There’s a reason why Trump 2016, though it caused a lot of damage, wasn’t nearly as bad as it was thought to be.

Trump was probably the laziest president in US history. He had no clue what to do at the start of the presidency, and many of his requests were met with resistance by employees in the executive branch because they were stupid or illegal. This is because the executive branch has a small chunk of president-appointed positions relative to the merit-based chunk.

Many of his successes came about later in his term, as he got plenty of help from well-funded right-wing organizations to find people to appoint to various positions, including the 3 Supreme Court justices who helped remove federal abortion protections.

If you look forward to now, the same right-wing organizations have prepared a document (Project 2025) serving as instructions for Trump’s first 180 days. It calls for reclassifying every merit-based position in the executive branch into political ones, replacing the people who serve in those positions with Trump loyalists, then dismantling organizations like the FBI, EPA (environmental regulation), NOAA (meteorological organization; helps detect hurricanes), DOJ (sues entities for reasons like antitrust), and more. The only entities that could intervene in this case are the Supreme Court, which is very comfortably on Trump’s side, and Congress, which is very unlikely to be controlled by Democrats in a way that will matter.

Tl;dr, Trump didn’t know what to do during the first term. For his second term, he was handed a step-by-step tutorial on how to dismantle the FBI and everything else in the executive branch.