“This time is different.” With Donald Trump’s second term off to a roaring, snorting start—a furious dust cloud of ICE raids and ICE-raid photo ops, tariffs announced and then paused, a funding freeze dramatically imposed and then rapidly rescinded—these words have become something of a media mantra. This time, after all, Trump ran not merely as an insurgent entertainer—an amorphous vessel for free-floating anomie—but as the scarred veteran of a decade-long ideological war, prosecuted and convicted by his enemies, his purposes hardened and sharpened by a thirst for political payback. This time, Trump won the national popular vote by a margin of more than two million ballots, thereby claiming a decisive mandate for his return to power. And this time, unlike the disarray and improvisation that defined his first term, Trump has taken office flanked by a disciplined coterie of true believers, chief among them Elon Musk, who are prepared to execute a muscular agenda at home and abroad.
This triumphal narrative has found support at Mar-a-Lago. “This time,” Steve Bannon has boasted of the second Trump transition, “it’s more sophisticated, it’s got more money, it’s got a whole media and influencer ecosystem.” But it has also—revealingly—been enthusiastically adopted by Trump’s foes. Ezra Klein, elevated by the 2024 election cycle into the leading voice of today’s liberal mainstream, laid out the essentials of the argument in the New York Times just before Trump’s inauguration. “America’s institutional storm walls,” he noted, “are not, in 2025, what they were in 2017.” The Republican Party, once a source of intermittent defiance to Trump, has been thoroughly tamed, if not outright seized, by MAGA loyalists. The liberal and progressive opposition, formerly mobilized for “mass resistance,” according to Klein, is now “dispirited and exhausted.” And corporate America, including blue-state billionaires from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, no longer treats Trump as “an aberration to be endured or a malignancy to reject,” but as a powerful leader to be recognized and a business partner to engage. The collective result, in this telling, is a new Trump Administration with a vast potential for power and limited constraint, whose future is unknowable but seems certain, one way or another, to leave a profound imprint on American life.
Whenever a talking point attains this level of transideological consensus among pundits—uniting New York magazine, CNN, and the Center for American Greatness—the smart money heads in the other direction. It may be hard to see right now, with all the Musk in our eyes, but in the long run, Trump 2.0 remains less likely to deliver historic rupture than another episode of dreary, numbing continuity.
Trump is now a second-term president. There is nothing unprecedented about this position in American politics: after 1980, only Joe Biden and George H. W. Bush have failed to secure reelection. From Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, we know quite a bit about what second-term administrations look like in the long late-capitalist era. All four won reelection by larger margins than did Trump, clobbering a moribund opposition party for the second time in a row and cementing what many hoped and feared would be a new epoch in American politics. And yet, all four of these second terms, despite their many differences, followed the same broadly deflating trajectory: initial White House confidence collided with legislative gridlock, then decomposed from the slow rot of scandal. Domestic policy advanced, if at all, through ungainly negotiations and unloved compromises; foreign policy, a familiar resort of the throttled executive, was given over to grand though generally fruitless gestures. Within the ruling party, ideological fervor flagged, rather than intensified; and in the last three of the four cases, the end of the term was marked by an electoral repudiation at the hands of the once-feeble opposition.
Consider George W. Bush, who won reelection in 2004 by about three million votes. His party controlled fifty-five seats in the Senate and held a robust thirty-vote majority in the House; after Inauguration Day, his public approval rating reached 57 percent. “I earned capital in this campaign,” a triumphant Bush told the press, “and now I intend to spend it.” He unveiled an ambitious plan to partly replace Social Security with a system of private investment accounts. Yet despite an expensive public-relations campaign led by Karl Rove, Bush failed to win popular support for the scheme. It never came to a vote in Congress, and by late 2005, after the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, the rest of the Bush domestic agenda had withered away. Nothing in his second term matched the achievement of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the No Child Left Behind Act, or the 2003 Medicare expansion. In foreign policy, Bush’s second term was defined by the ongoing occupation of Iraq, which was bloody, destructive, and increasingly unpopular—little more than a dull echo of the crusading energy of his first term.
