Why America’s elections will never be the same after Trump

It's important to step back to examine what's really at stake: the collapse of agency independence, the normalization of policy reversals after every election, and the growing threat that democratic institutions will be hollowed out and repurposed to serve a single political movement

- Robert Cropf

Donald Trump wasted no time when he returned to the White House. Within hours, he signed over 200 executive orders, rapidly dismantling years of policy and consolidating control with the stroke of a pen. But the frenzy of reversals was only the surface. Beneath it lies a deeper, more troubling transformation: presidential elections have become all-or-nothing battles, where the victor rewrites the rules of government and the loser’s agenda is annihilated. And it’s not just the orders. Trump's second term has unleashed sweeping deportations, the purging of federal agencies, and a direct assault on the professional civil service. With the revival of Schedule F, regulatory rollbacks, and the targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, the federal bureaucracy is being rigged to serve partisan ideology. Backing him is a GOP-led Congress, too cowardly — or too complicit — to assert its constitutional authority.

This was no improvisation. Trump's blitz follows a playbook: Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's sweeping plan to, in its own words, “dismantle the administrative state” and rebuild the executive branch with “loyalists prepared to carry out the new president's agenda from Day One” (Heritage Foundation). Even compared to Franklin Roosevelt's wartime mobilization or George W. Bush's post-9/II national security expansions, the scope and ideological intent of Trump's agenda mark a radical break — not in response to crisis but an effort to permanently transformthe structure of American governance.