Opinion | What Will Donald Trump’s Second Term Be Like? Four Columnists Debate His Early Moves.

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie, Ross Douthat, M. Gessen and Lydia Polgreen about Donald Trump’s preparations for a second term and what they signal about America’s future.

Patrick Healy: Folks, I want to take you back to November 2016, after Donald Trump was elected president. Much of what we saw in that first Trump transition process foreshadowed his four years in office: the pressure for loyalty from his cabinet picks and other government officials; the jockeying for power and influence among conservative, campaign and establishment G.O.P. factions; Trump’s constant tweeting; the lack of policy planning; the leaks to news media. I’m curious: As you look at the second Trump transition process, what do you see happening that you think foreshadows his next term in office?

M. Gessen: What I actually remember most about 2016 was Trump choosing people whose qualifications and opinions were antithetical to the agency they were picked to lead: Betsy DeVos for education, Ben Carson for housing secretary. Trump had promised to destroy government as we knew it. Of course, compared to this time around, his 2016 appointments seem almost conventional. And that, to me, may be the most informative thing now — this measure of how far we’ve devolved.

Ross Douthat: In 2016, Trump mostly made the kind of cabinet picks that any Republican would have made, like DeVos, with a few personal flourishes — a fondness for generals, the odd Rex Tillerson experiment. This foreshadowed a presidency in which Trump’s chaotic impulses were often channeled through the personnel of a normal Republican administration, which, like other Republican administrations, left the normal infrastructure of the federal bureaucracy entirely intact.

This time, some of the picks follow the same pattern (Marco Rubio at the State Department, say), but in other cases you have people being picked explicitly because of the critiques they’ve lobbed at the institutions they’re assigned to lead — Pete Hegseth with the Defense Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with everything associated with American health care, and so on. (This was part of the idea behind the late, unlamented Matt Gaetz appointment, as well.) So this sets up potential scenarios for sustained intra-bureaucratic warfare — but with the proviso that because none of these nominees have substantial managerial experience, if they actually go to war with the bureaucracies they aspire to lead, it’s a decent bet the bureaucracies will win.

Gessen: Ross, I have far less faith in the resilience of the bureaucracies. I remember visiting the State Department about a year (maybe less) into the first Trump administration and noticing how much had changed in such a short time. The line at security was gone, because there were so few visitors. Inside, the place was a ghost town. In a very short time, the Trump administration had fired some people, induced others to quit and, perhaps most important, paralyzed the work of those who remained. Everyone I talked to said that they didn’t know what would happen to whatever programs they were running or employed by. All of this is to say: Bureaucracies have less inertia than we might imagine, especially when the person or people at the helm are dead set on destroying the actual thing.