President Trump promised profound change. His former aide Steve Bannon said the first few weeks would be ‘days of thunder’.
It’s been all of that and more.
Domestically and globally Donald Trump has proudly upturned norms.
One key question for me these past few weeks has been: if much of the world (and liberal America) has been buffeted and bewildered by Donald Trump, what do those who chose him back in November think, nearly 50 days in?
I’ve been back to Pennsylvania, a place I have spent plenty of time over the past few years. It’s crucial in every election and was particularly so last November.
The state is sort of a microcosm for the country. To the east and west are the urban Democratic strongholds of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
In between are the rural Republican heartlands. And dotted throughout are the hinterlands – smaller towns where there is more of a mix of voters but still with a general lean towards the Republicans or, more specifically, to Trump.
Gettysburg and Waynesboro both voted broadly two-thirds for Trump and one-third for Kamala Harris back in November.
On the edge of Gettysburg, a bleak rocky outcrop marks the location of the battle which changed the course of the civil war. The threads which stitch America run through this place.
A few hundred metres away is the spot where Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg address.
It was 1863 and America’s 16th president marked the end of the battle with a reminder to a country divided by a civil war that it was a nation founded years earlier on the principles of liberty and equality.
Lincoln was America’s most consequential president, until now, maybe.
In the town’s Lincoln Square, a statue of the 16th president stands tall. My focus was the new White House occupant.
“10!” It was the first of many ‘tens’ on my Trump scorecard.
“Oh he’s doing great…Yeah he’s doing real great,” one man said.
I asked what, in particular, he was happy with. “The money he’s making me.” The theme was the same with the next person.
“Trying to pass no tax on social security for one, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime – help out the workers, help out the retirees, that’s very important to me,” Mike said.
My third conversation was with a couple. I suggested to them that the federal firings had felt quite chaotic; a sledgehammer approach.
“No. I think they’re using a scalpel. They’re finding so much. It looks bad,” the man said.
“We had too many people that were in those jobs, they weren’t doing anything,” his wife added.
A couple say that Donald Trump has been a ‘scalpel’ – not a ‘sledgehammer’