Trump’s agenda includes matters no American president has ever contemplated addressing

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The pre-eminent issue in the John F. Kennedy administration was containment of communism. For Lyndon B. Johnson, it was civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter was preoccupied with energy supplies and hostages in Iran. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama took on health care, and George W. Bush was forced to address terrorism.

Those were the concerns of yesteryears.

Donald Trump is barely finished with the first half of the first year of his second term, and already many issues on the presidential agenda – along with immigration, tariffs and wars in Ukraine and Gaza – are the sorts of matters that American presidents never contemplated addressing.

Whether vaccines are available, and to whom. Who gets research grants, and why. What’s taught in classrooms, and how it’s presented. What museums display, and the way they do it. What historic sites celebrate, and how. Who is admitted to private universities, and how those decisions are made. What’s shown at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and who chooses the repertoire. What books are read at military academies, and who decides. What the independent Federal Reserve Board does, and who sits on it. How crime in the country’s cities is fought, and by whom. What a notorious sex offender was up to, and with whom.

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This is an agenda with a difference, reflecting a different kind of president in a different political environment in a different age.

Commentators have focused on how Mr. Trump has extended the reach of presidential power. What’s just as astonishing is how he’s extended the reach of the presidential agenda.

In his first term, he altered the tone of American politics, making vindictiveness and grievance the major leitmotifs of the presidency. Seven months in this time, he’s altered the character and content of his office and, along with them, the very subjects of the national conversation, nudging them – no, thrusting them – into fresh areas of concern and contention.

“Symbolic issues have always been powerful in politics, and the issues Trump is emphasizing are matters of culture and society that haven’t been part of national politics before,” said Christopher Devine, a political scientist at the University of Dayton. “When Trump promised to deliver for his voters, he was talking about scratching the cultural issues that bother his supporters – and now that he’s doing it, it’s a way of saying he’s addressing their concerns.”

All this week the country has been convulsed in a controversy about vaccines – their safety, their availability, even whether schoolchildren should be required, as they have been for nearly a half-century, to be vaccinated against measles, polio and tetanus.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wednesday nominated at least three vaccine skeptics to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This came the same day Florida became the first state to outlaw vaccine mandates, including for children, with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo saying, “Who am I to tell you what your child should put in your body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God.”

In recent weeks, the President has maintained his offensive against Ivy League universities (calling them harbours of antisemitism and withdrawing research grants), and his administration has ordered the Smithsonian Institution to cleanse its museum exhibits (“to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions”).

The Smithsonian, which operates 21 museums, responded Wednesday by agreeing to review its exhibits but reminded the White House that it had sole “authority over our programming and content.” The Kennedy Center had similar sole authority, but Mr. Trump appointed himself chairman of the board of the performing arts venue on the Potomac River, with the result that controversial presentations have been cancelled.

“Trump has said the ‘quiet parts’ out loud,” said Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “We’ve fought about these kinds of things but it always was subtext to our politics. On the surface, our politics was about budgets and such things. But beneath the surface it was also about cultural issues. Trump is just making this stuff explicit.”

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This comes as Mr. Trump, who already has sent troops to Los Angeles and Washington, is targeting Baltimore, New Orleans and Chicago for new deployments, part of his effort to transform an otherwise municipal concern into a national and military matter. These cities all are led by Democratic mayors.

Federal judges ruled in recent days that both the withdrawal of Harvard federal funds and the military deployments in the country’s cities were illegal. Both matters, however, remain unresolved pending further judicial proceedings.

Scholars long have examined how the press played a vital role in setting the national agenda. Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, once said that countries’ agendas were set by “Events, my dear boy, events.” One of the oldest maxims of the American capital is that “the president proposes, Congress disposes.”

In the Trump years, the press has relinquished its agenda-setting role, and events (aside from the wars the President has tried to quell) have taken a back seat. In American politics today, the President proposes the questions of the day from his own special portfolio of issues – and Congress, controlled by Republicans in both the Senate and House of Representatives, has unilaterally disposed of its role.

The result is that the national agenda is set by a single individual – and it is a singular political bill of fare, without precedent and without the guard rails that were implicit in the traditional matters of national concern.

“In the first Trump administration the story was bending the norms of behaviour,” said Daniel Shea, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Me. “Now he’s dramatically transforming the government, heading into new territory of discussion that was never part of national issues – and taking it to the limits.”