An intense White House vetting process has left Trump with a battle-hardened group that follows orders.

The name Miles Taylor still makes some longtime Trump allies fume. In September 2018, Taylor — then chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under the first Trump administration — published the infamous anonymous New York Times op-ed.

Titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” the then–government official told the country that “many of the senior officials in [Trump’s] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations” and “insulate their operations from his whims.”

Even six and a half years after that op-ed ran, lobbyist and former Trump campaign official David Urban “can’t put in strong enough terms the emotion that it conjures up” to know that administration officials were working to undermine the president’s objectives to advance “their own agenda.” Yes, longtime Trump campaign hands like Urban — a lobbyist who worked to elect the president in 2016, 2020, and 2024 — scoff at Taylor’s decision to anonymously identify himself as a “senior” official, insinuating a higher-ranking position than his role as a department chief of staff entailed.

But in the view of many longtime Trump allies, the op-ed still crystallized the problem Trump faced last time around — constant leaks to reporters, infighting, and a desire to rein in what Taylor called the president’s “misguided impulses.” Many Trump 1.0 White House officials came in with the moral imperative to serve as a check on Trump, believing they could steer the ship in the right direction despite their own personal misgivings about his character and policy aims. For some administration officials, that meant taking papers off the president’s desk and leaking to the press. For others, that meant resigning from their posts in protest.

In 2016, “there was a good group of people around the president, a good core group, but a lot of people had, I would say, potentially different views on how things should be executed, right? And they were trying to get things done the way they thought the president wanted,” Urban says. In other words, the first administration was staffed with people who were trying to “interpret” Trump’s rhetoric and policy goals.

The second Trump White House understands the assignment, Urban says: “Donald Trump doesn’t need an interpreter.” From tariff policy to national security, this Trump White House is letting Trump be Trump.

“This time,” he says, “they’re just doing what he says.”

The loyalty didn’t emerge out of thin air. The president’s transition team implemented an intense White House vetting process and worked hard to staff the administration with aides who would not subvert the president’s agenda. The president’s running mate and eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., were involved in that effort, telling reporters in the fall that they were hellbent on sniffing out the “snakes” who they believed hindered the Trump agenda during the first go-round.

Naturally Trump, who has long complained about hiring “disloyal people” during his first term, made the final call on all high-profile picks.

“There was turnover within his first administration. This time around, he clearly is picking people that he’s had longer relationships with,” longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin tells National Review in an interview. “There’s more recognition of who’s really out to achieve the goals of what the president said his movement is about, rather than people who are about themselves.”

Many current staffers inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue worked on the 2024 campaign and have been through depositions, investigations, and searing media criticism along the way, sticking it out through the aftermath of the Capitol riot and a flurry of criminal indictments that would have sunk any other candidate.

“A lot of the core nucleus were with the president all the way through some horribly difficult times, when everyone said he would never get back here. And so, this is a pretty epic core, it’s a pretty battle-hardened group,” James Blair, assistant to the president and a deputy White House chief of staff, told National Review in a wide-ranging interview last month.

For this administration, the goal isn’t interpretation but rather execution. “When he says something, people do it. They don’t hope he forgets about it,” Blair continued, before quickly jumping to the necessary caveat. “That doesn’t mean people are yes men. Obviously, people vet things. They bring him information.”

But overall, with Trump 2024 co–campaign manager turned White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles at the helm, the president’s inner circle is trying to implement his agenda. “Not undercut it, not undermine it, not divert it, just implement it,” says Blair, a Florida political operative who got his start in state politics before joining Wiles in Trump world.

Now a little more than a month into Trump’s second term, Republicans and Democrats alike have been taken aback by the swiftness with which the administration has sought to dismantle parts of the bureaucracy, shrink the federal workforce, and scrap Biden-era policies surrounding national security, foreign aid, energy policy, border security, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Just as striking are the president’s disruptive moves on foreign policy and trade, from his decision to temporarily suspend intelligence-sharing with Ukraine amid its war with Russia to his on-again-off-again tariffs on American allies and adversaries that have left investors feeling jittery about a recession.

The White House has been pleased that with few exceptions, Senate Republicans have paid deference to the president on the advice-and-consent front, swiftly pushing through nominees whose odds looked tough from the start. He believes this cabinet is representative of the coalition that helped elect Trump, and that confirming unconventional picks like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. serves as another example of giving the American people what they voted for.

Now comes the hard part: getting Congress to deliver on the president’s legislative agenda. On that front, this administration’s team of battle-tested White House staffers have a not-so-subtle message to Republican lawmakers.  “Congress has to pass the Trump agenda, and I don’t mean their version of the Trump agenda, I mean the actual agenda,” Blair says.

The president indeed ran on some very specific campaign commitments — ending chaos overseas, securing the southern border, and bringing down inflation. Blair singles out Trump’s tax-related campaign promises, such as ending taxes on tips, Social Security, and overtime pay, as “very popular” proposals voters are eager to see enacted. “They like them. He burned them into voters’ brains. That’s what people want to see.” People close to the president say that Trump will stop at nothing this time around to implement his legislative agenda.

“I don’t think he’s going to let anyone in Washington stand in his way, because if we don’t get those tax cuts through, you’ll have a massive tax increase, and we’ll lose the House and Senate majority, and we’ll get impeached again,” says McLaughlin, the longtime Trump pollster. “We don’t want to go through that.”

Lawmakers have gotten hints of this preemptive retribution already. Last week, Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) — a perennial thorn in Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R., La.) side — was the sole House Republican to vote against a continuing resolution to fund the government through September to avoid a shutdown. That no vote unleashed a rageful social media post from Trump demanding a primary challenge against Massie, a rare breed of Republican who is completely unfazed by the president’s threats despite his unrivaled control over the GOP.

“I had the Trump antibodies for a while — I needed a booster,” the libertarian-leaning Kentuckian joked to reporters earlier this week, suggesting that, unlike his colleagues, he is used to the criticism by now.