On January 20, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, beginning his second term. This is a sentence that would have read as rank parody in 2015 or even early 2021, when Trump was spurring on an insurrection at the Capitol. Instead, like a Nixonian phoenix, Trump authored one of the great political comebacks in American history, and he will be governing with his strongest hand yet. He won the popular vote for the first time, and Republicans have full control of Congress. His MAGA movement has utterly annihilated dissent within the GOP. In his first term, Trump had to contend with a bevy of old-line Republicans who were skeptical of his project, including John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Paul Ryan, then the Speaker of the House and a rising political star himself. There is no equivalent opposition today, and the median congressional Republican is either slavishly devoted to Trump or actively quaking in fear of one of his outbursts. The federal bureaucracy will be crammed with Trump loyalists — no more John Kellys or Rex Tillersons muddling through — and many of them will be poring over Project 2025 like the pages of the New Testament.
And Trump beat the rap. He will, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan of New York, become a felon but will not suffer otherwise for getting indicted four times by federal and state prosecutors. He outran Jack Smith, his great tormentor. For those who came up in the MAGA movement in the mid-2010s, when Trump was a fringe and fading celebrity braying about Mexican migration and the Barack Obama birth certificate, this stretch of time, from November 5 through the inauguration, is nirvana. It is no less thrilling, for them, than Obama’s ascension was for the liberal left, when anything, for a few months in 2008 and 2009, seemed possible. Trump and Obama: two political outsiders who now belong, inarguably, to their own parties’ modern Mount Rushmores.
What the MAGA faithful don’t want to hear is that it will never be so good again. The liberals who fear Trump’s fascist takeover need not caterwaul so much: This really is it. Of course, the damage Trump might do to the federal government and democracy broadly shouldn’t be hand-waved away. New right-wing judges will flood the federal bench, and the conservative majority could be cemented into the 2050s if Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito strategically retire. Efforts to combat climate change will be unraveled. Taxes on the wealthiest Americans might be slashed. Corporate regulations could be significantly weakened. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s meddling in the federal bureaucracies will trigger an exodus of talent from pivotal agencies. Even if $2 trillion will never be cut from the federal budget, Musk and Ramaswamy can certainly weaken the government through attrition, and it appears the few economic populists in Trump’s orbit could be suffocated by the big-tech libertarians. Unregulated crypto markets won’t make America great again, but they could seed a future economic crash. And on immigration, Trump should be taken seriously. Whether or not a true mass-deportation regime comes to pass, the borders will tighten. Perhaps the arch-nationalists who celebrate will slowly come to understand that depriving America of human capital, in an era of high inflation and slowing population gains, is not the greatest idea.
Now are the days of wine and roses for MAGA because Joe Biden is still president and Trump’s reign remains hypothetical. On January 20, the script flips: The inflation and affordability crises are Trump’s problems. So is governing, which he has never excelled at. While Trump’s second term may promise, in theory, less chaos than his first, there isn’t much evidence that his White House will evince the grim, rapacious discipline of the Bush-Cheney years, when Republicans actually dominated all policymaking at home and abroad. There was no five-dimensional chess move in nominating Matt Gaetz for attorney general: Trump could have saved himself much grief and put forth a far less scandalous loyalist in Pam Bondi but opted against it because he ultimately can’t help himself. Pete Hegseth appears to be past the threshold for survival, and perhaps Kash Patel has a shot at the FBI, after all — but the trouble for Trump is that he has selected for subservience over any kind of greater seasoning or skill, and this will prove deleterious when these men are tasked with overseeing enormous federal bureaucracies. The same applies to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has never managed much of anything.
Trump’s legislative agenda will be challenged immediately because, despite MAGA’s claim to the contrary, he did not win a historic landslide. Republicans barely control the House. Since Trump rarely thinks strategically, he has nominated not one but two Republican representatives, Elise Stefanik and Michael Waltz, to positions in his administration. Both will easily get confirmed and vacate their seats. In the interim, House Speaker Mike Johnson will be able to afford only a single defection on pivotal votes. A faction of far-right lawmakers — a faction, ironically, Johnson once belonged to — is very hungry to dump him despite not having a challenger with the support to actually become Speaker. The Democrats under Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, are unified and will not be aiding the fractious GOP.
In the Senate, life is only a little better for the Republicans. They have a majority of 53, far short of the 60 needed to override a filibuster, and at least three of those Republicans are explicitly skeptical of the Trump right. Susan Collins of Maine has a tough reelection fight in 2026 and will have every incentive to buck her party. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has always hewed to the center. And John Curtis, the new senator from Utah, may end up a moderate in the mold of Mitt Romney. A fourth Republican, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, needs to survive in 2026 too, and if he’s pitted against the popular former governor of his state, Roy Cooper, he will need to be careful about how closely he aligns with Trump.
To pass any kind of legislation, Republicans will have to rely on the reconciliation maneuver that Democrats employed to engineer Biden’s sweeping infrastructure, green-energy, and manufacturing agenda. The Democrats had a smaller Senate majority — just 50-50 with Kamala Harris casting tiebreaker votes — but a more disciplined bloc in the House. Their primary struggle was wrangling the votes of a few rogue senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. For Republicans, counting votes will be far more daunting. Assuming no Democratic support, can Johnson unify his entire Republican conference around tax and spending bills that might alienate the furious fiscal conservatives?
Finally, there’s Trump himself: a 78-year-old who immediately, upon his swearing-in, becomes a lame duck. He will be president into his 80s, forced to contend with approval ratings that will inevitably slide and majorities that, if history is any indication, will leak away. Democrats are already poised to retake the House in 2026. There are few examples, in recent American history, of overly triumphant second terms, and J.D. Vance, the front-runner for the 2028 nomination, will have to campaign as a de facto incumbent in an era that will continue to be unkind to anything that reeks of institutional entrenchment. (Does Trump, at 82, try to steal a third term? Anything is possible. But Vance and his ambitious rivals, dreaming of the Oval Office themselves, will not be terribly motivated to keep the dissembling would-be monarch on the scene.) The MAGAs are The Man now. And that, in our uneasy time, in which martyrs are made of assassins, is not the greatest place to be.
