Trump 2.0: Confident, organised and still freewheeling

Former administration officials say Trump’s slew of first-week executive orders and actions signal his team has returned considerably more prepared than when they first arrived in January 2017.

“It’s been much more disciplined, on-point and issue-focused,” said Lawrence Muir, a former official in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Mr Muir, who was tasked with hiring administration personnel as part of the 2016 Trump transition team, told the BBC he was “essentially discarded” by the incoming White House at the time.

“They did not have a great idea about what they were supposed to be producing, or how to produce it,” he said. “[Trump’s] doing much better this time in terms of what he’s getting out, getting it out efficiently, and knowing how it has to be enforced down through the agencies.”

Trump’s first day in office in 2017 was overshadowed by a briefing in which then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lectured reporters on the size of the president’s inauguration crowd.

A week later, Trump controversially ordered that citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya – were banned from entering the US for 90 days, prompting chaos at airports. The order was blocked by a federal court and went through two more versions before it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.

Trump allies say they believe the new administration appears to have learned lessons from that early public defeat in 2017, as well as other legal battles the administration faced.

“They had four years in exile to prepare for a potential return,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, an organisation that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “And now they have a plan that they can implement.”