The day before he left the White House in 2021, then US-president Donald Trump vowed to remain a force in US politics.
“The movement we started is only just beginning,” he said in a farewell video.
What might have seemed then to be wishful thinking now sounds like a prophecy.
Illustration: Yusha
Trump left office a defeated and isolated figure, banned from social media and repudiated by fellow Republicans in his own administration. The US Congress, shaken by his supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, was preparing a second impeachment trial against him.
Trump, 78, is to return to the presidency more powerful than ever. He faces fewer guardrails as he pursues a norm-shattering agenda that is already upending Washington and unsettling the world.
The former real-estate developer, whose first elected office was the White House, now plausibly stands as the defining political figure of the early 21st century.
“He doesn’t look like he was rejected. It looks like his version of Republican politics is as mainstream as it gets,” Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer said.
Unlike the start of his first term in 2017, Trump is buttressed by a clear electoral victory, having won the Electoral College and popular vote.
Aides who last time sought to blunt his most aggressive impulses have been replaced by bare-knuckled loyalists eager to bend Washington to his will. Skeptics within his Republican Party have been driven into retirement, leaving allies who are eager to push his proposals through the US Congress. A sympathetic US Supreme Court, a third of whom are Trump appointees, has already ruled that he would have wide latitude to do what he wants.
Silicon Valley titans who once kept their distance are competing to win his favor. The world’s richest person, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has volunteered to help Trump overhaul the government, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would feature prominently at his swearing-in ceremony.
Trump, a former reality TV star, can also count on a network of sympathetic podcasters and influencers to amplify his message, while established media outlets struggle with shrinking audiences. His freewheeling October interview with podcaster Joe Rogan has been viewed 54 million times on YouTube, approaching the 67 million who watched his televised debate with Democratic presidential rival, US Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump is to inherit a strong economy and a quiet southern border, with migrant arrests lower last month than when he left office.
Nonetheless, he has said he plans to impose steep tariffs on trading partners and deport millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally — policies that could reignite inflation and pressure stock prices, which Trump follows closely.
One possible check on his ambitions is the bond market, where investors could be spooked if the US$36 trillion national debt increases dramatically or the US Congress struggles to raise the borrowing limit. Markets could also react poorly if he does not follow through on his promise to extend his 2017 tax cuts and cut government spending.
When Trump launched his third consecutive presidential bid from his Florida estate in November 2022, his fortunes were at an ebb. Many of his preferred congressional candidates had lost in midterm elections, and he faced multiple criminal and civil investigations. Rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were sparking enthusiasm from Republicans eager to move on from the Trump years. “Florida Man Makes Announcement,” the New York Post wrote dismissively of Trump.
However, Republican voters rallied to Trump following his criminal indictment in March 2023 for covering up a hush money payment to a porn star; donations poured in and he easily secured the party’s nomination. Broader events played in his favor as well, as voters grew dissatisfied with Democratic US President Joe Biden’s response to spiraling prices and illegal immigration. Biden dropped his re-election bid in July last year following a disastrous debate performance, leaving Harris little time to make her own case to voters.
Trump also turned misfortune to his advantage, portraying his legal woes as a campaign of political persecution and mounting a run-out-the-clock defense that ultimately forced federal prosecutors to drop their two cases, including one for election interference, against him.
When he was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in July last year, Trump raised his fist and shouted “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, creating one of the year’s defining images.
In his November victory, Trump made inroads with traditional Democratic constituencies, such as young people and Hispanics. Voters shrugged off his felony convictions and Democrats’ warning that a candidate who refused to acknowledge his 2020 defeat posed an ongoing threat to democracy.
Trump has threatened to purge the federal workforce and enlist the US Department of Justice to harass his political enemies. He has held out the possibility that he could refuse to spend money appropriated by US Congress, which could lead to a constitutional showdown.
He has embraced an agenda of territorial expansion — such as buying Greenland from Denmark and asserting control over the Panama Canal — raising the possibility that his second White House term could be as chaotic as his first.
However, even before he takes the oath of office, Trump has already reshaped Washington. Republicans and Democrats alike now share his more confrontational approach to China and his skepticism of free trade agreements. Proposed cuts to popular health and retirement programs, once a staple of Republican budget proposals, are off the table. Biden kept many of Trump’s tariffs in place and has worked to reduce US reliance on foreign-made semiconductors.
Once an interloper in US politics, Trump has come to define it.
“It’s clear that since 2015, we’ve been in the Trump era,” said Matthew Continetti, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “It’s not over yet.”
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
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