Pen in hand he wasted no time in laying down his first political marker.

Sitting behind the presidential Resolute Desk, only hours after taking the oath of office, Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, signed his first executive order, targeting Barack Obama’s health care law.

It is, his political critics say, only a sign of things to come from a president who barely hours earlier in his inauguration speech, blamed Washington’s political leaders for neglecting ordinary Americans.

As the rain began to fall shortly after President Trump took to the inauguration platform on Friday, the Reverend Franklin Graham, one of the clergy in attendance at the ceremony, told Trump that the downpour was a sign of “God’s blessing.”

Many Americans though appear to disagree with that sentiment, taking to the streets over the last few days to protest at the property tycoon’s inauguration to the highest political office.

All the negative signs were there on Friday as Trump was sworn in. The less-than-packed inaugural parade route, an inauguration crowd markedly smaller than the one his predecessor Barack Obama drew in 2009, and protesters who set a limousine on fire in the afternoon.

Seemingly determined to look like a central casting version of a president, Trump moved through hours of inauguration ceremony, intent on projecting the image of a confident and unifying leader.

Instead, he painted a doom-laden picture of America, where empty factories are “scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” and inner cities are engulfed in violence and poverty.

“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” insisted Trump. His critics again point to the fact that with his first executive order aimed at rolling back Obamacare he is already setting about wreaking some carnage of his own.

As Trump moves from private citizen to leader of the free world this weekend, he has already shown signs of using immediate executive action to chalk up early political victories before he has to turn to the grinding work of getting bills through Congress.

On Friday Trump signed a waiver to allow retired General James Mattis to serve as defence secretary, even though he left the military less than the required seven years ago.

General Mattis, whose appointment has been approved by the Senate, was later sworn in by Vice-President Mike Pence. Pence also swore in John Kelly as head of Homeland Security.

There are other signs too of things to come. Almost from the moment Trump was sworn into office the White House’s website changed dramatically. WhiteHouse.gov immediately wiped civil rights, LGBT rights, climate change and health care from its “issues” section.

The page on climate change was replaced with a page entitled “An America First Energy Plan” that ignores climate change entirely and now says, “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule.”

The page on civil rights meanwhile, was replaced with one entitled “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community” that replaces concerns with how police act with a demand for even more police.

It also depicts predominantly black inner cities as shooting galleries. “In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent,” the page claims, which observers have already pointed out is false given that figures for homicides in Washington, DC went down in 2016 from 2015.

While his predecessor President Obama’s WhiteHouse.gov page on his first day in office featured a slate of issues he campaigned on, Trump's White House page doesn't even have a policy page on his signature campaign issue: immigration.

The words “black” or “African-American” also do not appear once in any policy sheets on the new WhiteHouse.gov site.

There have been other communications changes too within the Trump team’s approach.

The president’s Android mobile phone, which had hundreds of numbers of associates from whom he seeks advice, has been swapped for a new encrypted phone.

Some sources close to Trump have said that his aides and security officials do not want him to text, and that some are urging him to forgo his personal Twitter account - a staple of his campaign - to use only the official @POTUS handle created by Obama’s team and controlled by staff members. Trump however is resisting it.

“Let me ask you: should I keep the Twitter going?” he asked a cheering crowd of supporters before dancing with his wife, Melania, to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” at the second of three inaugural balls on Friday “The enemies keep saying, ‘Oh that’s terrible’, but it’s a way of bypassing dishonest media’,” Trump told them.

Throughout these events, Trump brought his signature style to the task of governing, sprinkling his comments at the three inaugural balls with references to “phony polls”, campaign victories and social media.

Characteristically he seems determined to do things his way and while changes to the WhiteHouse.gov website provide some clues as to his direction of political travel, in other areas there continues to be considerable confusion.

Despite the signing of a few executive orders and claims that the Trump team would hit the ground running, there is evidence that they are still struggling to find their feet.

A huge part of the problem is that effectively Trump entered the White House on Friday with most national security and other positions still lying vacant.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” one career government official told the respected and influential Foreign Policy magazine.

Overall, Trump’s transitional effort has been disorganised and chaotic, with many key senior positions still unfilled and amid infighting over who should be appointed to hundreds of jobs across the government.

A recent poll found that more than half of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidential transition.

According to Obama administration officials, congressional staffers and people familiar with the transition process, the positions still to be filled include senior management and policy posts that oversee diplomacy, military budgets, nuclear weapons, counter-terrorism, and media relations.

