WASHINGTON — The Trump show is back in Washington, with familiar set pieces. The new president held court for hours with the press, trolled bankers at Davos, feuded with a bishop and danced with a sword, all with cameras rolling. He signed decree after decree, pulling presidential Sharpies from the wooden cradle on his desk.

The executive order signings showed Donald Trump’s penchant for pageantry — and a leader more familiar with the levers of power, emboldened and gleeful to pull them beyond previous limits. He moved to deny birthright citizenship to some children born in the U.S., including some whose parents are in the country legally. He freed or cleared 1,500 Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, even those who assaulted police officers, and began dismantling parts of the federal government.

Republicans are jubilant and Democrats are despondent. “It was rolling thunder. It was core issues. It was deep, it wasn’t performative,” said Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and occasional constructive critic. “This shows years of preparation paying off. This is what victory feels like.”

The honeymoon is hardly assured to last. Trump has so far mostly stuck to domestic files and matters that are low-hanging fruit, avoiding drastic steps in the policy areas that would tempt the most backlash from his party, Wall Street or both.

He’s embraced a dovish early approach to China that’s at odds with Republican orthodoxy. At least for now, he hasn’t moved to enact the maximalist raft of tariffs he thundered about on the campaign trail. His plans for a tax overhaul and for ending the war in Ukraine remain unclear.

Meanwhile, fresh fault lines are emerging within his party around his top emissary, Elon Musk, who took the wind out of the sails of one of Trump’s early tech announcements and is at odds with the GOP’s populist wing around issues such as H-1B worker visas.

Delighted conservatives

Trump’s first week had a domestic focus that reflected his slogan: America First. He declared a national emergency at the southern border, encouraged more fossil-fuel production, delivered a broadside to government diversity programs and ordered federal workers back to the office. He traveled Friday to North Carolina and California, two states dealing with disaster responses, and mused about dismantling the federal disaster agency.

To the extent that he’s made global moves, they’ve reeled in American involvement abroad: He quit the Paris Agreement, demanded NATO more than double defense spending and moved to back out of the World Health Organization. “Ooooo, that’s a big one,” Trump said in delight when the WHO order was presented for his signature.

The blitz of action has made his allies ecstatic. “We had very high hopes,” said Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank. “Those have been exceeded.”

Roberts ticked off a list of orders that have most delighted conservatives: the move to curtail birthright citizenship, which he says takes away an incentive for illegal immigration, as well as “tearing out DEI, root and branch, from every federal agency.”

The birthright citizenship move already has been blocked by a judge, though that won’t be the end of the push. “Most administrations don’t want their EOs to be struck down,” said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “This administration doesn’t care about that.”

Some of the early steps align with suggestions in Project 2025, a playbook compiled by Heritage and other conservative groups. The initiative became a lightning rod during the campaign, leading Trump to distance himself from it. Roberts demurred and said he'd leave it to others to assess the project's impact.

Republican glee is matched only by horror from rudderless Democrats, who are outraged over Trump brazenly freeing the Jan. 6 convicts, abandoning climate and health efforts and ramming through controversial cabinet picks, with little outcry. “He is much more normalized this time around,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., lamented in a podcast with Jon Stewart.

Yet he exhibited a sign of his sense of impunity when, on Friday night, Trump fired at least a dozen inspectors general, according to the Washington Post. The watchdog purge further obliterates Trump’s guardrails.

Tariff whiplash

Now, after Trump’s initial burst, comes the tricky part. That part includes tariff policy, an area where he’s sent mixed signals. He’s pledged to hit Mexico and Canada with 25% levies, while applying either a lower tariff on goods from China or sparing that country entirely from new tariffs.

That whiplash, and the potential he’ll eventually take a more broad-brush approach, is testing the strength of his coalition. “He’s talking 20%, higher rates on others, maybe up to a trillion” in new annual revenue, said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who has expressed public misgivings about a full embrace of tariffs.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s tariffs, and the retaliation they’d likely prompt, could rattle Wall Street — one of few institutions from which Trump craves approval. The S&P 500 had its best start to a presidential term since 1985 — an upbeat reception that Trump surely wants to be durable.

But he appears determined, believing tariffs — along with a new, lower corporate tax rate for firms that produce goods in America — will reshape the economy.

This all suggests Trump’s tariff barrage is simply delayed, not deferred, as the administration staffs up. Roberts acknowledged some unease within the conservative movement about a tariff fight erupting by saying Trump might find it best to hit China and Mexico first. Some Trump allies have signaled they’re much more comfortable with Trump wielding the threat of tariffs as leverage than they’d be if he plunged the U.S. into a new mercantilist age.

Other policy questions, too, are poised to expose divisions in his party: Can Republicans deliver on Trump promises — like not taxing tipped income, a pledge he’ll emphasize Saturday in Nevada — while also extending his expiring tax cuts, increasing defense spending and not curtailing Social Security eligibility, all without exploding the already ballooning deficit?

In a sign of how Trump intends to carry out his agenda, there’s virtually no talk of a bipartisan bill, like the infrastructure law former President Joe Biden passed or the semiconductor subsidy bill that Trump may yet try to prune.

With legislative action temporarily on the back burner, Trump has sought to make a splash with pledges of investment in U.S. industries. On Wednesday, he stood with titans of the artificial-intelligence world to announce a planned flagship investment of $500 billion. Musk, who has an AI business of his own, called out companies involved in that plan, saying they don’t have the money to back up their pledge.

Courting strongmen

When Trump was asked where he’d go for his first foreign trip, he demurred and suggested it was up for bidding. He said Saudi Arabia might win the sweepstakes if they pledged to invest $500 billion; when the Saudis offered $600 billion, Trump asked for a trillion. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was his first foreign leader phone call.

The overture is one example of his courting of improved ties with authoritarians. Trump also praised Xi Jinping, offered to speak with Russia and blamed Ukraine in part for its invasion. He spoke virtually to U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea, and asked: “How is Kim Jong Un doing?”

That dynamic is also making his trade policy jarring. He called on OPEC to cut crude prices in the same speech that he said he didn’t need oil from Canada, which is the US’s top source of imports. He has repeatedly lamented trade deficits while absolving the country with easily the biggest shortfall, China, and aiming ire at his biggest customer, Canada.

While he’s only days into a job he spent years fighting to reclaim, Trump already appears occasionally confined. This was evident as soon as Monday, when he delivered an inaugural address that kept closely to script and evoked the presidential tone that staff have long steered him toward.

He then riffed a second speech to supporters in an overflow room where he was the unburdened, freewheeling version of himself.

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(With assistance from Joshua Green.)

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