Donald Trump's decade-long political journey has deeply changed both him and the country's politics. Photo / Al Drago, Bloomberg via Getty Images
Ten years after a self-professed real estate tycoon and reality television star announced he was running for President, the United States and its politics have irrevocably changed, Peter Baker wrote yesterday in the New York Times.
The man himself isn’t quite the same, either.
President Donald Trump is still the attention-loving, payback-obsessed main character that he was in 2015.
But he learned during his first term what glass he could break if he only had a hammer – while his four years out of office drove him to turn grievance into vengeance.
To guide us through the way the Trump era has changed Trump, I Slacked the person who has chronicled his decade in more detail than just about anybody: New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Our lightly edited conversation follows.
Jess Bidgood: The decade that’s passed since Donald Trump came down the escalator and announced his first presidential run has changed the country enormously. You’ve covered every twist and turn along the way. How has this decade – with his rise, and fall, and rise – changed Trump?
Maggie Haberman: In all of the big ways, Trump is very much the same person he was when he first announced, and for many decades before 2015. He is deeply focused on himself, on getting “credit” – something he brought up in a Truth Social post over the weekend about Iran and Israel – and on dominating media coverage and his perceived rivals, and commanding financial advantage.
He has always been interested in payback. But the experience of the Russia investigation in his initial term first began to harden his behaviours. Then, the four years out of office, which included indictments, a criminal conviction and two assassination attempts, have had a deeper effect on him than I think is always clear.
JB: What is that effect, and how has it shaped the first months of his second term?
MH: A couple of points stand out. One is, armed with the backing of a Supreme Court decision last year that granted him broad immunity for official acts, he is doing some of the things he wanted to during his first term, like maximising official power – and testing what courts will let him get away with – to dismiss inspectors-general and swathes of the bureaucracy, and to use the Justice Department openly as something of a personal law firm.
For all the claims of his visibility to the public, he actually has very few public events away from the White House. Some associates believe that is also a byproduct of the attempts on his life.
Today, Trump has a far more effective chief of staff in Susie Wiles than the four he had during his first term, because he trusts her. But there are still a number of issues on which he’s calling the plays as he goes. His ups and downs on tariffs have been a reminder of how little planning goes into some of his decisions.
His sudden decision to exempt farm workers and hotels from his vow to enact a historic mass deportation effort also has echoes of term-one behaviour.
JB: Trump’s critics are quick to describe him as more extreme today than the person who came down the escalator. And both his supporters and detractors agree he has acted faster and more boldly than when he first took office, even if, as you point out, he sometimes walks his actions back. Have his views about power and politics actually changed? Or is it simply that he’s better equipped to enact them?
MH: I don’t think his governing style has evolved, really. I think he went to Washington in January 2017 having spent his formative years dealing with and trained by a political clubhouse system of New York City, and he believed Washington would function more like the Brooklyn Democratic machine than what it actually is. I do think he knows more now about how Washington works. But I believe this iteration has always been there, it was just obscured by his advisers last time and by his own lack of certainty about what he could get away with doing.
I also think we lose sight of the chilling effect the Russia investigation and other congressional investigations had on much of his first administration in terms of fears of being subpoenaed. That’s just not the case now.
Today, he is surrounded by people who really believe in him – ardently, almost with a fervour in some cases – and want to help him enact his vision. He has successfully ground down so many of the institutions that held him back last time, or reshaped other parts of them, like the judiciary.
He is also clearly enjoying the retribution part of his agenda.
JB: Absolutely. Do you think that represents an important shift? That, if his campaign in 2015 and 2016 seized on grievance, generally, the Trump of today seems more focused on retribution – on weaponising the injustices he says have been done specifically to him?
MH: I think when he was campaigning in 2015 and 2016, he surprised himself with how well he did, and he didn’t anticipate winning, although he would say otherwise. I think he has been interested in payback for perceived wrongs for as long as he has been a legal adult. He used the Government against a number of his perceived enemies in term one.
But now it’s streamlined and operationalised, and often delivered publicly from the Oval Office in front of cameras, as opposed to just him railing on social media and seeing if his aides will take up the charge, or pressuring people inside the Government who might not comply.
Last time, he didn’t issue presidential orders against people whose supposed wrongdoing was, say, rooted in disagreeing with him that the 2020 election was stolen.
To be clear, he has always trafficked in his own realities – I said in 2017 that it was like that children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, in which a child draws the world he imagines, and thereby makes it real. But now, he’s adapted the entire Government – and much of the Republican Party – to sign off on his version of reality, and his grievances.
JB: It seems like his years out of power were just as formative as his years in power have been.
MH: One thing that I’ve been having discussions with folks about over the last year is how different history would have been if Trump had won a second consecutive term.
Some of what he is doing now is what he started to do in 2020, before the pandemic. He was beginning to reshape his White House, and to move to control parts of the federal workforce, before the coronavirus froze everything in place.
If he had won in 2020, he would have been in office through global inflation because of the pandemic, he would have dealt with the after-effects of that recovery, he would have dealt with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and he would have potentially faced the rising anti-incumbent tide around the globe.
Instead, Biden had the after-effects, and his own calamitous decision-making, and Trump hardened his own support.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jess Bidgood and Maggie Haberman
Photographs by: Al Drago, Chip Somodevilla, Kayla Bartkowski
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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