WASHINGTON — As Republicans start negotiating perhaps “one big, beautiful bill” with the new president, which of two recent versions of Donald Trump will they encounter most often? Or could it be a brand-new version of the 47th chief executive?

GOP members walked triumphantly about the Capitol on Monday as Trump returned to the presidency. White House aides were all smiles the following day as they tried to get organized, working diligently to set up laptops and email accounts as some picture frames hung empty on the walls.

“You never know when POTUS is going to stop by,” said one aide, his eyes darting through an open sliding door as he added, “I think I just saw him on the Colonnade. Where’s he going?” The aide, excusing himself, gave chase.

Such is life working for the unpredictable Trump — something congressional Republicans, many of them ecstatic about his return, will likely soon learn as well.

In recent weeks, as Trump was preparing to return to power, there was the hand-shaking, ceremonial incoming president. He chitchatted with his first-term predecessor, Barack Obama, at the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter. He laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and placed challenge coins on the graves of fallen U.S. troops at Arlington National Cemetery. He attended a pre-inauguration church service and the traditional tea with the Bidens, whom he had long charged with leading a “crime family.”

The ceremonial, even subdued, Trump flashed again during a late Tuesday afternoon Q&A session with reporters in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. He said outgoing President Joe Biden had left him a “nice” letter inside the Oval Office’s storied Resolute Desk.

“It was a little bit of an inspirational type letter, you know: ‘Enjoy it, do a good job,’” Trump said. “I think it was a nice letter. I think I should let people see it because it was a positive for him in writing it. I appreciated the letter.”

But since his swearing-in inside the Capitol Rotunda, there’s been another version of the president, one who told the world he believes he was “saved by God to make America great again” after a pair of assassination attempts last year.

He defied some Republican lawmakers’ long-stated stances when he issued pardons to nearly all the rioters convicted for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, as well as other first-night actions, like those terminating Biden-era energy policies that GOP members wanted to include in reconciliation legislation, which would need Trump’s sign-off.

But, so far, some Republican lawmakers suggest they’ve seen a third — and new — Trump.

“You can see President Trump’s focus is so much sharper. He really recognizes he was spared by God to get to this moment,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana told Fox News on Tuesday after a White House meeting between the president and congressional GOP leaders.

“If you go back to 2017, there was a little bit of a difference between President (Trump) and Congress. You don’t see that today,” said Scalise, who survived a shooting in June 2017. “We’re in sync. We’re moving together. We had a great meeting at the White House today with President Trump, and he’s ready to go, and we’re ready to go to deliver on that agenda.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity said the same to reporters Tuesday after taping an Oval Office interview with Trump. “He is focused, and he’s happy, and he has a big agenda,” Hannity said, according to a pool reporter. And on Wednesday, Trump met with three House Republicans who represent districts carried by rival Kamala Harris last fall — and whose support will be vital to the passage of his agenda in Congress.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene praised Trump for stating during his second inaugural address that it would “henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female,” something he later reaffirmed through an executive order.

“It’s hard to believe we even have to do that, to have to define that there’s only two genders, male and female,” Greene said Monday. “That was a campaign promise of his. It’s an issue I’ve talked about with him personally, many, many times, and I was thrilled to hear him say it.”

Trump on Monday vacillated between ceremonial — chatting with and shoulder-slapping Biden, even sharing some laughs with his longtime rival — and the hard-line populist.

“For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025, is Liberation Day,” he said in his inaugural remarks, adding later, “We must be honest about the challenges we face. While they are plentiful, they will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.

“We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while, at the same time, stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad,” he said.

In later remarks before an audience of loyalists in an overflow space in the Capitol, Trump contended, falsely, that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”

Make Mars great again

Whichever version of Trump Rep. Kat Cammack saw Monday, the Florida Republican was left gleeful — even as the president has shied away, so far, from giving Republican lawmakers an order on whether to pursue one or two reconciliation bills.

“We are so back, baby,” she said. “The Golden Age is upon us. America will no longer be in decline.”

Many Republicans were caught off guard Monday in the Rotunda with Trump’s out-of-this-world declaration that the United States would “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

Cammack’s reaction: “We all kind of looked around like, ‘Yeah, we can get behind that.’” Asked about the continuing lack of a unified reconciliation plan to enact Trump’s agenda, she said, “This is all about one team, one mission. And that’s what the speech was all about.”

Speaker Mike Johnson seemed particularly over the moon about Trump’s return to power, introducing him to the overflow audience at the Capitol on Monday as “the greatest president of our lifetimes.”

Not every GOP member has seemed impressed, particularly with the more extreme version of Trump.

“We’ve never seen the pardon system, in my memory, used in this manner,” Maine Sen. Susan Collins told reporters Tuesday when asked about Trump’s order freeing all Jan. 6 prisoners. “I just think this erodes public confidence.”

Two former aides in Bill Clinton’s White House, both now with the Brookings Institution, assessed this week that Trump would undermine his second term if his more hard-line instincts win out most often.

“Trump’s second inaugural address is consistent with his campaign, in which he worked tirelessly to intensify his support rather than broaden it,” wrote William Galston and Elaine Kamarck.

“If he wishes to maintain majority support, however, he must recognize that the voters who put him over the top were not fervent MAGA supporters,” the duo said, “but rather swing voters who decided that he offered a better chance than his opponent of solving specific problems, high prices for the basics of daily life first among them.”

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Justin Papp, Mary Ellen McIntire and Aidan Quigley contributed to this report.

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