The beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential term has most certainly been full of sound and fury. What has it signified?
As in the first Trump administration, it’s been challenging to distinguish between the controversies of the day that will soon be forgotten, and the concrete changes that truly matter and will last.
On many important issues — trade wars, the economy, the future of NATO, US-China relations, mass deportation, DOGE’s efforts to overhaul the federal workforce, potential prosecution of Trump’s political opponents, and the handling of future election results — it’s simply too early to say how things will turn out. Ultimately, it depends on what exactly Trump ends up deciding to do, how effective his team is, and how much pushback he gets.
But other Trump changes already stand out as likely to last — or at least to result in significant consequences.
The sandbagging of Ukraine will clearly have global ramifications. The dismantling of USAID will be very difficult to undo. Many of Trump’s attacks on DEI and affirmative action policies will likely stick, given a sympathetic Supreme Court. And his wholesale cooptation of the Justice Department and use of the pardon power to protect political allies sends an unmistakable message.
1) Trump’s harsh treatment of Ukraine will have global consequences
Trump’s public humiliation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his subsequent cutoff of aid to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, was an incredibly important change in American foreign policy with consequences that are already rippling outward far beyond Ukraine itself.
Indeed, the upshot for Ukraine itself and its war with Russia remains unclear. We don’t yet know whether the Trump administration will eventually reach an accommodation with the Ukrainian government, and how efforts to bring the war to a close will play out.
But already, Trump’s behavior, his willingness to close the door on a decade’s worth of US support for Ukraine, and his questioning of NATO commitments, have sent shock waves across Europe. European nations, now believing US support can’t be counted on, are reevaluating their defense policies.
We can’t know where all this will lead. But one potential consequence is more nuclear proliferation — the prime minister of Poland said last week that, because of Trump’s actions, his country might have to “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.”
2) USAID has been torn down in a way that will be difficult to reverse
In Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government, he’s engineered a bunch of firings and canceled a bunch of contracts. But he wreaked particular havoc on the six-decade-old United States Agency for International Development, which, he bragged, he fed “into the wood chipper.”
Indeed, Trump’s appointees simply declared that they were ending USAID as an independent agency, and moving a much-reduced version of it to the State Department. Most of USAID’s staff was fired or placed on leave, while programs to send life-saving food or medicine abroad were put in limbo.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the “review” of USAID programs was complete, and that 83 percent of its programs would be canceled while the remainder would be restarted. The administration has not yet announced which programs fall into which category. Hopefully much of the most important life-saving aid, like the PEPFAR HIV treatment program, will return to operation.
But Trump is, at the very least, significantly downsizing the US’s commitment to foreign aid while gutting both the government workforce that worked on it, and dealing devastating blows to many nonprofits that provided it with USAID grant money. Even if Democrats return to power in 2029, it will be very difficult to simply turn back the clock and restore everything to where it was — once a sector is this broken, it’s hard to put it back together.
3) Trump is using the federal government to fight the culture war
One of the most striking features of Trump’s new administration is how aggressively his appointees have used federal power to fight the culture war.
Trump has not only rolled back federal affirmative action policies, he’s demanded investigations into universities, nonprofits, and companies that have purportedly “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. He’s threatening funding for institutions that support gender-affirming care for adolescents and young adults. He’s cutting funding to universities that he claims let anti-Semitism flourish on campus (by tolerating protests of Israel’s war in Gaza).
But together, they’ve sent a very clear message that if you go too left, the Trump administration will try to punish you — by withholding federal funds if you get them, or investigating you if you don’t, or deporting you if you’re a non-citizen. The chilling effect is the point — fear has spread in universities, among researchers, and elsewhere, as people now have to watch what they say.
The anti-“wokeness” crusaders now in power may well overreach and provoke a backlash, and many of Trump’s policies here may not survive court scrutiny. But with his appointees committed to waging culture war against the left, they’ll have four years in power to figure out new ways to do it — and will likely do a lot of damage.
4) Trump has politicized the rule of law
Since the Watergate scandal, there’s been a norm that Justice Department decisions about criminal prosecutions should be made independently of White House interference, and that the Department of Justice needed to uphold its reputation as an impartial administrator of justice.
So, under President Joe Biden, federal prosecutors indicted Donald Trump. But the Biden DOJ also prosecuted Democratic megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) — as well as, ultimately, the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
Trump, in contrast, began his administration with a broader pardon of January 6 rioters (including violent ones). He then appointed loyalists atop the DOJ and the FBI, who have gone on to purge many of those institutions’ existing leaders. Cases against certain connected Republicans quickly went away. The DOJ tried to drop the case against Adams, apparently in hopes of coercing him into cooperating with deportations, in what became a public fiasco. The acting US attorney for the District of Columbia threatened Democratic members of Congress with transparently baseless investigations.
Trump has long wanted his political enemies prosecuted, but making a phony case stick is easier said than done. In each instance, his team would have to convince DOJ prosecutors, a grand jury, and ultimately a judge and jury that the charges are legitimate.
However, it’s actually much easier to just have a standard where the DOJ avoids prosecuting the president’s allies. Past Justice Departments could be pressured, based on leaks to the press or complaints from Congress, into launching investigations into their “own team” — think special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment in Trump’s first term, or the Hunter Biden special counsel under President Biden.
But if Trump’s Justice Department thinks they can get away with ignoring those complaints, they will. They don’t seem to care much about maintaining the DOJ’s reputation for independence — they’d rather use it as a weapon. How effective they’ll be at attacking their enemies remains to be seen, but it’s a safe bet that friends of Donald Trump won’t see themselves in much legal trouble from the federal government in the next four years.
