Monday marks four weeks of President Trump's second term. His supporters are jubilant at everything he has achieved during this time.
Nearly all his cabinet choices are safely in their roles, including relatively controversial nominees like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth. If and when Kash Patel gets the nod, Trump would have managed a clean sweep.
In the meantime, Trump has notched up crucial victories with border states like Mexico and Canada in forcing them to enforce common-sense rules to restrict illegal immigration and drug smuggling. By unleashing dozens of Executive Orders on his very first day in office, impacting every cabinet department, he has crippled Democratic opposition. With Elon Musk leading the charge with his DOGE team and regularly posting developments on X and Truth Social (thereby bypassing legacy media), Trump has convinced even his most ardent haters that Washington has been corrupt, greedy, and fraudulent. The fiasco of USAID is just the tip of the iceberg.
However, the Left is mounting a furious attack. Several nationwide injunctions by federal judges to stop Trump's every EO are evidence that the liberals' fighting spirit is still alive. While no one knows the outcome of this judicial activism, it is very likely that Trump will prevail.
Strict constructionists in the Roberts Court, having given Trump a significant victory last summer regarding presidential immunity, are likely to respect Article II powers of the presidency. These same justices are unlikely to encourage judges to indulge in activism from the bench, believing that no Trump EO rises to the same level of a constitutional crisis as an impeachment. The New York Times opinions aside, nothing that Trump has triggered in his EO blitz constitutes a constitutional crisis.
2025 is not 2017. Eight years ago, Trump was besieged by the Deep State and Leftist Media. Holdouts from the Obama administration were remarkably successful in weakening his presidency.
After Russia-Russia failed, the clever James Comey leaked confidential notes of his conversations with the new president to a Columbia professor friend, who leaked them to the New York Times. Within days, a Special Counsel investigation headed by Robert Mueller started.
After two painful years, the Mueller investigation found no wrongdoing by Trump's campaign. But the Left, led by Congressman Adam Schiff, now California Senator, had his Ukraine impeachment plot all ready to go. After that ended, Trump was forced to fight race riots triggered by the Left in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police. And in the aftermath of the disputed 2020 elections, the liberal media displayed zero intellectual curiosity to investigate how Biden, a candidate who never left home, gained the most votes of any Democrat in history, nearly 15 million more than Obama. Or how Biden only won in one of 20 national bellwether districts but defeated the incumbent. After Jan 6, Trump was not only impeached a second time but was ostracized from Washington, the media, and the social media platforms.
Trump knew that hundreds of so-called "people with principles" had sabotaged a promising presidency. Trump also realized that America's problems were far too deep for voters to wish to be led by people with high-sounding, meaningless gobbledegook, while making America's problems worse. He correctly bet that voters would support him if he went back to his professed statements from the 1980s that America should win and always play to win.
To do this, Washington should be wise and not let other countries take advantage of America. Trump surmised that an inward-looking vision focused on protecting American interests first, second, and third would return him to the White House. And what a victory it was. A popular vote victory not seen since George Bush 43; an electoral margin unmatched since Reagan. A triumph in every battleground state! Taking back the Senate with a 53-47 majority and retaining the House, albeit by a one-vote majority.
Trump’s historic victory didn’t just bring electoral dominance—it also strengthened public confidence in his leadership. His second-term approval rating reflects this shift.
Lessons learned. Corporate leaders routinely preach to employees that companies can improve their performance if they learn from their mistakes. Trump, the ultimate CEO, had sat down for months with a small and reliable team of patriots like Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller to chart his comeback, based on not repeating mistakes from his 2015-16 campaign.
Under assault from relentless lawfare and fending off 94 cases in federal, county, and city courts, the Trump team focused on a few basic principles derived from his lessons learned. They vowed not to engage anyone who did not passionately share their view that America was broken and Washington was primarily responsible for the mess. The team decided to bring in ‘doers,’ like Musk, and those who had sacrificed their political careers in the Democrat Party after being shunned. As RFK Jr. famously said, he didn't leave the Democrat Party, but the latter left him. Tulsi Gabbard was in the same mold.
Marco Rubio was re-invited into the Trump fold after Rubio appreciated that no one in America today could have performed Trump's feat of winning non-consecutive terms. Rubio knew that Trump had truly recreated history when he became the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to accomplish this feat.
With Rubio vetted, Trump correctly appointed him Secretary of State. Trump had learned his lessons from his first term. Both Rex Tillerson and ultimate Washington insider Mike Pompeo were disasters in these roles. Trump needed a strong voice abroad and an astute student of foreign affairs. Rubio, having built his connections in the Senate, sailed through his confirmation 99-0. (With JD Vance making an impressive debut in Munich and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis becoming the most skilled state leader, Rubio joins two rising stars for the 2028 nomination.)
Among all of Trump's confidantes, Musk wields the most power. Even if his DOGE project faces obstacles from the Deep State and judiciary, Musk’s X platform wields more influence than even the presidential bully pulpit itself. Trump's brilliant strategy to develop his own social media company provides the President with a layer of backup––in the unlikely event that Trump and Musk fall out of favor with each other. With Big Tech's recent metamorphosis in supporting Trump and independent media fully behind him, legacy news organizations and prime actors in sabotaging Trump's first presidency have been significantly sidelined. Trump and Musk acknowledged this tectonic power shift when they sat down with Sean Hannity of Fox News.
It is little wonder that global elitists and the Left are clueless. Trump has learned his lessons and built something far bigger than a second-term presidency. He has fathered a populist movement that will prevail long after he is no longer around. And no amount of resistance from a deeply-wounded Left has a chance to upset this dynamic for at least a generation.
Rajkamal Rao is a columnist and a member of the tippinsights editorial board. He is an American entrepreneur and wrote the WorldView column for the Hindu BusinessLine, India's second-largest financial newspaper, on the economy, politics, immigration, foreign affairs, and sports.
