Trump's tumultuous return

and Budget. 

In his first term, two factors had constrained Trump. Despite ambitious goals, owing to his lack of prior governmental experience, he had limited knowledge of how to wield the levers of power in the White House. Several of his key advisers and Cabinet officials, while sharing some of his beliefs and preferences, were nevertheless unwilling to dispense with constitutional and legal proprieties. Consequently, some of them resigned while he summarily fired others because he deemed them to be insufficiently loyal or dared to differ with him on his policy preferences.

  In his second term, he seems to be far more familiar with institutional mechanisms and the folkways of Washington, DC. He has also carefully vetted those who serve in his Cabinet as well as at sub-Cabinet levels. These two factors have given him far more leeway to enact his policy agenda and to pursue his personal interests.

  At a domestic level, he has been able to ruthlessly pursue his preferred policy goals, thanks to his party’s control of both Houses of Congress, the unwillingness of most of his fellow Republicans to challenge his views, and a mostly pliant Supreme Court.  

His most significant legislative achievement was the passage of the so-called One Big, Beautiful Bill, which dramatically pared back a host of welfare programmes and extended a series of tax cuts (which had mostly benefitted the wealthy) that had been put in place during his first administration. And despite persistent efforts on the part of Democrats in both Houses of Congress, he and his Republican colleagues allowed the Obama-era healthcare subsidies to expire at the end of December 2025,  dramatically raising the costs of health insurance for over 20 million Americans. Although he and his fellow Republicans remained highly critical of the Affordable Care Act (popularly known as Obamacare), neither he nor the Republican-dominated Congress offered any viable alternative. 

Beyond the passage of the sweeping legislation, the administration also created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The two initial co-chairs of this entity were the entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Their stated task was to eliminate a range of government programmes that the administration deemed to be wasteful or unnecessary. Their dismantling, it was claimed, would enable the government to save vast amounts of money. Ramaswamy’s tenure proved to be quite short-lived, as differences with Musk quickly came to the fore. Leaving as early as January 2025, he chose to return to his native state of Ohio and started a campaign for its governorship. Musk, despite a display of considerable fanfare with a series of debilitating cuts directed at a host of government organisations and programmes, soon had a falling out with Trump.  Accordingly, he too quit the DOGE in May 2025 when his 130-day status as a “special government employee” ended. According to several independent sources, the DOGE’s budget-cutting claims were greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, a range of government-funded projects were abruptly terminated, government-supported research institutions either decimated or altogether shut down, and a host of employees suddenly left unemployed mid-career.

  Apart from this budget-cutting frenzy, Trump also directed his ire at several public and private research universities across the country. They fell afoul of the administration for two ostensible reasons: either they were accused of not curbing putative, pervasive anti-Semitic sentiments on their campuses in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, or they were seen as bastions of what the administration saw as “woke ideology”. To induce them to comply with his sentiments on both subjects, he instructed the Department of Education to withhold billions of dollars of federal funding. Some universities, faced with these draconian budget cuts, chose to comply with his demands. But others, despite a stated willingness to engage with the administration and its concerns, refused to comply with his extortionate demands.

  Universities alone have not been the only targets of his wrath. Several nationally prominent law firms, which had represented Trump’s political opponents or had helped pursue cases against him, faced not-so-veiled threats. Disturbingly enough, most of these firms, rather than stand their ground, acceded to his demands fearing the loss of an important revenue stream. The demands included providing pro bono services to causes dear to Trump or to reevaluate their commitment to or altogether dispense with diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes.

  A host of presidents, when faced with likely Congressional delays in passing legislation, have resorted to the use of Executive Orders (EOs) to boost their policy agendas. But these EOs only last the duration of the presidential term. Subsequent presidents are at liberty to rescind them with the stroke of a pen.

