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.
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 a string of recriminations about his character and abilities.
They’ve been replaced by a cohort of advisers and officials uninterested in keeping Trump in check. Instead of acting as bulwarks against him, those working for Trump this time around share his views and are intent on upholding the extreme pledges he made as a candidate without concern for norms, traditions or law that past aides sought to maintain.
Trump’s axis of influence has shifted greatly since he left office in January 2021. While his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were once prominent campaign surrogates and senior White House staffers, they’ve since stepped away from the daily churn of politics. Ivanka Trump has made clear she has no plans to return to the West Wing, and while Kushner has been involved in the transition efforts, sources familiar with his thinking said he is unlikely to leave his private equity firm.
Instead, Trump has found himself relying on people like Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk and Susie Wiles throughout his third run for the White House.
