If you want to understand the contrast between the Trump team’s early preparedness to govern the first time around and this time around, look no further than the so-called Muslim Ban in 2017 and the anti-DEI executive order this week.

The Muslim Ban created chaos at the airports and a sense that the administration didn’t know what it was doing, while, at the end of the day, the order itself wasn’t that important.

The anti-DEI order is obviously the product of a lot of thought and careful lawyering, and is enormously significant.

Mitch McConell famously says that there’s no education in the second kick of the mule, but the Trump operation evidently learned something from the first kick back in the first term.