Opinion | A moment that predicted everything

Times Opinion asked our columnists to think about important moments in the first 100 days of President Trump, who unveiled themselves through the administration or transformed the country. Read Ezras Klein's attachment below And the others here.

I will break the limits of the command prompt and say that the most important – or at least predicted – day of Donald Trump's second term before the start: it was July 15, 2024, the day on which he announced that JD Vance was his choice for Vice President.

The runners-up were Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum representatives of the Republican Party, which existed before Trump's 2016 campaign. Vance was in a way from the Maga movement how Rubio and Burgum were not. Vance hated the right people. Rubio and Burgum were viewed as moderating forces; Vance accused himself as an acceleration exam that believed that the biggest problem with Trump's first term was that Trump was surrounded by people who occasionally said no to him. Vance was the only one of the three vice presidential candidates who would say that he would have done what Mike Pence would not do: refuse to certify the election result of 2020.

In the days before Trump's choice, Vance had little sense to hold the pole position. The reporting later revealed a lobby campaign: Rupert Murdoch and his allies tried to speak Trump from Vance, as did Ken Griffin, the managing director of Citadel, and even Kellyanne Conway. But Trump was influenced by other voices: Don Jr., Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, who reports Trump said that if he chose Rubio or Burgum, he was probably murdered by Maga's enemies.

This was the moment when we could see the structure of Trump's first term in the structure of his second place. Trump's first administration was almost like a European coalition government: Trump ruled in a restless alliance with a Republican party that he did not fully control or even with a business world in which many viewed him as a buffoon, with an employee who saw some of his role that was opposed to the boss of the boss, and opposed an administrative state that often resisted his demands on an administrative state. This friction frustrated Trump and many of his first semester allies. It was also the reason why the worst predictions for his first term were largely not true and why so many had wrongly predicted that his second term would follow the same script.

But Trump's second term would never follow the same script because it has a completely different structure. This is not a coalition government; It is a royal court. Trump is surrounded by courtes who have influence as long as they maintain their favor and not longer. When was the last time he heard the word “no” or was said: “I'm sorry, sir, you can't”? During his first term, Trump was looking for either consultants and appointments that many of his doubters would calm down; In his second time he estimated loyalists who do what they are communicated, and executors who ensure that others are also in harmony.