Philip Bump takes the time to outline all the ways that Trump has already shown that he will fulfill the plans he’s touting on the campaign trail [T]his would not be comparable to his inauguration in 2017, an event that took most people by surprise and demanded that he quickly figure out what, exactly, he was going to do. Positioned between the base that devoured his hostile rhetoric and the party that facilitated his election, he split the difference, bringing with him advisers (Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus, respectively) from each camp. He learned his lesson. The latter camp encouraged him to respect the informal (and, of course, formal) boundaries that accompanied the job. The former camp let him do what he wanted. By the end of his term, nearly all that was left was those enablers, and he’d discovered that most of the boundaries he’d been encouraged to respect were transparently thin. That’s the recognition that he’d take into January 2025. Trump’s rhetoric, as the likelihood of his being renominated increases, has been less constrained even than it was on the campaign trail in 2015. He promises in explicit terms to use government power against his opponents and in support of himself. He talks about the presidency as though it is meant to be returned to him rather than as something for which he is offering himself as a candidate. The likelihood of his renomination and his musings about what he would do if given the power of the presidency…