On Monday, January 20, Donald Trump was once again sworn in as President of the United States. The ceremony was moved indoors due to the cold, where Trump declared in his inaugural address that no president has ever been tested like he has, and that “the new golden age for America starts now.” 

However, it wasn’t all speeches and ceremonies on Monday — Trump also signed dozens of executive orders, affecting U.S. policies on a range of issues, including climate change, public health, immigration and transgender rights. And while his administration is only days old, last week, we also saw the beginning of confirmation hearings in Congress for his cabinet nominations. 

On this episode, Dan Richards spoke with political scientist Wendy Schiller about what these early moves in Trump-world can tell us about what’s to come in a second Trump administration and how Trump will operate in a country that seems more open to his brand of politics now than it was in 2016.

Guests on this episode:

• Wendy Schiller is a political scientist and director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at the Watson Institute. She is also the interim director of the Watson Institute. 

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson institute for international and public affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. On Monday, January 20th, Donald Trump once again was sworn in as president of the United States. The ceremony was moved inside the capitol rotunda due to the cold in DC, where Trump gave his inauguration speech declaring that--

DONALD TRUMP: The golden age of America begins right now.

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DAN RICHARDS: However, it wasn't all words and symbolic ceremonies that day. Trump also signed dozens of executive orders that will affect American policy on climate change, public health, immigration and transgender rights, to name a few. And while his administration is only days old as of this taping, we've also already seen the beginning of confirmation hearings in congress for his cabinet nominees. So what can this all tell us about what to expect from another Trump term, and about how Trump will operate in a country that seems even more open to his brand of politics now than it was the last time he was sworn in.

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To help answer those questions, I spoke with Wendy Schiller. Wendy is a political scientist and director of the taubman center for American politics and policy at the Watson institute. She's also the interim director of the Watson institute. Here is our conversation.

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Wendy Schiller, thank you so much for coming back on the Trending Globally.

WENDY SCHILLER: It's my pleasure to be here.

DAN RICHARDS: So let's start with Trump's inauguration speech. In some ways, it carried a lot of the themes from his first inauguration speech, with an America in decline.

DONALD TRUMP: For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly incomplete disrepair.

DAN RICHARDS: That Trump and his movement will now restore and bring to new heights.

DONALD TRUMP: Change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.

DAN RICHARDS: But it wasn't all the same. And I wonder what stood out to you from his inaugural address yesterday? And how did it compare to his first one?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, I mean, I think it was a more assured, more confident Donald Trump in the second inaugural than in the first when I think he didn't even think he was going to win. And it was a little bit surprised. So this time he has an agenda. He's been thinking about it, working on it. He's got his staff working on it, and he sounded like a man who knew what he wanted to get done.

DONALD TRUMP: We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. We will reinstate my Remain in Mexico policy.

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WENDY SCHILLER: And intended to use all of the powers of the presidency to do it. So that was a big difference, I think, from the first and second inaugural.

DAN RICHARDS: And the day's ceremonies also, it put on display some of the strands that now form Trump's support. And one of the more notable features to a lot of people was the amount of tech leaders that were visible alongside, former presidents and supreme court justices, not just Elon Musk, but Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook. They could all be seen in that very intimate setting of the inauguration. And I guess, first off, how unusual is it for business leaders to be that central in an inauguration ceremony?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, you know, it's hard to make generalizations here because the weather made it impossible for them to have it outside. It's the lowest temperature in DC in 40 years. So that was unusual, I think, for the Reagan second inaugural, they had to move in inside as well. So everybody was really crammed in. And normally the tech guys, and mostly there were men, were on the other side of the former presidents. But big donors to Trump.

Miriam Edelstein, for example, was sitting right behind former presidents. And that's not something I'm sure you would have seen in an outdoor inauguration, and certainly probably not in prior years. So everything about Trump is different. However, I will tell you, more than 100 years ago, John D. Rockefeller oil, railroads, Andrew Carnegie, they were most likely invited to presidential inaugurations. And the wealthy certainly have always had a big influence. And even Ronald Reagan, going way back there, had wealthy donors and wealthy friends who he brought to the inaugural.

So I think the interesting tie to make is the fact that the inaugural speech did not talk about really punitive tariffs on China in the way that the campaign did. Trump did all throughout the campaign, and I think that was an actual nod to the people sitting in the room, people like Tim Cook, head of apple, who really relies on China for manufacturing and for parts and knowing that they're in the room. Trump seemed to have modified his position on that. And so that's where you say, is there a direct influence from the people sitting in the room to the president's policies?

