A common concern about Trump's second term was that he'd be more prepared. He would have purged his inner circle of anyone but loyalists, and he'd set about doing the same to the federal government. Thus, his will would be translated into policy that much more easily, and he'd get a lot more done.

In any introductory formal logic class, you'll be taught that a syllogism can fail for a couple reasons. It may not be valid: its conclusion may not follow its premises. It can also be valid, but not sound: its conclusion may follow its premises, but one of its premises can be false. The above syllogism has both problems. Let's lay it out this way:

1. Trump will surround himself with yesmen

2. The yesmen will implement Trump's policy more effectively

3. Trump will get more done

There's no good reason to believe 2, and 3 doesn't follow regardless. In fact, I think we'll find that Trump was more effective his first term because he had so many career bureaucrats and establishment officials working with him. He didn't have a transition team (because he, and I believe this sincerely, had no intention of winning), so he depended on Obama admin holdovers. He had no cabinet picks lined up, so he hastily assembled a generic GOP grab-bag. All this meant that yes, he was often told he couldn't do things he thought were good ideas, but this worked in his favor, because they were all bad ideas. (By "bad" I don't mean immoral, because nobody in DC has a moral compass; I mean "unworkable as policy.") His first term, beneath all the noise, was pretty unremarkable. He passed some tax cuts, stacked the courts, tried his hand at some coups in Latin America---basically just did what any Republican (and many Democrats) would do.

This time, he's surrounded by sycophants, and the situation has changed. He's churning out ambitious-sounding executive orders that are so confused and incoherent that federal agencies can't figure out how to make them into actual policy. Said agencies are also threatened with such steep cuts that even if they figure it out, they won't have the enforcement capacity to actually do what he wants them to. He's slapping steep, across-the-board tariffs on the US's closest trading partners because there's nobody to talk him out of it, or explain to him how tariffs actually work. He's making it more expensive to import chips AND threatening to kneecap Biden admin efforts to spur domestic production at the same time the US tech sector is scrambling to keep the AI bubble from bursting. He's abruptly cutting off sources of federal funding that solidly Republican states disproportionately rely on.

Last time, Trump did some shock and awe bullshit in his first week, and it mostly didn't matter to or affect the rich and comfortable. Wall Street enjoyed a little stock bump, liberals threw some parades they pretended were protests, and the world kept spinning. This time, the stock market is in freefall, the industries that spent the most to reelect him are getting screwed immediately, inflation is primed to spike again, and planes are literally falling out of the sky.

Trump 1.0 was a beneficiary of not getting what he wanted. Trump 2.0 is going to be less effective and even less popular precisely because there's no one standing in his way. He's a complete moron who was mostly pushed around and distracted by people who half-understood how the federal government works for his first term. (This was the broad continuity from Trump 1.0 to Biden: a barely functional president kept afloat by bureaucrats.) This time, it's morons all the way down.

The idiot's already at net-negative approval again, and we're gonna see a complete breakdown of the federal government and 1970s-level stagflation within the year. I wouldn't rule out a palace coup.