“Nothing will stand in our way.”

With that six-word vow, President Donald Trump described how he planned to make his second term in office differ from his first. Now, after a four-year interregnum that began with political exile and ended with his resurrection, the great disrupter made clear that he does not intend to be thwarted this time in making America far more conservative at home and more imperial abroad.

In his 29-minute inaugural address, Trump wasted no time on lofty appeals to American ideals. Instead, he spoke with a tone of aggression intended to be heard by domestic and foreign audiences as a warning that America under a more experienced Donald Trump will not take no for an answer.

He will end an era in which the world exploited American generosity, he said, empowering an “External Revenue Service” to “tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

After falsely declaring that China controls the U.S.-built Panama Canal, he vowed, “We’re taking it back.” He hailed a presidential predecessor: not Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln, but William McKinley, the tariff-loving 25th president, who engaged in the Spanish-American War, seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, and paved the way for that canal.

And in the best McKinley spirit, he reinvigorated the idea of an America that will “pursue our manifest destiny,” a rallying call of the 1890s. This time, though, he described that destiny as an American settlement on Mars — a declaration that brought a thumbs up from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who founded SpaceX with that goal in mind, and who has barely left the president’s side since Election Day.

Trump’s burst of executive orders were intended to send the message that this time the chaotic disruption that marked his first term would be married to rapid and more disciplined execution.

Immediate actions

He began essentially shutting down the southern border to migrants and signaled his intention to challenge the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship.

He was scrapping restrictions on drilling and exporting oil and gas and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord again. Even with parts of Los Angeles still burning, there was no talk of climate change.

Federal funding of gender transition care was out. Federal forms, his aides told reporters, would be set back to a previous era, and allow people to check only “male” or “female.”

To anyone who watched Trump struggle through his first term, this combination of the substantive and the performative, with the gestures to his base, seemed familiar. The big difference, his aides suggest, is that this time he knows how to get it done, substantively as well as symbolically.

He sent signals intended as warnings to what he has long regarded as a “deep-state” opposition to his agenda. Within hours of his swearing-in, the Pentagon portrait of Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs, was taken off the wall outside his former office. It was Milley, of course, who stood up to Trump, pushing back on using the military to put down Black Lives Matter protests and reminding his troops that they take an oath to the Constitution and not to a “wannabe dictator,” as he put it so vividly at his retirement ceremony (Milley was given a preemptive pardon by President Joe Biden on Monday morning).

The rules have changed

It was a reminder to all those who remain in the building — and at the State Department, the Justice Department or the intelligence agencies, among others — that the rules had changed. At the State Department and the FBI key career officials turned in their passes over the past few days, rather than wait to be fired.

And gone, almost completely, are the establishment figures whom Trump turned to eight years ago for his Cabinet because he thought they lent legitimacy and an air of competence to his new presidency. Instead, he has showcased his reliance on outsiders like Musk and his choices to lead the Pentagon and the FBI, Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, both of whom have pledged to fundamentally revamp those institutions.

On foreign policy, Trump’s speech was a clarion call for the return of a powerful America that doesn’t dwell on maintaining a rule-based international order or painstakingly nurturing its network of allies, which most of his immediate predecessors considered one of its most precious resources. Instead, he described a reinvigorated country that exerts its power by economic dominance, by fear and, if needed, by force.

The speech bore all the contradictions inherent in Trump’s vision of how to exercise American power and of how he wants to be perceived.

There has always been a constant tug between the Donald Trump who wants to expand America’s footprint and bring the world to heel, and the Donald Trump who says he wants to stay out of unnecessary wars and win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end conflict around the world. These competing instincts reside side by side in Trump’s mind.

His proposed Cabinet is drawn from both camps. One-time neoconservatives like Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom Trump has picked to lead the State Department, are calling for the United States to confront China and do whatever it takes to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Ukraine skeptics like Vice President JD Vance are arguing that America has other concerns besides sorting out fights between Russia and former Soviet republics.

‘Peacemaker and unifier’

He insisted his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” and he took credit for the return on Sunday of three of the Israeli hostages being held by Hamas.

But after leaving the ceremonies at the Capitol, Trump’s focus was almost entirely on his agenda at home and seeking to reverse what he sees as liberalism run amok throughout government and society, a force that he blames for trying to undermine him in his first term and to imprison him afterward.

By about 7 p.m. Trump was deep into a very public demonstration of how quickly he was casting the Biden era aside. He showed up at the Capital One Arena, lit into his predecessor and then sat at a desk to sign executive orders. There was a freeze on federal hiring, a freeze on regulation. He ordered all federal workers to show up at the office. He pulled out of the Paris climate accord.

And then he headed over to the Oval Office, which was redecorated that afternoon, to start pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, who he called “hostages.”

“We have to stop some stupid things going on,” he told the crowd.