DAN RICHARDS: So more than the visuals, which maybe caught a lot of people's attention, you're saying there were actual sort of signals in his policy proposals that make it clear he is listening closely to what these people are saying.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah I mean, or that he's been moderating his position in response to their concerns.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, let's look a little bit more at Trump's policies or what we have seen of them in this already brief period of Trump's second term. Trump signed dozens of executive orders in his first 24 hours as president, including ones aimed at restricting immigration, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. I mean, all over, across the board, he was making statements with these executive orders. I wonder, were there any that really stood out to you that surprised you to be coming out this right on the heels of his inauguration?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, some of them we expected. Certainly, the immigration. He's just reinstating his policies from his first administration, the Stay in Mexico Policy, for example. He eliminated DEI in the federal government. Now, Ronald Reagan issued an executive order to eliminate affirmative action in the federal government in Nineteen Eighty-Three, I believe. And it wasn't his inaugural, but he did it. And so it isn't new for presidents to try to use this power as broadly as they can to accomplish their policy goals. So that didn't surprise me.

Pulling out of the world health organization surprised me because unlike the Paris accords, which we knew he would do, you wonder why we want to absent ourselves from discussion and knowledge and research about worldwide diseases and potential plagues and epidemics. So that was surprising to me and curious. Presidents also have the opportunity and the power to reshuffle the federal bureaucracy. There are a lot of jobs that serve at the power of the president and even of divisions. And the way that they spend money to implement the law is really under the president's control.

So to reschedule jobs, to make people more loyal to the president, that's something that Eisenhower did. President Eisenhower did that creating schedule C. So that wasn't surprising to me. But surprising is the expectation that so many policy changes. He wants to eliminate crime. He wants to make things safer. He wants to reinvigorate manufacturing. You need people in the federal government to oversee all those endeavors. And if you are in the business of firing them or intimidating them or pushing them out the door, I'm just not sure who's left to implement Trump policies.

DAN RICHARDS: Speaking of the implementation, how significant are these early executive orders typically? Are they more about signaling your values right off the bat as an administration, or do they really have meaningful-- a lot of meaningful consequences longer term?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, president always tests the waters in terms of how they want to accomplish their individual agenda with executive orders. What's the pushback? Already, we've seen that attorney generals from democratic leaning states are filing suit against the executive order to repeal or deny birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the 14th amendment. So that will have to go through the courts. And typically, republicans have always been very good at fighting executive orders, certainly under Bill Clinton, under Barack Obama using the courts.

And so now, will democrats be able to muster the same resources to fight some of these executive orders in federal court to get injunctions? And so this could become series after series, order after order, challenged in the courts. So the supreme court's docket will be very busy. But Donald Trump, in his attempt to save TikTok, basically ignored the supreme court's upholding of the congressional law and the ban and now saying, well, let's give it a reprieve for a couple of days or maybe a month, month and a half. That's circumventing the supreme court.

And this is the same court that gave Donald Trump, in particular, immunity, but the president immunity for anything he does as president of the United States. So you have a very precarious combination and potential clash of power between the Supreme court and the president.

DAN RICHARDS: And let's not forget, I believe also in attendance at the inauguration yesterday was not the CEO, one of the lead executives of TikTok.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yeah. And Trump always, he can get on a roll. And he won. He won the popular vote by close to 3 million votes. He did not win 50% of the vote. But he did win the popular vote. And he has, I think, more momentum and more claim to legitimacy for his agenda than he did in his first term. And he's not able to run again. And that is a constitutional amendment that has to be repealed in order for him to be able to run again. He would be approximately 82 years old when he ran again, which is the age that Biden is leaving the white house. So I'm not sure that happens.

So if you have somebody who can't run again, their biggest goal is legacy and popularity. And now, with the pardon of the fifteen hundred convicted felons from the January 6th insurrection and riots, that is an interesting first move after a pretty glorious day for the president. And then it sort of pushes him backwards. Because you're already hearing some republicans say that they're unhappy with that.

My guess is the majority of those individuals had already completed their sentences, had already been released from federal prison. But he also, a couple of others that committed violent crimes were pardoned. So Trump sometimes can't help himself. And that's the big question mark. How much of a seesaw will we be in for in the next couple of months?

