Before the election, much was made of Donald Trump’s promise to be “a dictator on day one.” Trump’s critics and Trump himself said his medium would be executive orders — but this time used not as an ordinary instrument of policy-making so much as an extraordinary instrument of extra-constitutional governing.

In any event, the first executive orders of Trump’s second administration are largely an organized pursuit of his campaign pledges. They amount to a somewhat bolder exercise of presidential power than is customary for an incoming president, but nothing approaching the exercise of dictatorial power.

The seeming exception is the order abolishing birthright citizenship, which sounds straightforwardly unconstitutional and seems likely to be struck down by courts. In that case, the measure of whether or not it is an example of dictatorial power comes down to whether he is willing to directly confront the courts. There’s little chance of that. Trump himself has said it’s up to the courts — not exactly how a dictator talks. In reality, the birthright order is a win-win sop to his base: if upheld, he gets what he wanted; if struck down, then he did what they wanted. And if the courts do approve the order, it becomes part of that long, dark tradition of the courts putting a legal stamp on the extension and expansion of presidential power.

It is striking, however, that he has not imposed any tariffs yet. All the explanatory noise coming from Trump confidants is that they are likely to be targeted or even graduated, to avoid dramatic one-off price changes. I am guessing Trump is worried about two things: First, inflation. He backed himself into a corner with the inflation versus tariff stuff, and he knows it.

Second, the stock market. He’s obsessed with it, constantly bringing it up in his interminable speeches and freewheeling conversations with journalists. He is worried about strong negative swings — too worried, in all likelihood. He knows that the stock market is likely to react negatively to tariffs, both directly because of its effect on growth, and indirectly because tariffs mean inflation, and inflation increases the chance that the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which threatens to pop bubbles or alter investor expectations. Here he seems to be listening to the Wall Street wing of his economic team. Stephen Miran, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, has floated a gradual 2 percent monthly increase in tariffs on Chinese goods; Scott Bessent (the nominee for Treasury secretary) has proposed having tariffs “layered in gradually” to avoid shocking the market.

Immigration is the other headline issue on which Trump proceeded with more caution than one might have predicted. It looks like he is setting the groundwork for significant action (i.e., lifting restrictions on immigration enforcement in schools, hospitals, and churches), but he retreated from the promised day-one mass deportations and raids. It’s possible that the money just isn’t there yet to conduct the mass deportations, and so any such project has to wait for the big bill they’re negotiating. That, however, would mean there’s a sudden respect for a constraint, and it’s hard to believe that’s why the city-specific raids were nixed.

Trump will have to be aggressive on immigration if he wants to hold the populist wing of the Republican Party together, given how much he’s favored the oligarchic wing up until now. But given the expectations built up around the first day of this presidency, it seemed somewhat surprising he didn’t do more. Things can only get worse for him as immigration gets folded into the pending budget battle. As Corey Robin has observed, Trump hardly has the stomach for the details of a budget battle. But appropriations for mass deportations are hard to square with the need to maintain the budget-neutrality the reconciliation process requires, while also financing a large tax cut, avoiding cutting defense funds, avoiding cutting major entitlements, and resolving the debt ceiling.

So far, the most politically significant thing this time around is not the anticipated planning and steamrolling but the weakness and disorganization of the opposition. Last time, major cultural and political institutions came out in force against Trump on day one, beginning with the massive Inauguration Day protests and never relenting. Both within the government (city councils, mayors, senators, governors, civil servants) and outside it (cultural institutions like major cable news, universities, tech companies, social media, other corporations), there was spontaneous institutional opposition as well as massive popular marches.

But all this action fed on the fact that Trump had lost the popular vote. And many of the favored (as well as unpopular) tactics used by the Resistance against Trump have been discredited by their relative failure to undermine him (i.e., lawfare and highly partisan media). He has a democratic authority this time that he did not have last time — an authority he overestimates, given the actual narrowness of the victory and basis for it. Nevertheless, his opponents have been cowed. For instance, the effect of the so-called antisemitism inquiries and political pressure on universities during Joe Biden’s Israel War was severe and set a tone. On Inauguration Day, Harvard University pointedly settled an antisemitism lawsuit, which grew out of last year’s protests, and which included Harvard adopting the utterly disgraceful International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism that confuses antisemitism with criticism of Israel and Zionism.

The dispiritedness of the opposition is going to make Trump look more powerful — there will be more collaboration than resistance in his second presidency. The anger at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other titans of Big Tech is, in some cases, a genuine critique of that turn, but it also seems like displacement: expecting Zuckerberg to do what others will not. Some moves, by oligarchs like Zuckerberg, are things they wanted to do anyway; Trump simply provides permission. But in many other cases, it’s just cowardice.