President Trump in just two weeks back in office has moved with astonishing speed and boundless ambition to overturn the existing political, economic, cultural and international order in an even more far-reaching way than many of his supporters or critics had imagined possible.
Mr. Trump has thrown the nation’s capital into turmoil by purging enemies at home, attacking allies abroad, shuttering one agency while targeting others, handing the tools of government to an unelected billionaire, ignoring multiple laws, trying to rewrite the Constitution and even flirting with staying in power beyond his two-term limit.
Taking a Gatling gun approach to governing, firing shots in all directions at the same time, Mr. Trump has left virtually no corner of Washington untouched as he seeks to tear down the old apparatus and refashion it to his liking. Day after day, the city has been roiled with one political shock after another, starting with provocative social posts early in the morning, moving to personal conflicts in the middle of the day and finally to threatening staffwide emails after midnight.
A protest on Monday at the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development turned confrontational when several congressional Democrats tried to enter the building after employees were locked out. Security guards blocked the lawmakers, who vowed to get a court order to prevent Mr. Trump from subsuming the agency into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared on Monday that he was now the agency’s acting director.
The showdown over the aid agency, which was created by Congress in 1961 and presumably can be closed only by Congress, reflects just one front of the battle. Mr. Trump effectively moved on Monday to dismantle another agency disliked by conservatives and corporate chieftains.
After firing the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mr. Trump designated as its acting director Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who then ordered a halt to all rule-making, enforcement and other activities.
The president has talked about eliminating the Education Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And even for agencies he does not want to wipe out, the administration has taken down at least 8,000 government web pages that used language about diversity or other topics disfavored by Mr. Trump.
“He’s now just decided: ‘I’m not going to accept any of the legal limitations. I’m going to do whatever I want to do until the courts tell me otherwise,’” Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who represents many federal workers, said in an interview on Monday. “And he believes he has enough sway with the courts that he probably will get away with it.”
Mr. Trump has insisted that the government is corrupt and filled with “radical-left lunatics” who need to be purged. His far-right allies have celebrated the multifaceted assault on the status quo, calling it revenge for efforts to investigate and prosecute Mr. Trump, who was convicted in New York on 34 felony charges and indicted three other times after leaving office.
Stephen K. Bannon, who was Mr. Trump’s chief strategist in his first term, called the actions of the president’s early second term “nothing short of magnificent” during his podcast last weekend. “For those of you on the receiving end of this, the blunt force instrument that leaves blunt force trauma, you did this to yourselves,” he said. “You brought this on yourselves.”
Many presidents have come to Washington vowing to shake it up, including Jimmy Carter on the left and Ronald Reagan on the right. But none of them in recent decades went anywhere near as far in four or eight years as Mr. Trump has in just 15 days, particularly by taking action without authorization by Congress in seeming defiance of the constitutional balance of power.
Much of the shake-up is coming at the initiative of Elon Musk, the president’s billionaire patron, who has not shed his private interests and has never been confirmed by the Senate to any position but has been empowered by Mr. Trump to take drastic action to reorganize and shrink the federal government.
In recent days, Mr. Musk, whose SpaceX and other firms receive billions of dollars in government contracts, has obtained access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive federal payments system. He has moved to push out many federal employees by offering a version of a payout without outlining any plan for what happens to their duties if they resign.
Surrounded by a crew of young engineers in their early 20s with little if any government experience, including a recent high school graduate, Mr. Musk has reveled in the disruption he has fomented at the aid agency, known by its initials. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on social media on Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Democratic critics said Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk were wood-chipping government for their own profit and to justify large tax cuts for the wealthy. “There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told protesters outside the U.S.A.I.D. building.
The president’s eagerness to disrupt goes far beyond the government itself. His order over the weekend imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China threatened to blow up relations with America’s three largest trading partners.
But after markets plunged on Monday, he agreed to grant Mexico and Canada one-month reprieves after what he could present as concessions on stopping drug trafficking and illegal migration over their borders with the United States. China’s tariffs were still set to take effect at midnight.
Likewise, Mr. Trump has sought to influence the broader cultural state at home. He has made clear that he wants private companies to get rid of diversity and climate programs. His administration has threatened action against media companies that have angered him with their coverage.
Echoing the president’s complaint, the Federal Communications Commission has demanded a full transcript to examine how CBS edited an interview with his 2024 rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris, a remarkable level of government involvement in how a news organization chooses to present the news.
His Defense Department just ordered four major news organizations, including The New York Times, to give up their longstanding office space in the Pentagon in favor of Breitbart News and other favored outlets. And he has personally continued to press lawsuits against news organizations to extract multimillion-dollar payments.
Mr. Trump, who has objected to redesignating military bases that were named after Confederate generals because, he said, it erased history, has had no such complaints as his appointees have erased history themselves. Portraits of Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, both Trump appointees who angered him, have been taken down in the Pentagon from walls where all past military leaders are traditionally honored.
At the same time, the Trump administration has moved to help those it perceives to be allies. Now under its new management, the Justice Department dropped a case against former Representative Jeffrey Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was charged with lying to the F.B.I. in an investigation of illegal campaign donations. Mr. Trump then hailed the move, saying that Mr. Fortenberry had been “forced to suffer greatly due to the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”
Last week, federal prosecutors withdrew from a campaign finance investigation of Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, leaving the future of the case uncertain. Their withdrawal came just one week after Mr. Ogles filed a constitutional amendment to allow Mr. Trump to run for a third term, an idea that the president has lately teased about repeatedly despite the two-term limit enshrined in the 22nd Amendment.
Mr. Kaine said what he had seen in the past two weeks reminded him of his time living in Honduras in 1980 and 1981 when it was a military dictatorship. “This one to me seems very unprecedented in the U.S., but pretty precedented in world history,” he said. “It’s like Putin or Berlusconi,” he added, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and former President Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.
Mr. Trump’s insistence on acting on his own rather than seeking approval of Congress even though Republicans control both houses is revealing, he added. “Why is he taking unilateral steps?” Mr. Kaine said. “He is not confident he can persuade Republicans to go along with what he wants to do.”
Democrats and other opponents will count on the courts rather than Congress to stop the president’s most egregious violations of his constitutional authority. But Mr. Trump’s allies said no one should assume that he will back down — or that the flurry of action in his first two weeks will be the end of it or even the extent of it.
“There’s going to be much more of this,” Mr. Bannon said. “This had to be taken care of first, and it’s not stopped. Somebody contacted me the other day and said, ‘Some of the senior guys over there are very worried about their jobs.’ I said, ‘They shouldn’t be worried about their jobs; they should be worried about their criminal defense.’ This is only the first step, stage one, step one.”