According to Dan De Luce a writer at Foreign Policy, the Trump team has either failed to fill key jobs or put forward people who lack the experience or appropriate expertise to do the job.

More than one administration official called the transition effort “anemic,” while others point to the fact that previous administrations, including Barack Obama’s and George W. Bush’s, were much further along by the time of inauguration.

Underlying much of the delay and confusion in the transition, says De Luce, is a persistent question about who truly speaks for President Trump.

In a number of cases, one transition “landing team” at a department has arrived asking for briefings, often on sensitive topics involving classified information, only to be followed by an entirely different transition team asking for the same briefings again.

Choosing the right person for the right job appears to have been a particular challenge for the Trump team. The President’s choice for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, did himself hand-pick some former associates for White House and other administration positions who share his background in military intelligence and special operations forces.

The problem, say insiders, is that they are not versed in the essence of the job that includes formulating policy inside the White House out of a host of competing government agencies and agendas.

“They don’t understand the basics of how decision-making works at this level,” another senior administration official said.

The outgoing Obama administration officials meanwhile are said to refer to the new arrivals as “Flynnstones” for their connection to the next national security advisor.

This failure to fill key jobs has consequently fuelled uncertainty across the federal government and raised concerns that the new administration could be blindsided by an early-term crisis abroad, or an adversary testing their mettle.

Contradictory political positioning too on foreign policy issues by a number of he Trump team has left overseas diplomats from friendly capitals confused and puzzled about who they should be speaking to.

“We are never sure whether we are meeting with the right people,” one Western diplomat was quoted by Foreign Policy’s De Luce as saying.

Such is the chaos that Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said that about 50 officials from the former Obama administration would be asked to stay on temporarily due to the crucial nature of their jobs.

Some observers have quipped that Trump’s team has perhaps been preoccupied with other ‘priorities’ of late, after reports emerged that certain officials, apparently pushed for tanks and missile launchers to feature at his inauguration parade.

The then president-elect’s advisor is said to have wanted a “Red Square North Korea-style parade” for the presidential procession on Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday.

The US military are said to have rejected the Trump team’s request because they were concerned about how it would be perceived by the public.

With the new president now firmly ensconced in the White House however, it is Trump’s immediate and seismic policy interventions that are making the biggest headlines.

His first executive order aimed at undermining Obama’s signature healthcare law, known as Obamacare, notes that Trump plans to seek the “prompt repeal” of the law.

For the time being, it allows the Health and Human Services Department and other federal agencies to delay implementing any piece of the law that might impose any economic cost.

Using similar orders, the new president also signed into law a new national day of patriotism and signalled plans to build a new missile defence system to protect against perceived threats from Iran and North Korea.

In general the global reaction to Trump’s inauguration as president has been very mixed.

“What we heard today were high nationalistic tones,” said Germany’s vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, after Trump was sworn in. “I think we have to prepare for a rough ride.”

In China meanwhile there was a more cautious tone after Trump in his inauguration speech promised to fight back against the “ravages of other countries.” China’s Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, said the “impressive” address signalled that the start of the Trump era would herald “dramatic changes”.

Elsewhere there was anger in Mexico and champagne parties in Russia while in Iran the inauguration was not even broadcast live with news reports instead simply saying, “ the new US president had begun his work amid popular protests.”

In the hours after his inauguration the new President typically has mixed pageantry and celebrations with practical politics.

Yesterday however the stark realities of the job came in the shape of a visit to the CIA where he met with members of the nation’s intelligence community. Donald Trump and America’s spies have not been on the best of terms lately.

Trump has sharply criticised the nation's top intelligence officials for their assertions about Russian hacking and leaks about his briefings in the weeks before he was sworn in.

Few believe that his CIA visit yesterday, the first since becoming president, will do much to ease tensions. Indeed given Trump’s reputation some warn it might even make relations worse.

During his election, Trump campaigned on a detailed 18-point plan of the things he would do on his first day in office.

In these first few days though he seems to have distanced himself from taking such a rapid-fire approach to implementing policies, especially when it comes to complicated issues, which may involve negotiations with Congress or foreign leaders.

One promise he did keep was to return a bust of former British prime minister Winston Churchill to the Oval Office after Barack Obama moved it to make way for one of Martin Luther King. As ever Donald Trump wants things done his way.

Rarely has the lurch from one US president to the next been so wrenching, or come at the end of a presidential campaign and transition in which the incoming president had wilfully insulted and alienated so many.

The two most pressing questions now is just how far he is prepared to go in fulfilling his campaign promises, and how tolerant of him others will be in that process?