  In his second term in office, Trump’s use of these orders can only be described as both flagrant and profligate. As of mid-December 2025, he had issued as many as 221 EOs on matters ranging from the dispensing of childhood vaccines to restricting immigration and declaring the highly addictive synthetic drug, fentanyl, as a weapon of mass destruction. (For comparison, US President Joe Biden had issued 162 EOs during his entire term.) 

  Finally, he has demonstrated a remarkable propensity for self-aggrandisement domestically. For example, after slashing the budget of the United States Institute of Peace and placing a loyalist as its head, he renamed it as the Donald J Trump United States Institute of Peace. In another remarkable development that also smacks of blatant self-promotion, he renamed the  storied John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, as the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, after having replaced its entire advisory board with his handpicked appointees. Following its renaming, several artists who had agreed to perform at the venue cancelled their prior commitments. 

Trump has been equally assertive in his use of presidential prerogatives in the realm of foreign policy. The examples thereof are legion. One of the more dramatic of these was when he hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Oval Office in February 2025. Trump not only berated Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit but also for showing up in military-like attire. At the same meeting, US Vice-President J D Vance publicly upbraided Zelenskyy for not displaying adequate gratitude for the US’ military and economic assistance to Ukraine.  

Apart from this episode, which was clearly staged for the benefit of television audiences, Trump has acted abruptly and idiosyncratically on other crucial foreign policy issues. Without any apparent preparation, he hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August 2025. Despite his bombastic statements following the summit, little or no progress was made in terms of bringing the war in Ukraine to a close. 

Trump also made a series of claims that he has helped end a range of conflicts across the world. They include, according to his own reckoning, the settlement of or a ceasefire involving eight conflicts ranging from India and Pakistan to Israel and Hamas. But the only conflict that his administration may have ended is a longstanding dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Israel-Hamas peace deal is mostly pockmarked with ongoing violence, and his claim of ending the Iran-Israel conflict is little more than fatuous. Amongst other matters, his peace accord involved the use of US airpower to bomb several nuclear sites in Iran. These attacks may have partially and temporarily set back Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. However, there is no evidence to suggest that it has in any way reduced the intransigence of the regime towards Israel. 

  India, of course, has vehemently denied that Trump helped end the flare-up with Pakistan in early May 2025. Its insistence that Trump played no role in bringing about the ceasefire, as is well-known, has incurred his wrath. Indeed, most informed analysts of US-India relations believe that Trump’s apparent warmth towards Pakistan and his imposition of a set of highly punitive tariffs has much to do with his chagrin about India’s failure to publicly acknowledge his putative role in swiftly terminating the 

post-Pahalgam conflict.  

Two key elements seem to characterise Trump’s conduct of his foreign policy. The first involves an emphasis on personal diplomacy and a concomitant belief that he alone can work out deals with foreign leaders. The second is a reliance on several personal advisers and political appointees ranging from his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to his long-time friend and fellow real estate mogul, Steve Witkoff. In the process, he has mostly marginalised the roles of career foreign service personnel as well as professional members of the intelligence community. 

As Trump enters his second year in office in his current term, it may be worth recalling the noted US historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr’s seminal work, The Imperial Presidency. Published in 1973, it traced the gradual expansion of presidential power in the US from the time of the country’s first president, George Washington, to the then incumbent Richard Nixon.  Schlesinger’s concern about the steady accretion of presidential power now appears to have all but reached its zenith under Trump. When he wrote this magisterial work, one doubts that he had any sense of how presidential powers would dramatically expand in the decades ahead. In recent years, various conservative legal scholars and analysts have provided an intellectual rationale for what they refer to as the “unitary executive theory”: that the US president has sole authority of the executive branch, granting them sweeping authority. Critics of this perspective have argued that it diminishes the roles of the two other branches, the legislative and the judicial, but to little avail.

  With another three years in office, one may argue that if the first year was any indicator, the trends that were established during that time span will continue. The only possible constraints may emerge if the Democratic Party succeeds in taking control of one or more Houses of Congress in the upcoming 2026 mid-term elections.