Trump Signals a ‘Seismic Shift,’ Shocking the Washington Establishment

Somehow disruption doesn’t begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald J. Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming president has in his lifetime.

He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice it to say, so far there have been more of the former than the latter. Mr. Trump has said that “real power” is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.

Mr. Trump’s early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.

He has chosen a bomb-throwing backbench congressman who has spent his career attacking fellow Republicans and fending off sex-and-drugs allegations to run the same Justice Department that investigated him, though it did not charge him, on suspicion of trafficking underage girls. He has chosen a conspiracy theorist with no medical training who disparages the foundations of conventional health care to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

He has chosen a weekend morning television host with a history of defending convicted war criminals while sporting a Christian Crusader tattoo that has been adopted as a symbol by the far right to run the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world. He has chosen a former congresswoman who has defended Middle East dictators and echoed positions favored by Russia to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. In the past, none of those selections would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a cabinet nominee. Mr. Trump, by contrast, has bulled past the old red lines, opting for nominees who are so provocative that even fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.

The message to Washington is simple, according to Roger Stone, the longtime Trump friend who relishes his own reputation as a political dirty trickster. “Things are going to be different,” he said by text.

To say the least. “There is something in this city, in the imperial capital, that’s changed over the last 48 hours,” Stephen K. Bannon, the self-styled agitator and former Trump White House strategist, said on his podcast last week. “It is a sense that there’s been a seismic shift in the political culture. And, hey, I think they know we’re not going back.”

Mr. Trump, of course, made no secret of his desire to smash the status quo of Washington during his campaign. It was part of his appeal. Many of his supporters agree with his argument that the system is fundamentally broken and needs to be burned down. Business as usual, in this view, has benefited the privileged class at the expense of the broader American public. The government has been thoroughly corrupted and turned against conservatives and their way of life.

Karoline Leavitt, his incoming press secretary, said Mr. Trump had won “a mandate” to change Washington and that his nominations reflect that. “President Trump will continue to appoint highly qualified men and women who have the talent, experience, and necessary skill sets to make America great again,” she said.

At least some in Washington fooled themselves into assuming that Mr. Trump would not go as far as his campaign trail rhetoric. They sighed in relief when he named Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, to be secretary of state instead of Richard Grenell, a combative conservative who argued earlier this year that it was necessary to have “a son of a bitch as the secretary of state.”

But then came the nominations of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Republicans gasped out loud at news of Mr. Gaetz’s selection. Even the editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post called Mr. Kennedy “nuts on a lot of fronts.” And the Trump camp was surprised to learn that Mr. Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a settlement agreement, although he insists it was a consensual encounter.

David Marchick, a co-author of “The Peaceful Transfer of Power,” a history of presidential transitions, and dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, called the collection of choices unlike any before.

“This is like the ‘Star Wars’ bar scene of nominees,” he said. Mr. Trump’s camp has made clear, he added, that “it’s a serious strategy to blow out the government as an institution because of their belief that it’s become too big, too powerful and represents the deep state.”

Don Baer, a former White House communications director under President Bill Clinton, said Mr. Trump was challenging the foundations of the American system. “This is a huge moment for Washington, in all sorts of ways,” he said.

Mr. Trump, he added, is amplifying the populist resentment that has grown since the days of the financial crash of 2008 rather than trying to ameliorate it. The eruption in Washington is a goal as he tries to tear down the system, not something to tamp down. “What he’s doing now with these appointments is, ‘You all jump up and down and tear your hair out, but you know what? These are the people I’m going to do it with and I like that it aggravates you,’” Mr. Baer said.

Amid all the hair-tearing-out, other consequential moves by Mr. Trump have attracted less attention. In tapping Elon Musk to head a new Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy, Mr. Trump has handed vast influence over the federal government to a billionaire who profits from billions of dollars in government contracts.

And while heads turned at Mr. Gaetz’s nomination, Mr. Trump tapped three of his own defense lawyers from his various criminal cases to take other top Justice Department positions, pretty much guaranteeing that he never has to worry about scrutiny from federal prosecutors over the next four years.

It is a mark of how much has changed since Mr. Trump’s first term that appointees who once generated uproars are now slipping by without much protest. He has learned how to move the spectrum of outrage.

When Mr. Trump first tried to appoint John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican congressman, as director of national intelligence in his previous term, Senate Republicans deemed him too partisan and forced him to withdraw. Mr. Trump responded by making Mr. Grenell the acting intelligence director, which horrified establishment Republicans so much that they eventually confirmed Mr. Ratcliffe after all. Now Mr. Ratcliffe has been chosen for C.I.A. director and is seen as a relatively reassuring pick compared to the others.

