What’s old is new again. President Donald Trump has returned to the White House, and his new administration is already acting with a vigor that eluded former President Joe Biden for most of his forgettable term.

Not since Grover Cleveland, in a dramatically different political and media environment than that which prevails today, have we seen a president and his team arrive in Washington, D.C., with first-term energy but second-term experience. 

Holding Trump’s inauguration inside the Capitol Rotunda enhanced the image of him sweeping Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, his actual failed general-election opponent, out of office. As Trump delivered his inaugural address, Biden and Harris were often in the shot as he denounced their administration’s woeful record and the various depredations of the bipartisan Washington political class.

Biden mostly kept a stiff upper lip during the proceedings, though he did cast a quizzical glance at Trump a few times. While he probably would have been trounced if he had remained in the race, we cannot know that definitively. Biden can go into retirement knowing that he is the only politician in either party who has ever beaten Trump in something more than some primaries. Harris, on the other hand, often looked as if she wanted to be teleported out of the room.

WHAT TRUMP HAS PROMISED TO DO ON DAY 1 IN THE OVAL OFFICE

If in 2017, Trump was effectively telling the swamp to go drain itself, this time, he came not to praise his opponents — eight years ago, he set aside some words of praise for his departing predecessor, outgoing President Barack Obama, but there was no such inaugural flattery of Biden or Harris — but to bury them. (His sole mention of Biden and Harris came in the introduction at the top, though he assailed their policies repeatedly.)

While there is much that is familiar about Trump in his second term — Biden told the Trumps “Welcome home” when he greeted them at the White House — quite a lot feels different. “Trump barely won the popular vote,” reads the headline of a piece by liberal New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “Why doesn’t it feel that way?”

Of course, the entire Harris campaign was premised on the idea that Trump could not win a national plurality, barring some catastrophic occurrence like Biden’s dismal debate performance. Biden himself stayed in the race as long as he did because he, too, believed there was a bigger anti-Trump electoral coalition than a pro-Trump one. This assumption proved correct in 2020, when the pandemic and COVID-19 voting protocols helped sweep Biden into office. And it worked well enough for Democrats in two midterm elections, one in 2018 and the other in 2022, in which they overperformed despite losing the House.

No more conventional Republican had won the popular vote in 20 years. George W. Bush’s 50.7% at the height of the war on terrorism was itself the first time a Republican managed this feat since his father did so in 1988.

There is also the fact that Trump improved his electoral performance virtually everywhere, even in California and New York, the two massive blue states where Democrats run up the score to win nationally, though it only helps them so much in the Electoral College if they cannot defend the blue wall in the Rust Belt. Both California and New York are experiencing revolts against the excesses of left-wing governance, though Democrats have yet to feel the full effect at the ballot box.

Between the coasts, Trump won an absolute majority. That, too, contributes to the feeling that Trump won a great victory because, in vast swathes of the country, he did. California took forever to count its votes, so by the time most people had processed the election results, he had yet to dip below 50% nationally (the final tally was just a tick below). Harris won more than 2 million fewer votes than Trump and about 6.8 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020.

Another answer to Klein’s query is that the majorities siding with Trump on the major issues that defined the election, and have dominated the new president’s early executive actions, are bigger than those who voted to restore him to the White House. Most voters reject gender ideology and racial discrimination dressed up as diversity, equity, and inclusion schemes. They were deeply unhappy with the ravages of inflation and the consequences of a lightly guarded border.

Polling has even shown greater openness to Trump initiatives such as mass deportations than during the first term. Why? Because record illegal immigration is felt far beyond border communities, with undocumented migrants holing up in hotels in Massachusetts and New York City. Springfield, Ohio, is not a border town. It remains to be seen whether this heightened resolve to control immigration will hold up in the face of hostile media coverage and widespread footage of weeping migrants, which will undoubtedly include some genuine hard cases. For now, there is a new sheriff in town, and his name is border czar Tom Homan, who has a rather different theory of the “root causes” of mass illegal immigration than Harris.

Most importantly, even if the voters’ choice wasn’t overwhelming — every presidential election since the hanging chads year of 2000 has been competitive — it was deliberate. There was a comparison made between two administrations’ records. There was an intense awareness of Trump’s many flaws and foibles, yet the electorate chose him again, much more decisively than in 2016.

“How bad does your second wife have to be to dump her and go back to your first wife?” quipped the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, an apt analogy for what the voters had done with Trump and Biden-Harris. Pretty bad, as it turned out. A CNN poll taken this month showed Biden leaving office with a 36% job approval rating and with 61% judging his tenure as a failure. Biden’s approval rating on the economy, crime, immigration, inflation, and foreign policy was underwater by 20 to 30 points, according to the RealClearPolitics averages.

Overall, Biden’s numbers were as bad or worse than Trump’s in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — perhaps why the Democrats’ focus on the nadir of Trump’s first term did not resonate with the voters as much as they had hoped. 

While most of the Democrats’ focus on democracy and norms was hypocritical (Biden left office issuing preemptive pardons and trying to wish into existence the ratification of a new amendment to the Constitution), Trump’s popular vote win did seem to sap their appetite for protesting his election. For the first time since George H.W. Bush in 1989, there wasn’t a single congressional protest of a winning Republican presidential candidate’s Electoral College certification. After four years of railing against the “Big Lie,”  it was too much even for congressional Democrats. 

Unlike in 2017, the leaderless Democratic Party is scrambling to find its footing and a coherent anti-Trump messaging strategy. Businesses and international leaders have also been more accepting of Trump a second time around, recognizing both his win and his near-decade atop national politics. Mark Zuckerberg had better seats at the second Trump inaugural than Cabinet nominees or Republican governors. 

In turn, the Trump administration has behaved more deliberately than eight years ago. It was ready with sweeping executive orders, a much more regular Trump presence in the public eye than was seen under the last few years of Biden, and federal vacancies have been set up to be filled much more quickly. Vice President JD Vance also projects youthful energy as he is seen everywhere with his young family.

“[I] increasingly think Trump’s 4 years out of power may have been an inadvertent blessing for him,” the conservative commentator Saagar Enjeti observed on X. “The party is now entirely unified with him, the [Left’s] theory of democracy illegitimacy is broken, and the vanguard of talent to help him accomplish his goals has had 4 years to prepare.”

Many possible pitfalls still lie ahead, and Trump retains his often self-defeating tendency to hold a grudge. But he is back in the Oval Office, and even his opponents realize there is nothing fluky or accidental about it.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.