Smash and Grab: Why Trump Is Moving So Fast

Various theories are kicking around to explain the speed and lack of caution surrounding the initial blizzard of executive actions in the second Trump administration. The most conventional is simply that having four years to mull what happened in his first term, Trump and his top advisers came prepared to hit the ground running. That may account for developments like the early start on Cabinet nominations, but there have been plenty of second-term presidencies that did not begin with breaking every norm constraining executive powers, so something else is clearly going on.