Similarly, some in Washington took umbrage when Mr. Trump tried to replace Geoffrey S. Berman as the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, a particularly sensitive position whose jurisdiction includes Mr. Trump’s onetime business base, with Jay Clayton, who was then chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Clayton was assumed to be more pliant, and his appointment was thwarted. Now Mr. Clayton has been chosen for the same U.S. attorney position with little objection.

Indeed, some Republicans assume that Mr. Trump put forward some of the more contentious nominees to draw attention from the others, making Mr. Gaetz, for instance, a possible sacrificial lamb who can be blocked while the rest slip through. Mr. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, but he hopes to prevent the release of a House Ethics Committee report into his past.

“Gaetz won’t get confirmed. Everybody knows that,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California toppled last year by Mr. Gaetz and other G.O.P. insurgents, said on Bloomberg Television on Friday. He added that “it’s a good deflection from others.”

Others disagreed. “That’s not what’s happening,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary for Mr. Trump who broke with him, said on MSNBC. “He is drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”

In fact, it is not much of a mandate. While Mr. Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, he garnered just 50.1 percent nationally, according to the latest tabulation by The Times, just 1.8 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. When the slow-counting blue giant of California finally finishes tallying its votes, that margin is likely to shrink a bit more. The Cook Report already calculates that his percentage has fallen below 50 percent, meaning he did not win a majority.

Wherever it eventually falls, Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in the national popular vote will be one of the smallest in history. Since 1888, only two other presidents who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote had smaller margins of victory: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. (Both Mr. Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000 won the Electoral College, and therefore the presidency, without winning the popular vote.)

Mr. Trump can boast that he increased his margin in the Electoral College, winning 312 votes this year to the 306 he garnered eight years ago. But according to nearly complete totals, he secured his most recent victory by just a cumulative 237,000 votes in three states that, had they gone the other way, would have meant victory for Ms. Harris.

Moreover, Mr. Trump won with modest coattails, unlike, say, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 or Ronald Reagan in 1980, who each swept dozens of their fellow party members into Congress.

By comparison, Mr. Trump helped Republicans gain four seats in the Senate, enough to take control of the chamber, certainly a major victory. But he failed to bring with him Republican Senate candidates in four of five battleground states where he campaigned the most and won. Moreover, with races still to be called, Republicans held onto the House but did not build on their razor-thin majority.

One of Mr. Trump’s superpowers, however, has been acting as if he were more popular than he really is. Despite his modest margins, he has exhibited more dominance of his own party than any president in modern times. And his Senate recess demand will test just how far that dominance will go.

The recess appointment power in the Constitution was designed to let a president temporarily fill vacancies while Congress was out of town in an era when it took weeks or months to travel to Washington. But Mr. Trump wants to use the power to sidestep the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent to appointments.

At any other time, it would be hard to imagine the Senate voluntarily surrendering power to a president like that, even one from the same party. But Senate Republican leaders did not rule out the idea after Mr. Trump broached it, and it may be the only way to get Mr. Gaetz and some of the others through. Even if senators do not agree, some conservatives have warned that Mr. Trump may try to employ a little-used provision in the Constitution allowing him to force a recess.

“Trump has promised to be a dictator on Day 1 but has already started before Day 1,” said Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader from South Dakota. “This is a major test to our system of checks and balances. The Congress must demonstrate its commitment to its constitutional role. And it is critical that it does it now. Failure to do so is an acknowledgment that the president’s promise will become the reality.”

Under the rules, a recess appointee can stay in place until the end of the next congressional session, meaning until December 2026, or almost two years. Given Mr. Trump’s historically short patience with appointees, that means he could have people in key departments for as long as he typically might have them without ever being subjected to Senate confirmation.

According to figures from Mr. Marchick, the average tenure for a cabinet secretary in Mr. Trump’s first term other than Treasury, Commerce and Housing and Urban Development was 1.8 years. For the key security agencies — Defense, Justice and Homeland Security — the average term was 10.5 months.

“None of these candidates, I’m sure, were vetted,” Mr. Marchick said of the latest nominees. “It’s all just spontaneous decisions by Trump and then announcement by tweet. No process, no interviews, no vetting, just chaos. He had a mandate to deal with the price of eggs. The question is: Did the mandate extend to this craziness?”