President Donald Trump’s first week in office was a blitz of executive orders and memos — some important, others little more than press releases on fancy letterhead — designed to overwhelm Washington into submission.

Week Two showed Trump’s maximalist second-term instincts were more than just an opening bid. It revealed how the president many Americans grew to distrust in his first term — erratic, chaotic, and unwilling or unable to focus on uniting the country rather than dividing it — has not really gone anywhere.

The result, for many Trump critics in Washington, is a mixture of fear and hope: worries about purges of the civil service and unconstitutional power grabs by Trump, mixed with a revival of hopes that Democrats can fight a president who’s proven more effective at blustering than taking real action.

Trump, who has largely shed the illusion he is not attempting to implement large chunks of the Project 2025 agenda, is unlikely to let up. And unlike in early 2017, Trump and his core allies are more familiar with the federal government and how to bend it to their will.

“It’s vastly different. There’s a level of preparedness and focus that frankly we didn’t have last time,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary. “The four years out of office have really allowed the president to think about the people he wants to surround himself with, the people he wants to stay away from, the policies he wants to pursue and the process by which he can get those things done.”

But Trump’s second-week struggles, including a brazen and potentially unconstitutional attempt to freeze all federal spending and the possibility that two of his Cabinet nominees may not be confirmed, prove Trump’s “golden age” is not a sure bet.

“I think one of the things that we are remembering this week is that no politician, no administration, is unconstrained by politics,” Democrat Senator Brian Schatz told HuffPost. “Everybody is subject to the laws of politics and the law of gravity.”

Federal Funding Fracas

On Monday evening, the Office of Management and Budget issued a stunning memo ordering federal agencies to pause all financial assistance grants. The order threatened to disrupt a broad swath of federal safety net policies and represented an affront to the constitutional separation of powers, since it’s supposed to be Congress that controls spending, not the White House.

Organisations that receive federal grants, such as charities like Meals on Wheels, said they were concerned they’d be unable to provide services. A spokeswoman for Meals on Wheels America told HuffPost the order “would presumably halt service to millions of vulnerable seniors who have no other means of purchasing or preparing meals.”

The White House initially insisted the order had been misconstrued and that it wouldn’t affect any programme that helps Americans in their homes. Two days later, after a court injunction and reports of Medicaid systems outages, Trump officials........

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