Ashley Parker

And they said, well, to be fair, he does say a lot of crazy things.

But if he says it a second time, we know he's serious.

And we know regardless of whether it's, you know, to fire the board of the Kennedy Center and take it over or to potentially march on Greenland, if that's what he wants, we are there to make that happen.

And it is such a marked difference.

And by that metric, I would argue that some of the staffing got better in certain ways, right?

So a lot of these people, the first term, were new, if not to government, then certainly to the White House and the executive branch.

And, you know, the first term, Stephen Miller, for instance, his famous travel ban executive order, it created chaos at the airports.

And a lot of these people spent their four years out of power working.

learning the lessons.

And the president, too, he came in in the first term and he sort of expected the presidency to kind of be like a monarchy.

Right.

And he was frustrated when he wasn't king.

And it turned out that, you know, a single senator, John McCain, could tank something he really cared about.

So they all learn these lessons in the four years out of power.

And they spend that time essentially getting bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more ruthless.

And so Stephen Miller, when he comes back — and I'm using him as an example, but this applies to a number of people — he now knows how to structure executive orders so that they can better stand up to court challenges.

He now knows that if he cares about immigration, it's not just the Department of Homeland Security where he needs his people and true believers and loyalists.

He knows that there are certain positions at the Department of Health and Human Services —

where he needs people who can implement his policies or certain people at the State Department, you know, in the Western Hemispheres Division who will be crucial for what he wants to do.

And so they come back understanding the levers of bureaucracy and government and ways to be creative and push norms and push boundaries in a way they didn't in the first term.