Since Donald Trump first became president in 2017, I have written many articles — and even a book — that focused on the efforts by his aides to contain his impulses and stop him from waging a retribution campaign against his enemies.
Throughout my reporting, I — like many journalists in the midst of an intense and complex story — wondered: Was I accurately capturing the facts? I knew that the people around Trump often justified working in his administration by saying they would serve as guardrails against his most extreme impulses, but how could I know for sure that these checks on his power were actually the force holding him back?
I had those doubts because we, as reporters, very rarely get to see the counterfactual, to test our reporting by witnessing how the world would play out if the circumstances were different.
But Trump’s second term has given us that unique opportunity.
The people who sought to restrain the president back then, like his former chief of staff John Kelly and his White House counsel Donald McGahn II, are gone, and so are the hypotheticals. We are now seeing how a truly unshackled Trump uses his power.
Nine months into Trump’s second term, he has done several things he was stopped from doing during his first term. He has exerted more direct pressure on the Justice Department to bring charges, apparently spurring prosecutors to secure an indictment against at least one target who eluded him during his first term. And he has greatly expanded presidential powers, including by deploying the military on domestic soil in more sweeping ways than he did during his first term.
In tonight’s newsletter, I’ll explain what Trump’s second term has taught us about his first: The guardrails worked, up to a point. (See: Jan 6.)
And many of the stark warnings about what would happen without them — which were issued loudly during the presidential campaign by the very people who had once sought to restrain the president — have proved true.
An eye on the Justice Department
As early as 2017, Trump tried to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute his rivals, like Hillary Clinton. But Sessions and top administration aides managed to distract Trump for months. Sessions held onto his job for nearly two years, and no charges were brought against Clinton.
At the time, Trump himself was under investigation by the special counsel Robert Mueller III for obstructing the F.B.I.’s inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Trump complained endlessly about why his own Justice Department was investigating him, casting a cloud over his presidency, without looking into his perceived enemies.
As the pressure built on Trump, he became more fixated on the idea of not only prosecuting his rivals, including the former F.B.I. director James Comey, but siccing the I.R.S. on them.
Repeatedly, Kelly and McGahn managed to stop Trump. They refused to order the Justice Department to investigate his rivals, telling him that what he wanted to do was potentially illegal. McGahn even wrote Trump an extraordinary memo in which he warned him that he could be defeated at the ballot box — or impeached — if he tried to meddle in prosecutions.
The Justice Department’s prosecutorial decisions remained insulated from the president. While many of his perceived enemies came under investigation, none were ever charged. This left Trump angry, convinced that his aides and political appointees had wrongly constrained him.
The warnings begin
In the four years Trump was out of office, he was indicted four times. At the same time, his aides, including Stephen Miller, an adviser during his first term who is now his deputy chief of staff — considered the lessons they learned during his first term and figured out how Trump could harness the powers of the presidency more effectively for his own political ends.
Trump’s allies pledged that if he ever returned to the White House, he would not have guardrails like Kelly around to try to stop him.
During the 2024 campaign, Kelly, other top generals who worked for Trump and other former aides issued a series of stark warnings. They said that not only would Trump follow through on prosecuting his rivals but he would use the military domestically on Americans. And, they said, Trump would use his power in audacious and potentially illegal ways to achieve his political goals and erode the independence of bedrock institutions of American democracy.
Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, echoed those warnings on the campaign trail.
Republicans pooh-poohed the warnings, saying that the former officials were just castoffs suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
An expansion of power
Since returning to office, Trump has largely done exactly what Kelly and the former aides warned he would. He has engaged in an aggressive retribution campaign. He has pierced the Justice Department’s prosecutorial decision-making process by publicly and privately telling Attorney General Pam Bondi — including in an apparently accidentally sent private message on Truth Social — whom to charge, including Comey.
Bondi’s department charged Comey five days later, shortly after pushing out a prosecutor who had raised concerns about a potential case against Comey. An indictment against the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat who sued Trump for fraud, followed soon after.
Trump has deployed the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to several American cities run by Democratic mayors over their objections. He has dismantled large parts of the federal bureaucracy and work force, challenging Congress’s control over spending. And his administration’s responses to some high-profile court rulings related to immigration issues have raised questions about whether they are following judges’ orders.
For this piece, I reached out to Kelly to see if he would talk about how his warnings lined up with the way Trump has governed. But Kelly declined to comment. Since Trump won, he has said little publicly, believing he already warned the country and there is nothing left for him to say.
IN VIDEOS
How Trump’s Chicago immigration crackdown escalated
Chicago is a city on edge.
As the Trump administration ramped up its immigration crackdown there, an unauthorized immigrant was fatally shot. American citizens have been detained along with undocumented immigrants. Residents have given chase to federal agents’ vehicles. And chemical agents have been used on protesters, journalists and clergy members.
My colleagues have reviewed 100 videos that tell the story of the past six weeks, and it’s a case study in how the administration has used both immigration agents and federal troops to enforce its agenda in a city that largely opposes their mission. See what they found.
by the numbers
One dozen
That’s roughly how many majority-minority House seats could plausibly disappear in the South if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in response to a case it heard on Wednesday. The court’s conservative majority appeared to be leaning in that direction during oral arguments on Wednesday. Those seats are all currently held by Democrats.
Losing that many seats, Nate Cohn writes, could make it much harder for Democrats to gain control the House in future elections — even when they win the popular vote.
ONE LAST THING
Both parties are losing faith in higher education
President Trump has waged an assault on colleges and universities, and there is some evidence to suggest his attacks are resonating on both sides of the aisle. Ruth Igielnik, The Times’s polling editor, explains.
A growing share of Americans think higher education is headed in the wrong direction, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. Seven-in-ten Americans now agree with that assessment, up from 56 percent five years ago.
Two-thirds of Democrats share that opinion, up from 49 percent in 2020. And while the percentage of Republicans who agree is also rising, majorities in that group have felt higher education was headed in the wrong direction for a while.
The poll doesn’t tell us whether this eroding faith is a direct effect of President Trump’s rhetoric. But at minimum, it shows he’s done something he often has a knack for: zeroing in on an unpopular target.
Jacob Reber, Jess Bidgood and Ruth Igielnik contributed to this newsletter.
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.
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