DAN RICHARDS: I want to turn to Trump's cabinet or prospective cabinet because even before his inauguration last week, the senate began hearings confirmation hearings for some of Trump's picks, including his choice for attorney general Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth, his pick for defense secretary. And they're just two of the rather unconventional nominees Trump has been put forth in a couple of ways. Bondi is a former attorney general for the state of Florida, but was also one of Trump's personal lawyers during his first impeachment. And Pete Hegseth is most well known before this as a anchor on fox, although, he does have a career beyond that.

But these were two nominations of Trump's that many observers of politics in Washington thought might not get confirmed for one reason or another, but it looks like they will get confirmed on a probably on partisan lines, but confirmed nonetheless. Were you surprised by how these hearings went, and the level of support that nominees like Hegseth and Bondi received from republicans?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, most presidents have their cabinet nominees confirmed. It's rare that they pull somebody, George Herbert walker Bush nominated a man named senator John Tower from Texas, who had some of the same complaints about his personal behavior that Hegseth has today, and particularly with abuse of alcohol, harassment of women. And he ended up pulling his own nomination because it was thought, well, that's a bridge too far.

And obviously with Hegseth, the opposite happened. The republicans said, well, he's changed. He's better. We'll see how he works out. Commanding the military is no easy job. And how much will Trump allow him in terms of liberty and freedom to be a free wheeling secretary of defense.

Other nominations were quite standard. Marco Rubio, secretary of state Doug Burnham as a former governor of North Dakota, the governor of South Dakota as homeland security Kristi Noem. These are relatively standard republican nominations, with some exceptions. I think Tulsi Gabbard is the one that I'm watching. And Robert F. Kennedy jr.

Now, I think one of those people will not make it. I think that the senate will say no to one of them, possibly both. But I think Tulsi Gabbard might be the one that doesn't get through. Because if Trump can claim victory on getting most of his cabinet through, he will probably be more accepting of some rejections. I want to remind folks, in case you know, I specialize in the senate, I worked in the United States senate, that only a third of the senate is ever up for re-election at one time. So many republican senators are not facing the voters again in Twenty Twenty-Six. Which means if they feel strongly enough about a nomination, they may feel that they can vote against it and still survive electorally.

DAN RICHARDS: Outside of the official cabinet. I also wanted to ask you about Trump's plans for what he calls the department of government efficiency, also known by its acronym DOGE, which will be led by Elon Musk with the purported goal of eliminating wasteful spending and streamlining government services. So for listeners who haven't been following it that closely, I think it might be a little confusing. It's not an official department, but we're calling it a department. Elon Musk has made sweeping claims about what this organization can and will do, while other people are saying it can't really do anything. Can you give us a little bit of a sense of where this is going? Like, what's their plan?

WENDY SCHILLER: So there was an executive order to create DOGE. But DOGE doesn't exist. So in order to have a cabinet level department with legal authority, you have to have congress created. So the department of homeland security was created in the wake of 9/11, and congress created it, and the president signed it. And it's up and running, as we well know. And that was in response to a lot of people's beliefs that there wasn't enough shared information and coordination and our security services and our defense services to really prevent the kind of attack.

So that's the way it goes. Doge may make suggestions, but they would have to be carried out by executive order because they have no legal authority. And the bigger question is, business people find the bureaucracy, as we know, very frustrating. It's why they want less regulation. Elon Musk is an individual entrepreneur who's really has been brilliant in some of the ways that he's transformed certain sectors of our economy and business. But how long will he stick around to wait to eliminate jobs?

I mean, that's a really nitpicky, very tedious thing to do. And there are 2.4 million jobs civilian in the federal bureaucracy. So how long will he stick with this? That's my big question. Remember, for those of you who are old enough to remember, Bill Clinton asked his vice president, Al Gore, to reinvent government, and Al Gore did in the course of that eight years, they shared together. And they did reorganize, and they did eliminate some positions. So in that sense, I think this is not new. And the president certainly has the power constitutionally to configure the executive branch the way that he wants to.

DAN RICHARDS: Also yesterday, multiple lawsuits were filed against DOGE, claiming that it was effectively a federal advisory committee and that it was operating outside the bounds of those types of bodies. Might that also be the end of DOGE, or do you think this is a fight that's going to continue?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, again, it's all going to go to the courts. I also want to add that the question is who gets fired? So if Elon Musk fires people who live in the district of Columbia or live in northern Virginia or Maryland, I think that the republicans in congress or advocates won't be that bothered. But if you start firing people who live in Louisiana or Alabama or Idaho, really red states and those jobs are gone. And Elon Musk actually says, OK, you're fired. He doesn't have any legal authority to do that. And they will sue, and then they will call their members of the house and senate and their governor's office and anybody else they can.

