Washington: Somehow disruption doesn’t begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution, maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming president has in his lifetime.

He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice to say, there have been more of the former than the latter so far. Trump has said that “real power” is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.

Despite his modest margins, Donald Trump has exhibited more dominance of his own party than any president in modern times.Credit: AP

Trump’s early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.

He has chosen a bomb-throwing backbench congressman who has spent his career attacking fellow Republicans and fending off sex-and-drugs allegations to run the same Justice Department that investigated him, though it did not charge him, on suspicion of trafficking underage girls. He has chosen a conspiracy theorist with no medical training who disparages the foundations of conventional healthcare to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

He has chosen a weekend morning television host with a history of defending convicted war criminals while sporting a Christian Crusader tattoo that has been adopted as a symbol by the far Right to run the most powerful armed forces in the history of the world. He has chosen a former congresswoman who has defended Middle East dictators and echoed positions favoured by Russia to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Left to right: Elon Musk, US President-elect Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Mike Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy enjoy a McDonald’s meal aboard Trump’s private plane. Credit: @DonaldJTrumpJr/X

Nine years after Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is. In the past, none of those selections would have passed muster in Washington, where a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny used to be enough to disqualify a cabinet nominee. Trump, by contrast, has bulled past the old red lines, opting for nominees who are so provocative that even fellow Republicans wondered whether he is trolling them.

The message to Washington is simple, according to Roger Stone, the long-time Trump friend who relishes his own reputation as a political dirty trickster. “Things are going to be different,” he said by text.

To say the least.

“There is something in this city, in the imperial capital, that’s changed over the last 48 hours,” Steve Bannon, the self-styled agitator and former Trump White House........

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