Reagan’s second term, meanwhile, began with an aggressive bid to slash domestic spending, including plans to cut Medicare, freeze Social Security, and eliminate all funding to Amtrak, along with numerous other federal programs. It ended in Iran-Contra fallout, a growing federal budget, and starry-eyed arms-control talks with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Trump is neither Bush nor Reagan. Yet there is little reason to believe that he will be immune from the forces that shaped the second terms before him. Erratic bluster aside, he cannot run for a third stint in office; nor does he have anything like a clear successor. In other words, he is already a kind of lame duck. For a political personality who has already demonstrated a large appetite for campaigning and little interest in governing, it is a good bet that extravagance, confusion, and tumult—eventually giving way to inertia and lassitude—are more likely outcomes than a policy revolution.
The makeup of Trump’s Cabinet has been cited by Klein and others as evidence that his second term will be more unfettered than the first. Yet the likes of Marco Rubio, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pete Hegseth do not suggest ideological extremism—or even ideological coherence—so much as a mercurial perception of personal loyalty, along with a vague preference for celebrities who look good on TV.
Trump’s desire to punish his enemies has long been depicted as a sweeping, authoritarian threat to democracy. could he lock them up? worried The New York Times Magazine last fall, referring to such iconic Trump foes as Robert Mueller, James Clapper, and Huma Abedin. Yet a drive for personal revenge, by its very nature, lacks political content; it is definitionally petty. The National Review believes that the removal of Secret Service protection from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is “gravely serious,” but what is bad news for General Mark Milley’s Pentagon portrait may not matter very much to the three hundred million other Americans.
Ideologically, MAGA world remains the same jumbled stew that it has always been, congregating neoconservatives and isolationists, global corporations and xenophobic populists, doctrinaire libertarians and big-government nationalists, antiwoke libertines and evangelical Christians. Musk and Bannon could not make it to the inauguration without crossing swords over immigration. Without the disciplining effect of a reelection campaign, Trump 2.0, like Trump 1.0, promises not cohesion but volatility and continual infighting.
Nor does Trump himself generate the kind of political momentum capable of blasting through his coalition’s tangles and conflicts. His Inauguration Day approval rating of 47 percent ranked behind every elected president Gallup has tracked since 1953, excepting only his own first term. (Trump is, as I write this, posting the best polling numbers of his career, but even so, his net favorability rating of plus 3 percent remains well behind the plus 18 percent Biden received in February 2021.) And the president’s signature policy moves—tariff hikes, large spending cuts, mass deportations—remain divisive rather than broadly popular. As in 2016, he owed his 2024 victory not to some grassroots ideological transformation but to a wave of disgust with the ruling Democratic Party, which is more unpopular now than it has been in decades.
This does not mean that Trump’s agenda is dead on arrival in Washington—far from it. Liberal and progressive causes will suffer; organized labor will take another drubbing; the investor class will get the deregulatory field day it has been thirsting for. In other words, when the dust settles, things will probably look much like the spasmodic right-wing coalition government of 2017–18, rather than some unified MAGA autocracy. In the House, Trump’s majority is now just three seats, much thinner than it had been in his first term. The Republican Senate, meanwhile, may have confirmed Trump’s Cabinet, but it remains a political world unto itself. We should expect no conspicuous break between the administration and our Republican-led Congress, given their shared interests in cutting taxes, confirming judges, and humiliating the Democrats. But neither will it be easy to push John Thune’s Senate—or John Roberts’s Supreme Court—toward a convulsive shift in any particular direction. These right-wing forces, not yet drained of their institutional power, seek to preserve rather than transform America’s political-economic status quo.
