Which president is different than all the others?

When George Bush Jr. was elected president in 2000, he also won majorities in both the House and the Senate in Congress. At the time I remember quite naively saying that he now was in a position to force through some real change, because any radical leftist proposal needed three different signatures, and the Republicans in all three branches just weren’t going to give it.

Hah! What a fool I was. During Bush Jr’s eight year rein the federal government grew in leaps and bounds, even more than under Bill Clinton, with every leftist desire fulfilled, though generally quietly in order to avoid outraging the American public that wanted change.

Nor was Bush Jr. the exception to the rule. No, every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower has been nothing more than a Democrat in disguise, and that includes Donald Trump during his first term as president.

Only now do we see a real conservative president in power. You need only look at the official portraits of all these presidents to the right to understand this. Just compare Donald Trump’s official picture in 2021 with this picture in 2025. In 2021 he was a happy leader who innocently thought the administrative state he was in charge of would do as he said.

In 2025 he is innocent no longer. Instead, he is a hardened warrior ready to do battle. And that is exactly what we have seen, a Republican president unlike any since before World War II.

For once, the voters got a choice on election day. For once, the Republican who said he wanted to change things really meant it.

Moreover, Trump did not enter this second term determined all by himself. He prepared well, gathering to him whole cadre of loyal and equally conservative troops equally ready to do battle. All, like today’s Trump, have no loyalty to the industrial-military complex that has been controlling Washington since Eisenhower. All recognized that if they wanted to actually change anything they needed to do so without mercy.

Thus, in only the first two weeks Trump and his troops have hit the federal executive branch like a tank, smashing through it savagely, issuing orders to reshape and even shut down whole agencies and — more important –instantly removing any civil servant who tried to defy them.

One need only read a list of his actions in his first week in office and then his second week to understand how shockingly different this Republican president has been from past Republicans. Both Bushes as well as Trump 45 merely said they would change things, but in the end none of them had the courage to really clean house. Nor was their general inaction much different than earlier Republicans Nixon and Reagan. Reagan was not afraid to fire people, such as the striking air traffic controllers, but he never cleaned house. Instead, he allowed the administrative state to grow bigger and stronger and more powerful.

Now however we have a new gang in town, and it is going about its business in ways Americans haven’t seen in many decades. This new gang also illustrates most starkly the utter corruption and incompetence of the established Republican Party that offered itself to conservatives for the last half century. While a handful were sincere conservatives, they held no real power. Instead, many in that party were simply timid cowards afraid of challenging the status quo. Others were clearly beholden to government cash — as Trump’s crew is now documenting — and did what they could to protect their cash cow. A large percentage were simply corrupt, liars eager to tell voters what they wanted to hear but never doing it so that they could keep the gravy train flowing.

The result was that, until Trump, the old saying, “It doesn’t matter who you vote for because both parties are the same!” was largely true. Establishment Republicans since the 1960s trimmed a bit at the edges to make it seem they opposed big government, but in their hearts they had no intention of trimming anything seriously. (We should have recognized this during the last six years of Clinton’s administration. Then Congress was controlled by the Republicans, who forced a balanced budget not by cutting any spending but by simply holding the increases down enough so that inflation eventually made up the difference. The goal however was always to allow the government to grow and get more power, and when Republicans also gained the presidency after 2000 under Bush Jr. their spending then went hog wild.)

A real house-cleaning has finally begun

It took an outsider like Trump 47 to expose this corrupt party and change it fundamentally. When he is done the new Republican Party will be quite different, and might actually represent the American conservative values it has been touting for decades.

Moreover, Trump’s second term is going to force major changes in the Democratic Party, or else it will die entirely. At the moment the Democrats can’t seem to understand what is happening and remain wedded to their racial politics. Thus the party’s death seems more likely.

Regardless, the real changes that Trump is bringing to DC explains why the DC swamp worked so hard to stop him from regaining office. They knew he would not be so easy to roll as during his first term, and feared he would do exactly what he is now doing.

For ordinary Americans, the news can’t be better.