We study the trident process in laser pulses. We provide exact numerical results for all contributions, including the difficult exchange term. We show that all terms are in general important for a short pulse. For a long pulse, we identify a term that gives the dominant contribution even if the intensity is only moderately high, , which is an experimentally important regime where the standard locally constant field (LCF) approximation cannot be used. We show that the spectrum has a richer structure at , compared to the LCF regime . We study the convergence to LCF as increases and how this convergence depends on the momentum of the initial electron. We also identify the terms that dominate at high energy.