Trump 2: A tighter, more effective ship
Prime Minister Mark Carney pictured with U.S. President Donald Trump at the G7 Leaders meeting in June. ‘This more disciplined and focused version of Trump will be a harder nut for Prime Minister Carney to crack than Trump 1 was for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,’ writes Ken Polk. / GOVERNMENT OF CANADA PHOTO
Canadians have seen this movie before, but the sequel feels different. In U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, Justin Trudeau could sometimes wait out the chaos, betting that today’s crisis would be forgotten by tomorrow’s tweet. Now, Prime Minister Mark Carney faces a U.S. president who is more focused, more disciplined, and far less likely to be blown off course. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do, and that steadiness—not the turbulence of Trump 1—may be the real test for Canada.
Trump’s first election was widely viewed as an accident, a freak alignment of the Electoral College and the poor campaign run by Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trump himself seemed astonished that he had won.
However, Trump 2 did not sneak up on the voters. Americans had seen Trump's chaos, quicksilver authoritarianism, and extremist tropes and tendencies in his first term. The Democrats spent billions of dollars reminding them about his first-term excesses. But in the end, Americans decided that a second Trump term was a better bet than a President Kamala Harris.
Conservative and “never Trump” columnist David Frum once used an analogy from Jurassic Park to warn of a Trump second term, saying: “This time the velociraptors will know how the door handles work. He will bring with him more committed followers, who may defeat the methods of evasion and delay.” This prophecy has come true.
Trump clearly spent a lot of time between 2020 and 2024 thinking about how he would get things done. He learned how bureaucrats can resist his agenda, and he has taken resolute action to bind the federal government to his policy ends. He has placed total loyalists in his cabinet and executive branch agencies. His firing of the Chief Statistician of the Department of Labour for publishing a weak jobs report last month is just the most recent example of his determination to control the Executive Branch.
Trump has moved systematically ahead with a coherent policy agenda focused entirely on boosting U.S. economic growth, including: massive tax cuts, erecting tariff walls to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., slashing regulations and the size of the federal government, and making massive investments to retain and expand the U.S. global lead in AI. Notwithstanding the uncertainty churned up by Trump’s tariff agenda, the U.S. economy outperformed many expectations in the second quarter of 2025, registering annualized GDP growth of 3%. But it is early days yet. Significant medium-term risks on investment, inflation and supply chains suggest the growth could get much rougher.
Again, showing a capacity to learn from experience on immigration control, Trump has focused on what he can control — deporting immigrants — rather than what he couldn’t in the first term: building and getting Mexico to pay for a Border Wall.
Trump has also evolved his culture war agenda from rhetoric into high-profile assaults on institutions he and his MAGA followers have long portrayed as being woke: most prominently by withholding federal funding from Harvard University and firing the entire board of the Kennedy Centre of the Performing Arts and making himself its head.
In foreign affairs, Trump 2 has transcended the Democratic caricature of him as an out-of-control agitprop puppet of dictators. He secured massive spending increases from his NATO allies and a Gaza cease-fire, while pushing for a broader region-wide Middle East peace settlement. He has engaged in active diplomacy, including with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, to work toward a peaceful resolution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He has combined force and diplomacy to push Iran toward abandoning its nuclear ambitions.
Perhaps the most telling difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 has been its disciplined execution. Trump 1 saw a plethora of leaks and counter-leaks as administration officials implemented policy anonymously, sometimes publicly. Nothing of the kind has been seen so far in Trump 2. There are a few leaks, and the leaks that occur come only from the top.
Having gone to school during his first-term trials and tribulations, Trump has systemically exerted maximal institutional pressure to bend Washington to his objectives. Republican control of Congress has abetted him in this.
The negative Canadian verdict on President Trump is set in stone — to the dismay of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. However, the jury is still very much out in the United States. Americans have elected Trump twice, and the Democratic Party seems to be in disarray in the face of the tighter, more effective ship that so far has been a feature of Trump 2. Indeed, some in the Democratic Party are wondering whether it might not be smarter to imitate Trump rather than rage-farming against him.
Yet he is politically vulnerable to the longer-term impact of tariffs and the significant cuts to health care, nutrition, and clean energy programs required by the Republican Congress to pass his tax cut. This has sparked a backlash, even among some Republicans.
Regardless, elections have consequences. Trump said what he was going to do, and he is doing it. The results of the 2026 midterms will tell us whether we see a Trump outlier or a long-term policy realignment. Whatever the outcome, this more disciplined and focused version of Trump will be a harder nut for Prime Minister Carney to crack than Trump 1 was for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
