President Trump wore a pin depicting a caricature of himself in the Oval Office on Wednesday. He has employed the power of the presidency to enact extensive and expansive changes since taking office last month. Photo / Eric Lee, The New York Times
No paper straws or local bike lanes. President Trump is increasingly trying to enforce his will on areas like the arts, sports, news, private companies and college campuses.
President Donald Trump knows what he wants, and he is not afraid to express it: No more paper straws, only plastic. No more drag shows at the Kennedy Center. No more low-flow toilets or changes to the rules of football.
In barely three weeks back in office, Trump has made clear that he has opinions on many things in American society and that he expects in this second term to dictate his preferences in spheres of national life that go far beyond the normal boundaries observed by presidents.
The sweep of his edicts and pronouncements has been astonishing, touching the arts, sports, news media, private corporations and college campuses. At times, it seems as if it were not enough for Trump to be President of the United States. He wants to be the mayor of the District of Columbia, the editor of The Associated Press Stylebook and the human resources director for corporate America.
The impact has been swift and profound. Where he can, Trump has employed the power of the presidency to enact changes more extensively and expansively than has been seen in such a short time. Where he has no direct power, he has used the force of the bully pulpit to pressure others to submit, effectively compelling private entities to make changes that in theory will please him.
Companies and universities across the United States have abandoned diversity, equity and inclusion policies that he has scorned. Hollywood was reluctant to distribute an unflattering movie about his younger days while eager to promote a US$40 million documentary about Melania Trump, with her as a paid executive producer. News media owners have recalibrated to avoid angering him.
Trump has never suffered from a shortage of opinions, nor a reluctance to share them. As a developer, he railed at executives who did not meet his specific demands, and as President in his first term, he often pontificated on all manner of issues.
But after winning a second term in large part through culture war appeals to Americans who think the country has changed too much, Trump seems more intent than ever to go beyond pungent punditry to reorient the country to meet his vision of what it ought to be.
“Trump’s ever-wider efforts at control seem like brand extension on steroids,” said Gwenda Blair, the author of The Trumps, a biography of multiple generations of the family, and a longtime student of the President.
“Back in his real estate days,” she said, “he promoted himself as the nation’s most successful dealmaker. During The Apprentice, this morphed into the nation’s workplace boss. Over the last decade, this has expanded into the Republican Party’s boss and the federal government’s boss. And now he’s making himself the boss of everyone and everything.”
Plenty of presidents have used their power to change society in profound ways, but rarely have they inserted themselves so prodigiously into many areas of public life beyond the executive branch.
In the past week or so, Trump has weighed in on a Texas education debate, directing the state House of Representatives to pass a school voucher bill. “I will be watching them closely,” he warned on social media.
As he prepared to attend the Super Bowl on Sunday, he scolded the NFL for changing its kick-off rules. “Whose idea was it to ruin the Game?” he wrote on social media. He told The Washington Post that its columnist Eugene Robinson “should be fired immediately!!!” for critical comments made on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Trump does not always get his way; the NFL has shown no sign of changing the kick-off scheme to what it used to be, and Robinson remains gainfully employed. But when the President signed an order intended to force athletic organisations to bar transgender women from women’s sports, the NCAA promptly went along.
The President has interceded even on matters that might seem less than presidential in their import. He signed an order this week meant to get rid of paper straws that have replaced plastic ones in recent years for environmental reasons. “Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!” he wrote on social media.
He directed his newly sworn-in Environmental Protection Authority administrator to focus on water flow standards “pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOILETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc. and to go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS”. (He has long obsessed over weak-flushing toilets and fluorescent lighting.)
He fired the governing boards of the nation’s military academies, with the goal of revamping their curricula because, he said, he believed their faculties have been “infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues” who are poisoning the minds of future soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
This week, he had himself anointed chair of the board of the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, directly taking the reins of the nation’s cultural centre rather than leaving it to others, as other presidents have done. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA – ONLY THE BEST,” Trump wrote.
He was never a fan of the institution on the Potomac River and skipped the annual Kennedy Center Honours ceremony throughout his first term, the only President never to attend since its inception in 1978. Now recognising that he could personally seize control of the centre, Trump seems tickled at the idea of being an arts impresario, so much so that he posted an artificial intelligence illustration of himself as an orchestra conductor.
The Kennedy Center takeover is not his only insertion into local affairs in the nation’s capital. Over the course of the presidential campaign last year, he repeatedly depicted the city as a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation” and vowed to “take over”. Now he plans to sign an order soon aimed at cracking down on crime, graffiti and homeless camps in the city, The Washington Post reported.
Washington is not the only place where Trump wants to call the shots. He is expected to try to reverse the new congestion pricing system in New York and told The New York Post that the city should get rid of bicycle lanes. “They’re dangerous,” he said. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, is set to meet with him Thursday at the White House, where she hopes to talk him out of intervening on congestion pricing.
When he is not playing mayor or governor, Trump seems intent on being editor or executive producer. He is asserting a right to judge how a major broadcast news network edits its interviews – not even interviews of himself, but of other people – and how a wire service stylebook renders names of geographic sites.
Even before his inauguration, Trump sued CBS News for US$10 billion over how it excerpted a 60 Minutes interview with Vice-President Kamala Harris during the campaign, arguing that it made her sound sharper than she really was. His newly appointed Federal Communications Commission chair has initiated a review of CBS’ editing.
The President has shown that he is willing to use his power to try to dictate change even on seemingly trivial matters. After unilaterally signing a proclamation declaring that the Gulf of Mexico should now be called the Gulf of America, he is trying to force private organisations to use the phrase.
The White House this week blocked an Associated Press reporter from entering the Oval Office for a press availability with the President on the grounds that the organisation had not changed its official style to the Gulf of America. A second AP reporter was later barred from an event in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
The Associated Press explained that it is an international news agency that serves audiences around the world that still call the body of water the Gulf of Mexico. The White House Correspondents’ Association protested on its behalf. “The White House cannot dictate how news organisations report the news,” said Eugene Daniels, the association’s president.
But that does not mean it will not try. And increasingly, there are those willing to comply. On the same day as the AP flap, Apple, whose iPhone map until that point still called it the Gulf of Mexico, changed it to the Gulf of America.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Peter Baker
Photographs by: Eric Lee, Doug Mills and Doug Marovich
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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