So there will be pushback, not just from advocates for the federal bureaucracy, but from republicans who live in republican states and districts who are losing their jobs. President Trump, in his first term, created a voting commission led by now attorney general Kris Kobach of Kansas. But he was secretary of state of Kansas at the time. And so he appointed him as his vote czar to reform voting. And he wanted from every secretary of state all the voting records and how people lived where they lived, how they voted. And he sort of demanded it.

And famously, the secretary of state and the attorney general, each of them objected in Mississippi. And the line was, if you want that information, you're just going to have to come down to Mississippi and try to get it. But we'll direct you to the gulf and you can just jump right in. And that was fascinating. A deep red state with republican leadership that said, no, you have no right to that information, and we're not giving it to you.

So again, that's a way of state-based resistance from your own party that says, no, we're not going to go in that direction. And I think Elon Musk might deal with this for a little while. And they get very tired of it and probably want to turn his attention to something else.

DAN RICHARDS: So regardless of Elon musk's interest in this particular project, what is clear is he is right now very interested in being involved in the Trump administration and having the ear of Donald Trump. How do you think about their relationship right now? You've mentioned there's obviously a long history of the titans of industry working closely with presidents. But how are you thinking about this relationship that's just sort of captured the attention of so many people?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, Donald Trump is a lone operator, and the world is big enough for one Donald Trump, but not two Donald trumps. And so what's surprising is how much Donald Trump has let Elon Musk in. Well, given that he's probably contributed 190 or $200 million to his campaign, I think that that was one of the big reasons he got in the door. But there isn't enough room for two presidents. And the democratic party, in December, when the congress republican controlled, house democrat controlled senate, they were trying to get a budget done.

And Elon Musk threw a big monkey wrench into it in the middle of the night on x, formerly known as Twitter, and the democrats went to the floor and said, president Musk wants us to do a co-president Musk wants. And they keep referring to Elon musk as president, musk and co-president. And Trump has already responded to that. It already bothers Trump, and the democrats are going to keep doing this over and over and over again. And that's where I think a rift will develop between Trump and Musk. And if Musk could be president of the United States, he is constitutionally prohibited because he was not born in the United States. And we saw him in the capital arena, really as if he had won. I mean, it's really he's riding the wave.

What's interesting to me is the connection between the executive order and the 14th amendment. If you take away birthright citizenship, then the argument for why you can't be president United States if you're not born here, that doesn't make sense either. So paving the way, perhaps, for Musk. So what if we have a trickle down effect where that starts to come into play. So Musk will stay in as long as he sees any chance of exercising national power, and that enhances his power abroad if he's got Trump's backing.

But one thing Trump could do is send him abroad. In other words, OK, you're annoying me. You're taking up all my publicity. You're riding my wave too closely. Go to Europe, represent us there, and we'll see whether that happens. But I just don't see this partnership, given the ego situation. And that's true of all politicians and business people lasting all that long.

DAN RICHARDS: As we start to wrap up, I wanted to talk a little bit about the opposition to Trump. Almost exactly eight years ago, 100 of thousands of people gathered for the women's march, as it was known in DC, and millions joined in from around the country protesting Trump. There were protests this past weekend, but they were much smaller. And overall, it just feels like there's less energy right now among the opposition to Trump than there was in, say, Twenty Seventeen. And I wonder, to the extent you agree with that assessment, why do you think that is? Or do you agree with it?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, Dan, that's a subject for a whole other podcast. I would say that part of the energy, particularly in Twenty Eighteen-- Twenty Seventeen, Twenty Eighteen, the Women's movement, the MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter movement, a lot of that energy was surrounded-- was based on unity, that there was this sort of male, white, male dominated, spoke about women badly. Charlottesville, the racist and anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi movement there, that sparked a sense of commonality across a lot of different groups.

COVID epidemic and remote work, remote schooling really sort of broke a lot of those bonds because you just didn't see people, you didn't experience things together. And then I think also in later years, certainly the Israeli and Gaza Palestinian conflict and the Ukrainian-Russian conflict have generated a lot of fierce and passionate opinion, and fragmented the left significantly, where people thought they had things in common, now they see a potential enemy.

