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President Trump has been back in office for two and a half days, and the cascade of news hasn’t stopped. With a stroke of his Sharpie, the president sought to end birthright citizenship. He allowed defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol to walk free. He withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. He has begun a crackdown on immigration.
He is already changing the country, and the nation’s politics are going to change with it — though we don’t yet know how.
As the second Trump era begins, I want to take a step back from the news to lay out the major political story lines that my colleagues and I will be watching over the next year.
Here they are:
Is the public behind Trump’s expansive agenda?
Trump has claimed an electoral mandate, despite his relatively narrow margin of victory, and the early days of his presidency have shown just how aggressively he intends to enact his agenda, testing the limits of his power in the process.
It’s still the economy, stupid.
Speaking of Trump’s coalition: The president assembled the support of a younger and more diverse coalition than Republicans before him, in part by promising that a second term would bring economic prosperity that working-class Americans feel eluded them after the pandemic.
The new politics of immigration.
Trump believes that it was immigration — not the economy — that won him the election, and his crackdown has begun. In 2017, Democrats fought his immigration policies at every turn, but their approach is different this time.
The Democrats’ search for a response to Trump — and a path back to power.
The Democratic Party is locked out of power in the White House and Congress. It has no obvious leader. There is no shared diagnosis of what went wrong in November. And the only thing Democrats know for sure right now is that their resistance-era Trump playbook of opposition and impeachments hasn’t worked — which might explain their muted response to the first days of his administration.
Can a G.O.P. showing cracks squelch dissent?
When Trump took office in 2017, there were Trump Republicans and the old guard. Now, Trump’s party has remade itself in his image — but it’s not exactly one big happy family.
What Trump 2.0 means for life in America.
It’s too early to know yet how the new administration will reshape American life, but we do know what Trump has promised: Enormous immigration raids. An end to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Tax cuts. The elimination of whole government agencies, like the Department of Education, that play significant but low-profile roles in communities across the country.
Is the country — and the world — getting redder?
Were Republicans’ gains in November — which extended from Trump’s popular-vote win all the way down to their gains in key statehouses — a post-pandemic cyclical reaction to economic discontent, or a sign of a bigger shift around the globe?
2028.
Too soon? I get it. You just got through one all-consuming election cycle, and you don’t want to think about the next one. But the people who want power in America definitely are. No one has made any obvious moves just yet, but the under-the-radar jockeying could begin in a matter of months.
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