Donald Trump has the potential to be the grand unifying figure the GOP has not had since Ronald Reagan. His voters see themselves in him and imagine his physical and political threats to be like their own. He gives enough to each part of the coalition to satisfy them, at least somewhat: The small-government libertarians get DOGE, the national conservatives get the firing of DEI bureaucrats, the MAGA-fringe get the January 6 pardons, the old-school Republicans get tax cuts, and even the neocons get a bellicose rhetoric toward Iran and terrorists.
The president’s advisers can scarcely believe their run of good fortune. It is not just that the #Resistance has been whittled to the size of a speed bump, or that Democrats seem unable to mount a coherent response, or that the courts have given the president freer rein; it is that the corporations that cut Trump off four years ago have come crawling back, and that celebrities and music stars have followed. “The big difference this time around is that the social stigma around Trump has receded. Trump is cool again,” says one GOP operative. “Trump was cool before he got into politics — all the celebrities loved him and the papers loved him, and Democrats tried to make him uncool and create a social stigma around him, but he has broken it.”
Even non-Trump-aligned Republicans see the dawn of Trump II as the coming of a new era of far-right political dominance, as the ideas that were once spouted from fringe thinkers on the internet (a president as a CEO, if not a king; a government geared around techno-libertarian principles instead of liberal democracy) become enshrined in law. With Trump’s inroads into popular culture and among voters of color, his political team sees no Democratic resurgence on the horizon and thinks that maintaining both houses of Congress in the midterms is for the first time in a generation a real possibility.
On Monday at a bar near the White House, two friends from Oklahoma reminisced about the last time they had come to Washington. On January 6, 2021, they were in the audience for Trump’s speech declaring the election had been stolen from him, bowing out just before the crowd he whipped up stormed the Capitol. “And now we are back!” one said, declining to give his name. “We are back! Can you believe it?!”
That they were there did defy credulity: Here is a president who blasted away at Joe Biden’s age and who at his inauguration was older than Biden was at his four years earlier. Here is a president who barely survived an assassination attempt — and who at a pre-inaugural rally said he still occasionally feels a “throbbing” in his ear from the gunshot — and who barely avoided prison after being convicted on a fraction of the 88 separate charges filed against him in four different venues, and who barely survived a second impeachment that would have barred him from running for office again. This is a president who presided over a pandemic response so shambolic that more than 350,000 people died under his watch and whose last term ended in such disgrace that corporations vowed to contribute to him again, one who was barred from social media and shunned by the mainstream press.
And yet here he was more sure-footed than ever. Trump has cleared out the sober Washington hands from his previous administration in favor of aides who will do exactly as he says. Republicans spent their years out of power creating an alphabet soup of think tanks and shadow governmental organizations designed to staff a new administration, and those figures now say they are prepared to enact an agenda that conservatives have been waiting to deliver on for half a century. Finally, they can take a sledgehammer to the administrative state and bend a culture that has been increasingly progressive back in their direction. “You are going to see an absolutely unbridled Trump,” says one longtime adviser. “He is not going to squander the honeymoon this time. And if we end up with blood on the floor, then so be it.”
It’s a return to 19th-century America, complete with territorial expansion to Greenland, the Panama Canal, and maybe Mars. When running up against the limits of Manifest Destiny, he’ll simply change the branding. (Who among us can’t wait to vacation on the shores of the Gulf of America?) Talk to his wealthy tech supporters and they see a return to the gilded age too, when men of massive wealth enjoyed unfettered capitalism and influence over government, this time propelling America forward with AI.
But squint at this moment of Trumpian triumph and it is possible to see the cracks in the foundation forming. Tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg were given spots on the dais behind the president at his inauguration, while MAGA stalwarts like Steve Bannon were frozen out. “Sorry I don’t trust Bezos and Zuck at all. Not one bit,” wrote far-right activist Jack Posobiec on X, adding, “I’m going to go read the Snake Poem.” Elon Musk has attached himself to Trump’s side while feuding with fellow acolytes like Vivek Ramaswamy (who is if anything more MAGA aligned than Musk) and fellow tech titans such as Sam Altman. In a Congress as closely divided as this one is, every member can be a king, and the House and Senate appear no closer to passing Trump’s big legislative priorities on taxation, energy, and immigration than they were weeks ago.
Trump, as he does, has promised big, telling a rally crowd the night before the inauguration that he was about to “act with historic speed and strength and fix every single crisis facing our country.” He has promised to reverse inflation while also cutting taxes while also instituting widespread tariffs while also ending illegal immigration while also lowering interest rates, all of which are likely to increase inflation. The blitz of executive orders the president unleashed in his first hours could end up mired in long and drawn-out court fights, such as peeling back birthright citizenship, burning precious time off the clock. What if “wokeness” somehow survives despite Trump’s executive order to end it? With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency and the External Revenue Service to collect tariffs, Trump has added two quasi-governmental agencies while promising to shrink the size of government, and Musk is likely to find that cutting government programs is not the same as laying off X engineers. Illegal border crossings are not going to go down to zero, nor will crime be wiped out.
Politics abhors stasis, and soon the media is going to be hungry for what’s next. Trump advisers were frustrated over the transition, as Bannon went to war with Musk and Ramaswamy over the question of visas for high-tech workers, but it was a classic media play: get attention by finding the fissures in the coalition and rally the true populist faithful against the arrivistes. With J.D. Vance the Trumpian heir apparent, any ambitious pol is going to have to find another way to get press and carve out a brand for themselves.
The MAGA-inflected flavor of GOP politics is very unlikely to go away, but if inflation and immigration remain elevated, it can only so long before some Republican starts arguing that the problem is that true Trumpism has never been tried. The quiet primary for the Republican nomination in 2028 is already brewing. Witness how Vance rushed to Pete Hegseth’s defense when Trump considered dropping his nomination to lead the Pentagon in favor of Ron DeSantis, thus keeping one potential ’28 rival away from Trump’s orbit.
But the real question is what Trump’s mind-set will be as his term grinds on. He always liked running for president more than being president, and only got into the 2024 race to keep himself out of prison. Mission accomplished. When Trump was elected the first time, he immediately set himself to the task of winning an election for the second time. On his first day in office, he broke precedent by opening a reelection campaign account to allow him to fundraise. He obsessively followed the Democratic primary as it developed, and once it looked like Joe Biden might emerge as the winner, withheld money appropriated by Congress for Ukraine in search of dirt that Trump thought would weaken him.
Reelection was his strongest guardrail, keeping him from doing anything too far outside of the political mainstream, and that guardrail is now gone. Longtime aides say that Trump likes being popular and keeps an eye on metrics like the stock market as a gauge of how he’s doing. Still, for the first time in his nearly 80 years, a person who has committed his life to winning in whatever form that means suddenly has nothing left to achieve. While other second-term presidents play for a historical legacy, Trump has never shown much interest in history’s verdict. A president who has always craved elite respectability could seek it out if offered, governing in a manner that would shock his opponents and enrage his base. But he will more likely do the opposite. What happens when Trump does something wildly unpopular, such as ordering the prosecution — or worse — of his political opponents or invoking paramilitary violence against protesters, as he nearly did in his first term? The old Trump didn’t go quite so far, fearful of the impact it would have on his reelection. This Trump has no such concerns and is free to do as he pleases. Who is going to stop him?
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