Donald Trump is heading into his second term with a substantially different attitude than he did with the first, journalists who have covered his presidency told Politico on Friday.
The general consensus of four reporters who have studied him, wrote Michael Kruse, is that "Trump is Trump, always has been, always will be — fractious, breakneck, unscripted — but after Jan. 6, two failed assassination attempts and an array of prosecutions (and convictions) didn’t stop him from getting reelected by a larger margin than the first time he won, he has, they say, a different sort of confidence and nerve."
One of these reporters, Meredith McGraw, said an adviser close to Trump — who has proposed some extreme ideas in his next term including military-enforced mass deportations and across-the-board tariffs on consumer goods — has echoed this sentiment clearly.
Trump, she said, now has "a different kind of confidence ... he knows how government works. He knows what pressure points there are in the government to push. And I think that’s what you’re seeing with some of these picks. It’s not only loyalty. He knows that by picking certain people, he’s daring Senate Republicans to go against him — but he’s also daring the entire government apparatus to defy him."
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An advisor close to Trump, she said, told her, “Look, he survived two assassination attempts, he’s been indicted how many times — he really is at this moment feeling kind of invincible and sort of emboldened in a way that he never has before.”
But though Trump has this confidence to dare the apparatus of government to defy him, already cracks are showing as his bluff is called in certain cases, the report states.
The clearest example of this was Trump's nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to serve as his attorney general — which caused sharp pushback even from his own party in the Senate amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into accusations he engaged in child sex trafficking. Gaetz ultimately withdrew amid the controversy.