And I do think the symbolism of the marches, particularly for the past year on all these issues, I think drove some independent voters back to Trump to say, I don't think I have anything in common with you. If you're destroying a building and throwing chairs around or doing things like that, and that's true of January 6th, that's true of protesters at Columbia University, it's a sense that that's not me, that you don't reflect my opinion or my values.

And I think it hurt the Left far more organizationally than making any damage to the Right. And it will take a while for the Left to build it back up and build trust inside its own movement across different constituencies within that movement. And that's going to take some work and some healing, and that'll take some time.

DAN RICHARDS: Beyond the organizational work that the Left might have to do amongst themselves. I wonder if you think, as people have predicted, that Trump backing power will provide a focus for opposition that itself could be unifying. Again, having a common enemy, so to speak, that might it bring people together a little bit more on the Left?

WENDY SCHILLER: My concern is that as some people and some democratic politicians have noted as well, is that there are real abuses of executive power that would deny people their civil rights. And then there is everything else. And you really have to decide what you want to ring the alarm bells on. And if it's everything, then that message will get drowned out. So it's really, what is he doing that affects daily lives of Americans from all sectors that infringes on their constitutional rights.

And in the first Trump administration, you can argue that some policies did, but not most for people who are US citizens. And that's what we have to wait and see. And if you looked at the executive orders, as I know you did, and you listened to the speech, at least the inaugural speech, they were very careful with delineating who they were, quote unquote, going after and who they were leaving, quote unquote, alone. And that's purposeful. They saw that. They know that. They understand that it's a bit precarious.

The house republicans did very badly in Twenty Twenty-Four. There were almost no presidential coattails. He won by 3 million votes in the popular vote, and the house lost at least 1 or 2 republican seats. That means that the vast majority of the public does not support all of the Republican Party's agenda. And there's, as I said, a very quick Twenty Twenty-Six around the corner. And in that sense, paying attention to what really resonates with the vast majority of people in terms of the Trump agenda will be the way that Democrats can make inroads in Twenty Twenty-Six and that the Left, whatever way you want to define it, can unify and cohere and get back some of that support that they had in Twenty Eighteen and Twenty Twenty.

DAN RICHARDS: So you're saying that despite all the different issues we've been talking about, it's really civil-liberties where you think the opposition to Trump will most clearly define itself.

WENDY SCHILLER: Yes, I mean, I genuinely think, like we saw in Washington DC when Trump broke up the Black Lives Matter protest. The freedom-- and the first amendment has really our big set. And it wasn't even supposed to be the first amendment, it was supposed to be later on down the list. But the freedom to assemble, the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, the freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom from an establishment of a national religion. These are fundamental rights. And if we see the Trump administration breaking up protests, committing violence against protesters, suing people or arresting people for speech or for press. John Adams did that under the alien and sedition act. And in fact, Trump cited that very act in his inaugural speech. That is where I think you'll find common ground among the majority of Americans to say, that's a bridge too far.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to close with if you have any advice for people who are looking at this new Trump term and the flurry of activity and coverage we're already seeing, and are maybe already feeling a little blown over by the amount of activity and the amount of energy and vitriol and counter vitriol and all the rest. What advice do you have for people for how to approach what is likely to be a pretty intense period in American politics?

And a time when there's likely to be a lot of reporting and discussion and concern about the restricting of rights, whether we're talking about immigration rights, transgender rights or reproductive rights?

WENDY SCHILLER: Well, first, take a deep breath. Second, pace your outrage. Make sure that you save your energy for the things that you value the most that are important to your family, your community. And when you enter the fray, make sure that you're entering the fray to protect something that is actually threatened, that may actually be lost. Not the perception or the potential, the probability, but in fact, something you see on the ground now.

And remember, Tocqueville, very famous French philosopher who came to the United States in the Eighteen Thirties and wrote a very big book, democracy in America, said, the heart of the American democracy is the local community. And the preservation of all that we find dear in terms of our rights starts in our local community. So think local. And again, take a deep breath.

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DAN RICHARDS: Well, Wendy, thank you once again for coming on the Trending Globally.

WENDY SCHILLER: Well Dan, thank you so much for having me.

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DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield and additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you enjoyed this show, please leave a rating and review on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps other people to find us. And if you haven't subscribed to the show, please do that too. If you have any questions or comments or ideas for guests or topics, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

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