Trump inauguration: 10 storylines to watch
Keeping your eye on the big picture
If you enjoy America Explained, you’ll find it is complemented well by International Intrigue (link now works - it was broken in the last newsletter!), a daily geopolitical briefing delivered in an accessible but authoritative tone. I read it every day to find stories that I might have missed from around the world - something that I find particularly important because tracking the fast-moving events in the U.S. is taking up so much of my time right now. Give it a try by clicking here.
The start of any new U.S. presidential administration is like drinking water from a firehose. There’s so much news about so many different things that it can be impossible to keep track of what’s important. When you have a president who is unconstrained by democratic norms or the rule of law, the magnitude of possible changes is much greater. Grinding us down by overwhelming our ability to process information seems to be part of the point of Trump’s chaotic approach, and one of my goals this time around is to try to avoid becoming numb.
That being said, I don’t have some grand take to offer on the occasion of the inauguration. Instead, I want to point towards a number of different consistent threads which are already weaving their way through the story of the second Trump presidency. Each of these are part of the big picture that you need to keep your eye on in the coming months - and each is illustrated with a few concrete examples.
Trump feels unconstrained, but is constrained in practice. One big consequence of the election has been that Trump and his MAGA movement feel on top of the world - they believe they have been vindicated in the eyes of the country. They’re overreading a narrow election victory which seems to have mostly been about inflation into a broader repudiation of “wokeness”, or liberalism, or whatever else. But the U.S. government didn’t just become a MAGA policymaking machine overnight. There are still courts and lawyers and civil servants who will try to block their policies. As in Trump’s first administration, the battle between the president and these “guardrails” will be a central theme - and that’s the case even if he manages to get people like Kash Patel or Pete Hegseth into key positions.
Congress is going to struggle to pass pretty much anything. The tiny Republican majority in the House of Representatives is going to make it extremely hard for Trump to pass major legislation. I’m confident he’ll get his tax cuts, but pretty much everything else is debatable. On the other hand, I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t get something on issues like immigration, but it’s unlikely to be anything like his sweeping campaign promises of mass deportation. Trump is likely to prove once again to be a very poor manager of Congressional deal-making and to become extremely frustrated, something we’re already seeing play out as Congressional Republicans dither over the path ahead.
Trump will push the boundaries of the presidency like never before. On the other hand, the inability of Congress to do much is likely to make Trump push the boundaries of presidential power like never before. When Congress won’t do something, he’ll try to do it via executive order instead. When the courts block that, he may try to draw on powers conferred by last year’s Supreme Court case, which effectively said that the president can do whatever he wants - including having his political opponents killed - and it’s not illegal. How far Trump might try to push this authority, and whether anyone can stop him, is one of the most frightening things about the new administration.
The military will undergo a severe crisis of politicization. The coming crisis of the U.S. military’s relationship to democracy and civilian control is already widely talked about in military circles. Trump has appointed a political hack as Secretary of Defense and has floated the idea of using the military for everything from mass deportations to riot control. At one point at least in the next four years, Trump will give the military an illegal order. If the order gets carried out, nobody will ever look at the U.S. military the same way again. If the order gets refused, it’ll be a technical flouting of the principle of civilian control. There’s no way for the military to win.
The MAGA movement will undergo splits. Steve Bannon vs. Elon Musk is already a big story - and the divide within MAGA between the populist-nationalist right and big business is only going to get worse. The early spat over visas for technology workers is just a foretaste of a broader disagreement about immigration, China, and the role of technology in society more broadly. Where exactly Trump will come out on all of this is unpredictable, but I don’t think it’ll be long before he turns on Musk.
The presidential succession will have huge repercussions. Trump is older than Biden was when he took office in 2020 and he is constitutionally unable to run for another term. From the beginning of his administration, many senior politicians in the executive branch and Congress are going to be engaged in a shadow campaign to emerge as the leader of the Republican Party in 2028 and beyond. Expect J.D. Vance, who the rest of them need to dethrone in order to have a shot themselves, to come in for a lot of hurt. And be aware that in any policy dispute within the Trump administration, for many people what it will really be about is what makes them look good in 2028 - and what makes their opponents look bad.
The right is coming for your speech - even if you live in Europe. The alliance between the Silicon Valley companies who control the platforms on which a great deal of political speech happens and the Trump administration is flourishing. Mark Zuckerberg has pre-emptively surrendered, X has already been destroyed by Elon Musk, and now Trump is talking about nationalizing TikTok. The hypocrisy is breathtaking - the right spent years complaining that social media companies suppressed their speech and promoted that of liberals, and are now engaged in blatantly doing exactly this themselves. In Zuck’s case, I don’t think it’s a genuine conversion, but rather fear that Trump will use the power of the state to come after him and his company. But in a way that’s even worse, because it shows that Trump can coerce any company into doing what he wants. And because these platforms are also present in Europe and elsewhere, changes on them are bad news for the whole world.
Trump will continue to make unrealistic promises and threats - and then walk them back. Already Trump’s timeline for ending the war in Ukraine has slipped from 24 hours to six months. He invented a migration spat with Mexico and then claimed it had been resolved even though nothing changed. This sort of thing makes it hard to know what he will really do, and what’s just bluster. But you can’t assume it’s all just bluster, especially given the expanded powers of the presidency this time around.
Corruption will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. This time around, Trump is not even trying to hide his attempts to enrich himself and his family through the presidency. He launched a crypto coin the weekend before his inauguration, and anyone who wants to funnel him money can do so by investing in TruthSocial, his social media company. This doesn’t just open the way to shady deals with corporate interests, but also for foreign countries to effectively bribe Trump into selling out America’s interests - something that already seem to have happened when Trump suddenly decided to back TikTok after receiving a large donation from an investor in the company.
Resistance will be muted - then grow into a flood. There’s a lot of talk right now about how muted opposition to Trump is - there are no mass protests planned for his inauguration and MAGA even seems to be undergoing something of a cultural moment, as Trump’s victory in the popular vote makes it easier to portray him as representing a genuinely popular movement. But if Trump enacts anything like the agenda he has promised, this honeymoon period isn’t likely to last. When families start being ripped apart by immigration agents, tariffs start fuelling inflation, and democracy looks imperilled again, resistance will begin. Ultimately, Trump’s combination of incompetence at governing and malignant intentions will make him unpopular all over again and pose a steep challenge to whichever figure inherits the MAGA crown from him.
If you enjoy America Explained, you’ll find it is complemented well by International Intrigue (link now works - it was broken in the last newsletter!), a daily geopolitical briefing delivered in an accessible but authoritative tone. I read it every day to find stories that I might have missed from around the world - something that I find particularly important when tracking the fast-moving events in the U.S. is taking up so much of my time right now. Give it a try by clicking here.