So, too, do the financial titans and tech billionaires who have supposedly kowtowed to Trump since his reelection. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg put Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, on the board of Meta and trimmed a few diversity, equity, and inclusion policies; Amazon paid millions of dollars to make a documentary about Melania Trump; and the CEOs of Apple, Google, and OpenAI attended Trump’s inauguration. is corporate america going maga? asked an uncharacteristically breathless Financial Times. But these small exuberances do not signal “a cultural shift in the nation’s boardrooms” of any greater significance than the profusion of corporate DEI programs did after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Trump is not the master of American capitalism; he is its creature and occasional mascot. MAGA world’s excitement at what amounts to a token embrace from blue-state industry moguls—Barack and Michelle Obama, after all, didn’t just get a vanity doc, but a production company that provides exclusive content to Netflix—suggests something of the real power relations between the president and the billionaire class.
No, whispers a tremulous voice, this is not just another corporate-led second-term administration: this is Trump. And yet, with this president and the media, “this time” is somehow always different.
Trump’s political emergence in 2015 was declared a shocking break with history. “In truth,” wrote Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, “this time is different.” And just as Trump himself was intrinsically other, a departure from all norms and precedents, his story seemed uniquely given to sharp pivots and sudden reversals. In October 2016, pundits hailed the Access Hollywood tape as a scandal unlike the other kerfuffles that attended Trump’s campaign: why this time it’s different, cried The Nation, confident that the leaked audio would doom Trump at the polls.
That didn’t work out, but Trump’s presidency itself produced no shortage of narrative drama. Once again the plot bent toward total transformations of the Republic, accompanied by the thrilling heralds of Trump’s imminent downfall. The new commander in chief was “an unprecedented president,” declared The Week in April 2017: “Just 100 days in, it’s clear Americans have never seen anything like Donald Trump.” this time is different, proclaimed Foreign Affairs, arguing that U.S. foreign policy would “never recover” from the damage wrought by Trump. Yet as Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference in the 2016 campaign appeared to gain momentum in 2018, Business Insider reported a dramatic change in the White House: “Trump’s friends and allies are worried he’s spiraling out of control—and they say this time is different.” By 2019, with the Democrats back in power on Capitol Hill, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution could declare that Congress was moving toward an impeachment vote that would spell doom for Trump. “This time,” she promised, “is different.”
The subsequent impeachment proved an anticlimax, but the advent of COVID-19 promised a fresh wave of turning points. “This is different,” charged the think tank Third Way, arguing that the president’s response to the virus had no precedent in the annals of medical history. Yet Trump’s same blundering simultaneously invited bold assertions of an imminent demise: the day he suggested that injecting disinfectant might cure coronavirus, Paul Krugman predicted in April 2020, was “the day Trump stopped being president.”
Trump was narrowly defeated that November—an unmistakable difference from 2016, but one that did not stop the appearance of yet further differences. Covering Trump’s second impeachment trial, after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, CNN returned to the formula: “Republicans acquitted Trump again, but this time is different.” After leaving office, Trump found himself in the crosshairs of federal and state prosecutors, and the story swerved once again. The felony charges brought by the special counsel Jack Smith in August 2023 offered another opportunity for analysts to identify a break with past patterns. trump has been indicted before, ran a Washington Post headline. historians say this time is different. The entire 2024 campaign—featuring Trump’s criminal conviction in New York, an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, and a last-minute candidate switch from Biden to Kamala Harris—was one long parade of broken precedents and dramatic plot twists.
The past ten years, in other words, have been an education in difference. And yet everything about these politics—the appearance of some new Trump shock, the outrage of his foes, the certainty that our conversation will change in another two weeks—feels blurrily familiar. In this world, the exhaustion of liberal “mass resistance” seems less like surrender to a new fascist dispensation than an understandable, even healthy aversion to boarding the same old carousel to nowhere. Perhaps the most fearful metaphor in the Age of Trump is not collapse, erosion, or backsliding, but endless, spiraling repetition. In other words, the darkest possibility is that this time will not be different at all.
