Presidents have routinely "cleaned" house when elected. Of all the Presidents in history, one of the presidents that did the least amount of purging was Trump when he got elected in 2016.
Having known two previous cabinet members, they have both remarked how important it is to clean house if you want any chance of getting your agenda implemented. You need those in positions of leadership to be committed to your campaign promises.
I was often hired as a "change" agent to reengineer companies and nothing is harder than trying to change a company, when the people you are relying on are passively or actively undermining everything you do.
Cronyism is also something that has always existed with regard to new Presidents coming into office. There are about 4,000 jobs that the President has control over with regard to appointments.
JFK appointing his brother as AG is just one example. Perhaps one of the worse to abuse this power in my lifetime was Jimmy Carter (he had no evil intent, he just had no trust in Washington bureaucrats... it was so bad, they referred to his appointments as the Georgia Mafia).
Meanwhile, Trump's appointments are all over the map. What they share in common is a belief in transparency and shrinking the size of government. Trump may already have surpassed Biden in interviews granted to the press that were not scripted. His cabinet members have also responded to interview requests. And I expect a lot of stuff will be declassified, that has been classified to "hide" from Americans rather than because they are necessary for national security.
Project 2025 was the product of a conservative think tank. You said Trump's appointments have ties to Project 2025, of the 4,000 appointments how many can you name with such ties? I know of 4, but statistically that does not seem significant.
Trump will be one of the most controversial President in US history. If he succeeds in shrinking the size and power of the government over the daily lives of citizens and shifts the country towards an America first agenda, he will be seen as a transformational President. Some will love the change; others will hate it. One recent analyst said the "wealthy" will hate it because they tend to be globalists and the working class will love it, because all of "their wealth, jobs, and future" is tied up with what happens in America.
With only one term to effect the changes he is pursuing, Trump must move fast and produce results in order to persuade citizens to elect someone to continue with his policies after he is gone (we have seen in both Trump and Biden, how quickly things can be undone when a President leaves office). He will have some wins and some losses.
I think this speed is necessary and it will produce a lot of consternation. When a country's debt reaches a point where it is double a nation's GDP bad things begin to happen. Those "bad things" are expressed in both the economy and sometimes the political collapse of a country (the exact timing of that collapse can vary some, but not by much). The US is on track to achieve that distinction in 10 years or so.
Minimally, we must get the rate of growth in the national debt down to around the rate of growth of GDP (ideally below it), so we can "grow" into our debt. Paying it off or balancing the budget seems unlikely at least for the next 10 years. But to achieve the first goal we must cut spending by 2-3% of GDP or close to $1 trillion dollars quickly.
No doubt we will cut things that should not have been cut and preserve things that should have been cut. Once we get spending to the right level, then Congress should put on its "big boy" pants and start making tough decisions regarding what more can be cut to make room for things the government should fund.
Time to do things slowly and deliberately was something we should have begun right after we came out of the Great Recession. But politicians on both sides have made careers by spending other people's money.
