Read: Trump almost always folds.

In fact, it wasn’t until day 929, or Monday, that the Treasury Department applied the formal label to China. When he came into office, Trump learned that China had actually quit manipulating its currency, per government definitions, in 2014. Trump advisers convinced him that it would be counterproductive to make the designation. But on Monday, the Chinese yuan slid, and the Treasury moved.

Why did China devalue? In response to new tariffs from the United States, of course, the latest round of several. Trump had wanted to enact the tariffs sooner, but was talked out of it by advisers who saw them as a bad idea, like Gary Cohn, who served as his chief economic adviser. But Cohn is gone, and the current reigning trade guru of the administration is hard-liner Peter Navarro, who believes that a trade war will end well for the United States.

This is the template for what has happened in several of the cases where Trump had appeared to fold but has since followed through. Aides who felt he was acting either against the national interest or against his own interest have been shipped out: Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelly. They’ve been replaced by advisers who either encourage Trump, like Navarro, or are determined to enable rather than encumber him, such as acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the television pundit Larry Kudlow, who succeeded Cohn.

In retrospect, the May 2018 announcement that Trump would withdraw from the nuclear-nonproliferation deal with Iran looks like a turning point. Trump had lambasted the deal as a candidate, but once entering office, he repeatedly recertified Iranian compliance with the agreement, bowing to the will of his aides. He seemed more ready to fire aides than to keep but overrule them. But starting with his withdrawal from the deal, Trump has begun following his instincts more fully.

He still makes his share of empty threats, as on Venezuela, where he talked tough and then lost interest when Nicolas Maduro’s regime didn’t crumble. But for the most part, Trump the pushover has been replaced by Trump the bulldozer. Since the Iran-deal withdrawal, he has slapped tariffs not only on China but also on the European Union, and has threatened to use them elsewhere. He labeled China a currency manipulator. After months of hesitations and threats to unilaterally pull out of NAFTA, he completed a renegotiation, producing a deal called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. He moved forward with plans for a bilateral summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. When government funding ran out at the end of 2018, he forced a lengthy shutdown.

This was “Trump being Trump,” exactly what some of his most diehard supporters had insisted needed to happen for his presidency to finally achieve liftoff. If only his aides—saboteurs at worst, obsolete sticks-in-the-mud at best—would just get out of the way, he’d have things hunky-dory in no time.