This time last week Stewart Rhodes was serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy over his role in a deadly attack on the US Capitol. On Wednesday, two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, Rhodes was inside the Capitol building, wearing a Trump 2020 hat and relaxing at a Dunkin’ Donuts.
With mere strokes of a pen, Trump has launched a rightwing political revolution in America, deploying troops to the US-Mexico border, assailing a constitutional right to citizenship, reversing gender and diversity policies, all but abandoning the fight against the climate crisis and freeing violent criminals who backed him.
The 45th and 47th president, back in the White House for less than a week, electrified his support base with a series of pardons and actions designed to reshape the nation. From an inaugural address that claimed he was chosen by God to the theatrical signing of executive orders before a raucous crowd, his aggressive consolidation of power has drawn comparisons with monarchy.
But the fast and furious onslaught – dubbed “shock and awful” by critics – has met with swift legal challenges and political blowback. The pardoning of January 6 rioters, and his suggestion that far-right groups such as the Proud Boys or Rhodes’s Oath Keepers have a place in politics, evoked the controversies of his first term.
Trump and his allies have “unleashed a sense of revolution” that the average American is unprepared for, warned Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “Folks better make a decision whether or not they’re committed to stopping this extremist rightward fascist march the country is on under Donald Trump and who he’s surrounded by.”
On Monday, minutes after being sworn in, Trump delivered an inaugural address that tore into his predecessor Joe Biden, sitting just feet away. He decried a “corrupt establishment” and federal government unable to provide “basic services” to people hit by natural disasters. “America’s decline is over,” Trump declared, even though he inherits a strong economy and a decrease in illegal border crossings.
It was music to the ears of Maga (Make America great again) fans who flooded into Washington, normally a Democratic bastion, with momentum on their side. At a downtown sports arena they witnessed Elon Musk, a tech billionaire leading Trump’s “department of government efficiency”, give what some interpreted as a Nazi salute.
The president then signed a blizzard of executive orders and took other actions that could have an impact on the lives of millions of Americans and non-citizens.
Nodding to the central theme of his election campaign, he declared a national emergency on the US-Mexico border and issued a broad ban on asylum for migrants “engaged in the invasion across the southern border”.
Trump ordered the Pentagon to prioritise sealing the border and support border wall construction, detention space and migrant transportation. Officials said the military was preparing to send roughly 1,500 additional active-duty troops to the border. Trump also suspended refugee admissions.
In his first TV interview as president, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News: “Open borders with people pouring in. Some of whom, I won’t get into it, but you can look at them and you can say, ‘Could be trouble, could be trouble.’”
In addition, Trump issued an order to end birthright citizenship to children born in the US if neither their mother or father is a US citizen or legal permanent resident. But on Thursday a federal judge blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”.
Trump has also reignited the culture wars. He signed one order calling for the elimination of government diversity programmes, which includes ending all federal offices and jobs related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). He signed another to “recognize two sexes, male and female” on official documents and directed agencies to stop using gender identity or preferred pronouns.
The president ordered federal workers back to the office full time and agencies to take steps to halt remote work arrangements. He reinstated his first-term Schedule F executive order, which would strip potentially tens of thousands of government workers of employment protections and make them easier to fire.
Trump declared a national energy emergency to expand production, scrap regulations and end rules aimed at expediting a transition to electric vehicles. He ordered the US to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, placing the world’s top historic emitter of greenhouse gases outside the global pact aimed at pushing countries to tackle the climate crises.
He also required his administration to begin the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization, saying the global health agency had mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic and other international health crises.
No first-day initiative was more incendiary than Trump’s blanket pardoning of about 1,500 supporters who attacked the US Capitol four years ago in an attempt to overturn his election defeat. The beneficiaries included more than 250 people convicted of assault charges, some having attacked police with makeshift weapons such as flagpoles, a hockey stick, a crutch and a stun gun.
Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman” who stormed the Capitol in Stars-and-Stripes face paint and a horned fur hat, responded on the X social media platform: “I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!! NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHAFU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”
Republicans have claimed to be the party of “law and order” since the days of Richard Nixon but Trump, the first convicted criminal elected president, upended the biggest justice department investigation in history. A handful of Republican senators condemned his decision but most backed him or stayed silent – a tacit acknowledgment of his immense political capital. In his Fox News interview, Trump dismissed the violence against police as “very minor incidents”.
Setmayer, now chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, described the sweeping pardons as “one of the biggest betrayals of our law enforcement officers and anyone who swore to uphold an oath to the constitution in the history of this nation. What an affront and a despicable one at that.
“Frankly I blame all the people who are making excuses for him more than I blame Trump. Trump told us what he was going to do. A convicted felon pardoning felons isn’t all that surprising, is it? It’s all the other people and elected Republicans who know better who are making excuses for it. Shame on all of them.”
Trump’s radical-right transformation is backed by aides and lawyers who have spent four years preparing for his return. It also rests on the premise of perceived legitimacy. “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said in his inaugural address. The White House website states that he won a “landslide election victory” in 2024.
Moreover, the cultural mood – the “vibes” – appear to be moving in his favour. The world’s wealthiest tech entrepreneurs attended his inauguration; Facebook has abandoned third-party factchecking; some companies have eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programmes; a pre-inauguration People’s March was much smaller than the Women’s March of 2017; and some Democrats have shown willingness to work with rather than criticise the new president.
Henry Olsen, author of The Working Class Republican and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “He has the upper hand, not just in the Republican party but in the country as a whole. He will use that to pursue the policies he said he was going to pursue and we don’t know whether they’re going to succeed or not. There will be setbacks and he will have his bumps in the road. We don’t know how serious and how he will react.”
Trump’s win was not a landslide, however. He gained less than half the national popular vote and only beat Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points. Republicans lost some key races in the Senate and only retained the House of Representatives by a wafer-thin margin. Opinion polls show that three in four Americans opposed pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists.
Some question whether the realignment is permanent. John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “It’s certainly an effort at a rightwing revolution, politically consolidating his base, taking advantage of disarray on the other side, putting points on the board and clearly changing the direction and tone. Now, is this a revolution or is it a Thermidor [the short-lived reactionary coup during the French Revolution]? We’ll have to wait and see.”
For all his early momentum, commentators argue, Trump’s political revolution cannot last. He faces splits within the Republican party in Congress and the Maga movement and an electorate demanding quick results. He sabotaged his own first term with his notoriously short attention span, unwillingness to read policy documents, and fostering of chaos and dysfunction.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “He has a style of governance where he leads with brash and then falls back on threats. There’s the big speech and the flashy announcements but then there is the kind of hard bore grind of governing and Trump seems to fall asleep when he gets to the hard work. It is a thoroughly radical rightwing agenda but we’ll see how far he gets with it.”
Jacobs rejected the notion that Trump’s victory signals a fundamental reorientation. “It’s not a rightwing country and, as his policies roll out and we see resistance build, there’s going to be a pretty sharp turn in public opinion. By the summertime, Trump’s approval ratings will be quite low.
“We’re going to see growing pushback in Congress that will be less and less friendly to Donald Trump, and Republicans are going to begin to talk about the 2026 election and how are they going to create distance from Trump. This is a rarefied moment for him. It’s downhill from here.”
