The nation’s politics are going to change in President Trump’s second term — though we don’t yet know how.
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. In a country that’s used to — and tired of — deadlock in Washington, this could be good politics. But some of his sweeping actions, including giving clemency to nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants or his effort to end birthright citizenship, are downright unpopular. We will be watching what that means for his new coalition.
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. Yet the president’s plans to impose steep new tariffs and deport scores of undocumented immigrants could actually raise prices, rather than lower them. Will that further stoke the nation’s economic discontent, and whom will voters blame?