It should be apparent that much of the past five years of Republican politics has been rooted in the protests that unfolded in mid-2020. George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis that May sparked national Black Lives Matter protests, demonstrations supercharged by the energy that had built up during coronavirus-related restrictions. But while protests sporadically spiralled into violence, the morality — and popularity — of the issue was clear. Even corporations sided with the protesters and against systemic racism, hastening to publish sympathetic social-media posts and implement internal checks against bias.

A big chunk of the energy powering those protests also stemmed from opposition to the sitting president, Donald Trump. When he lost his bid for re-election that November, that energy dissipated. Or, really, migrated — from the anti-administration Left to the anti-administration Right.

The advent of the Biden Administration brought with it a specific right-wing response to the previous year’s events: Nefarious lefties were using “critical race theory” to indoctrinate children against White people and against America. Eventually, that esoteric target was replaced with “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives or the more explicitly subjective “woke".

It was a message that Trump’s mostly White base could get behind: Black and Hispanic and gay people were trying to steal attention and power that was rightfully theirs. So, when Trump returned to the White House in January, he signed executive orders and appointed staff who offered a blanket response, culling mentions and images of non-White and non-heterosexual people from government websites, grants and processes. Latent systemic racism became explicit.

But Trump had other 2020 defeats to avenge, ones that were specific to him rather than to his base. And, since returning to the White House, he has focused on them, too — fervently and ferociously.

The most obvious is the election itself, a trauma that you might assume had been exorcised with his victory last November. But that was not enough for Trump. Again president, Trump signed an executive order focused on “election security”, a term used to suggest that elections are somehow insecure, which they are not. He used his power as president to target law firms that helped federal prosecutors investigating his efforts to retain power after his 2020 loss. He asked the Justice Department to gin up an investigation targeting a member of his first administration who had publicly — and accurately — said the 2020 election was fair. Those seeking jobs with the present administration, meanwhile, have been screened to determine whether they accept Trump’s false allegations about his defeat.

At the moment, the White House is centrally focused on another 2020 dispute: the deployment of military personnel to put down protests. There are numerous reports of Trump having wanted to use deadly force against people participating in the post-Floyd BLM demonstrations, including by invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing for the use of the armed forces. His defence secretary at the time, Mark T. Esper, rejected that idea, contributing to his eventual removal from that position.

It has been obvious for some time that Trump regrets acceding to that constraint. On his first day in office this year, he tasked his team with identifying whether the Insurrection Act might be used to address immigration. The recent protests in Los Angeles gave him a real-world opportunity to dispatch the military against protesters he sees as ideological opponents.

An administration source who spoke to the news website Axios admitted that the events of five years ago were central to Trump’s LA response.

“What’s driving the President is how the riots of 2020 are seared into his brain,” that source said, “and how he wished he could’ve sent in the troops to end it.” (Trump isn’t the only one seeking vindication on his 2020 position on this issue.)

On Tuesday, Trump visited Fort Bragg in North Carolina where, in a speech to troops, he touted his heavy-handed and well-armed approach to the pockets of protests in California. His speech was often explicitly political, with soldiers seated on risers behind him cheering along. Military.com later reported that the soldiers had been vetted to, among other things, ensure their support for Trump.

Presumably aware of that qualification, army secretary Daniel Driscoll praised the event during an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday morning, touting Trump’s “incredible connection as commander-in-chief with his army”.

This, too, is a shift since 2020. Then, Trump’s frequent efforts to depict the military as “his” crashed into leadership that appreciated the need to maintain a wall between politics and the military. When General Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined Trump for what turned out to be a photo op at a church across from the White House in June 2020, Milley apologised for appearing to take a side in partisan politics. He and others reportedly later planned how to oppose any effort by Trump to use the military to retain power.

The existing leadership of the military is unlikely to similarly balk at any effort by Trump to treat the armed forces as an extension of himself. The alacrity with which Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Fox News alum, signed on to Trump’s decision to deploy troops to Los Angeles made that very obvious. (Hegseth has been as enthusiastic about that mission as he has been about attacking DEI and “woke garbage”.) Contrast Hegseth’s response to the June 2020 comments of Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defence secretary during his first term: “Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them.”

Filling his Cabinet with sycophants such as Hegseth is another way in which Trump is rejecting the constraints of 2020. Hegseth instead of Mattis or Esper. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem instead of John Kelly. Attorney-General Pam Bondi instead of William P. Barr.

And then there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The final full year of Trump’s first term was dominated by the emergence of the coronavirus, a situation that demanded a balance between the economy and public health. Trump, with an eye towards re-election, was centrally focused on the former, meaning that he was often at odds with — and in conflict with — administration officials centred on the latter. The country’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, became a central scapegoat for Trump. The President blamed Fauci for advocating the wearing of masks and restrictions on in-person interactions, recommendations aimed at limiting infections but ones that were unpopular with Trump’s base. With Kennedy now leading the country’s public health efforts — and similarly inclined officials fleshing out other such roles — there is little chance Trump will again need to worry about having to compete with a doctor on who knows more about medicine.

There are other conflicts that flared up in 2020 and have been a focus of Trump’s this year. (Remember his fights with Harvard University then?) But we should also note an event that occurred in 2021 and has been a central part of Trump’s efforts to “un-lose” his past losses: the Capitol riot. On his first day back in office, he issued a blanket pardon to even the most violent actors that day. His administration agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of the woman shot and killed while she attempted to enter a secure area inside the building. His appointee to run the FBI has promised to reveal some hidden truth about that day, playing into conspiracy theories about government involvement. Bondi, for her part, said on Wednesday that the events of January 6, 2021, were “very different” than the protests in Los Angeles — suggesting that the latter was worse.

A lot of things happened in 2020 that Donald Trump did not like. During the first six months of 2025, he has expended a lot of energy and presidential power on reversing those things or trying to make it the policy of the Federal Government that they did not occur.

• Philip Bump is a Washington Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America