I look at President Donald Trump’s second term and see the ham-handed efforts to annex Greenland and Canada, massive tariff hikes on most of the world, a cruel immigration crackdown that has been both lawless and ineffective, and the sudden launching of a war, without U.N. sanction, congressional consultation or any clear strategy. And so I was surprised to hear Jeff Bezos — the owner of The Washington Post, and an obviously intelligent and accomplished businessman — say this week, “I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.”
Trump’s first term was more disciplined not because he was disciplined, but because he was constrained. He often deferred, however grudgingly, to the Republican establishment and national security elites. His early legislative agenda was shaped by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and executed by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Top economic adviser Gary Cohn repeatedly talked him out of the global tariff hikes he had long wanted. The generals around him urged caution on Iran, support for NATO and arms for Ukraine.
The lesson Trump drew from that first term, however, was not that expertise mattered. It was that the experts were not loyal enough. After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, many of his senior officials distanced themselves from him; some denounced him. So this time he has surrounded himself with people whose chief qualification is fealty. The less distinguished the résumé, the better: Such people owe everything to him. Process has given way to impulse, procedure to instinct, government to gut.
But the starkest difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is not policy. It is enrichment — its scale, its brazenness, its open contempt for restraint. Earlier this week, the acting attorney general announced that the Justice Department would grant Trump, his family and his businesses immunity from all audits and investigations for any past tax-related misconduct, and the announcement claims it lasts “forever.”
The week before, Trump disclosed that his stock portfolio had executed about 3,700 trades in the first quarter alone, many following a suspiciously convenient pattern: a stock bought shortly before a government action or statement that benefited it. On Jan. 6 of this year, for example, the Trump portfolio bought $500,000 of Nvidia stock. A week later, Nvidia received U.S. clearance to sell its H200 chips to China.
That was not all. This week, the Commerce Department announced an investment in a quantum-computing company in which a member of the Trump family holds interests. And don’t forget the $500 million UAE investment in a Trump family crypto venture, the $2 billion UAE investment using that company’s stablecoin, the flurry of new Trump Organization real estate deals or the drone company in which the Trump family invested and that later received a Pentagon contract. One number says it all: Reuters calculates that from the first half of 2024 to the first half of 2025, the Trump Organization’s income rose from $51 million to $864 million. This does suggest discipline: a relentless discipline devoted to monetizing the presidency.
The Trump Organization has maintained that Trump himself, his family and the organization don’t have any role in directing or influencing specific investments.
The deeper question is why this is possible — and why it has produced so little resistance. Scholars of corruption have long assumed that in advanced democracies, graft becomes subtle and institutional: campaign donations, lobbying networks, consulting contracts. Trump has taken the elaborate machinery of an advanced industrial state and used it to accelerate something far cruder: old-fashioned personal grift.
The wider public may be troubled. But his MAGA base doesn’t seem to be, and it is the only constituency that could restrain him. In a hyperpolarized country, corruption is no longer judged as an objective moral failing. It is filtered through tribe. If our side does it, it is either fake news, clever politics or justified revenge.
This reveals a deeper weakness in the American system. The Founding Fathers built a magnificent constitutional framework, but it rested on an assumption they did not spell out: that public officials would retain some shared commitment to unwritten civic norms. James Madison’s design — “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” — assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.
The legal guardrails are weaker than most Americans realize. The president is largely exempt from standard federal conflict-of-interest laws. Many of the actions described above would expose even the senior-most Cabinet secretary to grave legal peril. For a president, the Supreme Court has decided that the only remedy for “official acts” is impeachment and two-thirds of the Senate voting for conviction — which in our partisan age requires a civic miracle.
The mature response to these travesties is not revenge but a restoration of the rule of law. After Trump, the urgent task for the American republic will be to turn norms into statutes, curtail the ethical immunities of the presidency and find legal ways to ensure that the highest public office in the world can never again become a platform for family business.
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