“There is something in this city, in the imperial capital, that’s changed over the last 48 hours,” Steve Bannon, the self-styled agitator and former Trump White House strategist, said on his podcast last week. “It is a sense that there’s been a seismic shift in the political culture. And, hey, I think they know we’re not going back.”

At least some in Washington fooled themselves into assuming that Trump would not go as far as his campaign trail rhetoric. They sighed in relief when he named Senator Marco Rubio (Republican-Florida) to be secretary of state instead of Richard Grenell, a combative conservative who argued this year that it was necessary to have “a son of a bitch as the secretary of state”.

One of Trump’s superpowers, however, has been acting as if he were more popular than he really is.

But then came the nominations of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr for secretary of health and human services, Pete Hegseth for defence secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Republicans gasped out loud at news of Gaetz’s selection. Even the editorial board of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post called Kennedy “nuts on a lot of fronts”. And the Trump camp was surprised to learn that Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a settlement agreement, though he insists it was a consensual encounter.

David Marchick, a co-author of The Peaceful Transfer of Power, a history of presidential transitions, and dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, called the collection of choices unlike any before.

“This is like the Star Wars bar scene of nominees,” he said. Trump’s camp has made clear, he added, that “it’s a serious strategy to blow out the government as an institution because of their belief that it’s become too big, too powerful and represents the deep state”.

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Don Baer, a former White House communications director under President Bill Clinton, said Trump was challenging the foundations of the American system. “This is a huge moment for Washington, in all sorts of ways,” he said.

Trump, he added, is amplifying the populist resentment that has grown since the days of the financial crash of 2008 rather than trying to ameliorate it. The eruption in Washington is a goal as he tries to tear down the system, not something to tamp down.

“What he’s doing now with these appointments is, ‘You all jump up and down and tear your hair out, but you know what? These are the people I’m going to do it with, and I like that it aggravates you’,” Baer said.

Amid all the hair-tearing-out, other consequential moves by Trump have attracted less attention. In tapping Elon Musk to head a new department of government efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump has handed vast influence over the federal government to a billionaire who profits from billions of dollars in government contracts.

And while heads turned at Gaetz’s nomination, Trump tapped three of his own defence lawyers from his various criminal cases to take other top Justice Department positions, pretty much guaranteeing that he never has to worry about scrutiny from federal prosecutors over the next four years.

It is a mark of how much has changed since Trump’s first term that appointees who once generated uproar are now slipping by without much protest. He has learnt how to move the spectrum of outrage.

When Trump first tried to appoint John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican congressman, as director of national intelligence in his previous term, Senate Republicans deemed him too partisan and forced him to withdraw. Trump responded by making Grenell the acting intelligence director, which horrified establishment Republicans so much that they eventually confirmed Ratcliffe after all. Now Ratcliffe has been chosen for CIA director and is seen as a relatively reassuring pick compared with the others.

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Indeed, some Republicans assume that Trump put forward some of the more contentious nominees to draw attention from the others, making Gaetz, for instance, a possible sacrificial lamb who can be blocked while the rest slip through. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, but he hopes to prevent the release of a House ethics committee report into his past.

“Gaetz won’t get confirmed. Everybody knows that,” former speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California toppled last year by Gaetz and other GOP insurgents, said on Bloomberg Television on Friday. He added: “It’s a good deflection from others.”

Others disagreed. “That’s not what’s happening,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary for Trump who broke with him, said on MSNBC. “He is drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”

In fact, it is not much of a mandate. While Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, he garnered just 50.1 per cent nationally, according to the latest tabulation by The New York Times, just 1.8 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. When the slow-counting blue giant of California finally finishes tallying its votes, that margin is likely to shrink a bit more. The Cook Report already calculates that his percentage has fallen below 50 per cent, meaning he did not win a majority.

Wherever it eventually falls, Trump’s margin of victory in the national popular vote will be one of the smallest in history. Since 1888, only two other presidents who won both the Electoral College and the popular vote had smaller margins of victory: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard Nixon in 1968. (Both Trump in 2016 and George W Bush in 2000 won the Electoral College, and therefore the presidency, without winning the popular vote.)

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Trump can boast that he increased his margin in the Electoral College, winning 312 votes this year to the 306 he garnered eight years ago. But according to nearly complete totals, he secured his most recent victory by a cumulative 237,000 votes in three states that, had they gone the other way, would have meant victory for Harris.

Moreover, Trump won with modest coattails, unlike, say, Lyndon B Johnson in 1964 or Ronald Reagan in 1980, who each swept dozens of their fellow party members into Congress.

By comparison, Trump helped Republicans gain four seats in the Senate, enough to take control of the chamber, certainly a major victory. But he failed to bring with him Republican Senate candidates in four of five battleground states where he campaigned the most and won. Moreover, with races still to be called, Republicans held on to the House but did not build on their razor-thin majority.

One of Trump’s superpowers, however, has been acting as if he were more popular than he really is. Despite his modest margins, he has exhibited more dominance of his own party than any president in modern times. And his Senate recess demand will test just how far that dominance will go.

The recess appointment power in the Constitution was designed to let a president temporarily fill vacancies while Congress was out of town in an era when it took weeks or months to travel to Washington. But Trump wants to use the power to sidestep the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent to appointments.

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At any the other time, it would be hard to imagine the Senate voluntarily surrendering power to a president like that, even one from the same party. But Senate Republican leaders did not rule out the idea after Trump broached it, and it may be the only way to get Gaetz and some of the others through. Even if senators do not agree, some conservatives have warned that Trump may try to employ a little-used provision in the Constitution allowing him to force a recess.

“Trump has promised to be a dictator on day one but has already started before day one,” said Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader from South Dakota. “This is a major test to our system of checks and balances. The Congress must demonstrate its commitment to its constitutional role. And it is critical that it does it now. Failure to do so is an acknowledgment that the president’s promise will become the reality.”

Under the rules, a recess appointee can stay in place until the end of the next congressional session, meaning until December 2026, or almost two years. Given Trump’s historically short patience with appointees, that means he could have people in key departments for as long as he typically might have them without ever being subjected to Senate confirmation.

According to figures from Marchick, the average tenure for a cabinet secretary in Trump’s first term other than Treasury, Commerce and Housing and Urban Development was 1.8 years. For the key security agencies – Defence, Justice and Homeland Security – the average term was 10.5 months.

“None of these candidates, I’m sure, were vetted,” Marchick said of the latest nominees. “It’s all just spontaneous decisions by Trump and then announcement by tweet. No process, no interviews, no vetting, just chaos. He had a mandate to deal with the price of eggs. The question is: did the mandate extend to this craziness?”