For months, President Trump’s legal advisers implored him to avoid so much as mentioning the name of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, in his tweets, and to do nothing to provoke him or suggest his investigation is not proper.
Ignoring that advice over the weekend was the decision of a president who ultimately trusts only his own instincts, and now believes he has settled into the job enough to rely on them rather than the people who advise him.
A dozen people close to Mr. Trump or the White House, including current and former aides and longtime friends, described him as newly emboldened to say what he really feels and to ignore the cautions of those around him.
That self-confidence has led to a series of surprising comments and actions that have pushed the Trump presidency in an ever more tumultuous direction.
Long wary about publicly expressing his belief in the death penalty for drug dealers, he proposed it at a rally in Pennsylvania. “Probably you will have some people that say that’s not nice,” he said.
He bragged about making up an assertion in a conversation with the leader of a close ally, Canada, and called a reporter a “son of a bitch.”
He barreled ahead with a plan to meet with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, to the dismay of much of the diplomatic corps.
He vanquished the economic aides he had previously seen as having more stature than he did by announcing he would go ahead with tariffs on certain imports, alarming key allies.
And then this weekend he seemed to raise the possibility of dismissing Mr. Mueller.
“This could be the manifestation of growing confidence,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., one of the president’s oldest confidantes.
Projecting strength, control and power, whether as a New York developer or domineering reality television host, has always been vital to Mr. Trump. But in his first year in the White House, according to his friends, he found himself feeling tentative and anxious, intimidated by the role of president, a fact that he never openly admitted but that they could sense, people close to the president said.
This, after all, is someone for whom leaving the security of Trump Tower and moving to Washington and the White House was a daunting prospect. Even now, as he has grown more comfortable in the job, he rarely leaves the White House unless he is certain the environment will be friendly, such as at one of his own properties. Rallies are rarely scheduled in areas that could invite large protests.
For months, aides were mostly able to redirect a neophyte president with warnings about the consequences of his actions, and mostly control his public behavior.
Those most able to influence him were John F. Kelly, the retired Marine general turned chief of staff, and Gary D. Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive and director of the National Economic Council. And few people had more ability to blunt the president’s potentially self-destructive impulses than Hope Hicks, his communications director, who has been one of his closest advisers since the earliest days of his 2016 campaign.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have said that Mr. Trump was trapped in a West Wing cage built by Mr. Kelly, and has finally broken loose.
The reality is more complicated, his closest aides say. They say Mr. Trump now feels he doesn’t need the expertise of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Cohn or Rex W. Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil executive he made secretary of state. If he once suspected they were smarter or better equipped to lead the country and protect his presidency, he doesn’t believe that now.
Two of those men are now on their way out. And Mr. Trump has an ambiguous relationship with the third, Mr. Kelly, whom he alternately assures that his job is secure and disparages to other people. Ms. Hicks is leaving the White House in the coming days, a departure that has caused concern among his allies about how he will cope without her in the long term.
Outside the White House, there are few friends the president will listen to. Some of them warned him to back off his tariffs plan, telling him that he would undo what he had accomplished with the tax bill. Mr. Trump said he didn’t agree, and that was that.
But Mr. Trump’s moods have always been like storm clouds passing quickly over a desert island, and aides say that has not changed. Contrary to descriptions of a constantly fuming, beleaguered president, friends and advisers say Mr. Trump is more at ease than he has been in some time. What seems like unchecked chaos to almost everyone else is Mr. Trump feeling he is in his element.
“He seems more relaxed, believe it or not,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who spent several hours with the president during two St. Patrick’s Day events on Thursday.
“I would say it’s a combination of being more relaxed and also being frustrated by the fact that he feels like a lot of what he didn’t succeed at, or what hasn’t worked, is that he wasn’t allowed to be Trump,” he said.
His close allies, like Representative Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican who is the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, believe the president is finding his stride and learning how to navigate Washington.
“I see it more as a function of just, ‘O.K., I’ve taken a year to understand the different dynamics within a broad array of personalities,’ and so now it’s all about putting together a team to go the distance for the next three years,” Mr. Meadows said.
Perhaps.
Warnings of dire consequences from his critics have failed to materialize. When Mr. Cohn announced that he was resigning, the predictions were that the stock market would plummet. There was only a minor dip by the end of the next day.
And on North Korea, even the grayest of foreign policy beards have conceded that Mr. Trump might be able to accomplish something.
“The president has his own original style, and it’s unlikely to be changed at this stage of his life,” Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said in an interview. “But it also is conducive to bringing forward opportunities like this Korean conversation. It is not what we traditionalists would have recommended in the first place.
“But I have to say, when I have thought it through, and how it could play out, it could restore a political initiative to us, and could compel a conversation with countries” otherwise disinclined.
Some worried aides are less sanguine. They view the weekend’s attacks on Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I. as a particularly disturbing taste of what they believe could come. They say privately that Mr. Trump does not understand the job the way he believes he does, and that they fear he will become even less inclined to take advice.
It remains to be seen whether his attacks on Mr. Mueller are anything more than an effort to define the terms of the public conversation about the investigation, and the parameters of an interview with the president that the special counsel is seeking.
But the possibility that Mr. Trump would be emboldened enough to fire Mr. Mueller was raised on Sunday by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Such a move, Mr. Graham said on CNN, would be “the beginning of the end” of the Trump presidency.
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