U.S. history that many Americans won’t fully grasp until it’s well underway. Trump’s unpredictability, penchant for exploiting divisions and relentless pursuit of power remain, but his second term promises to be far more extreme and devoid of accountability. The American people must brace themselves for what’s to come.