Where next for America in the political era of Donald Trump?

Some Republicans probably wish US presidents weren’t limited to just two terms, so buoyant are they after the comeback victory of Donald J. Trump. Conversely, Democrats might wish US presidents could only do just one term. Not only would that have meant Trump couldn’t have run, neither could Biden.

There would have been none of the last-minute dropping-out drama that ultimately doomed Kamala Harris.

Yet, the re-election of Trump was not met with the depression among Democrats as in 2016, nor from much of the West. That raises two big questions for 2025. Does the US and the world know what they’re getting with Trump’s second term and is there a realisation that Trump is the new norm when it comes to our politics?

Questions for 2025

When Trump is inaugurated on January 20, he will be only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms in the Oval Office. His first four years were painted as a stunning success by Republicans and a disaster by Democrats, which is not surprising given the partisan divisions that have defined America since the 1990s. But the Trump agenda has had some bipartisan support: his China approach was continued by President Biden and his focus on border enforcement was largely co-opted by Democrats this election cycle.

Yet even if Trump might have won some arguments, he and many around him are still irked by that first term. Retribution has become part of his propaganda and proposed policy. Republicans are already talking about coming after former Congresswoman Liz Cheney for her involvement in the Congressional hearings into the January 6 insurrection.

What I remember from Trump’s election night party in West Palm Beach was that as supporters cheered for Number 47, they dampened any talk of retribution. When asking them about some Americans’ fears of what Trump might do next, the general message was, “Look, he didn’t ultimately lock up Hillary Clinton, did he? So don’t worry this time.”

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This is the conundrum with Trump: what he says and what he does. Ever since the 1980s, Trump has been the master of hogging the headlines. He knows what shocks and saturates news coverage. But it doesn’t mean he necessarily believes what he says or whether he’ll ultimately follow through on what he says.

Perhaps that is why some have not greeted Trump 2.0 with unbridled depression, both in America and further afield. Trump has always been a transactional figure, who is often swayed by whom he last met in a meeting and whoever last wooed him with flattery. And that could be crucial when it comes to his second term. Gary Gerstle, the historian and author of “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order”, points out that there are still divisions within the Republican camp, and it’s not clear which group will win the argument.

Trump may be the figurehead of the movement but he himself is not ideological, and we see divisions around him. On one side, Gerstle says, is “the radical libertarianism of Elon Musk or other Silicon Valley supporters of Trump. More free trade and radically shrinking the government in terms of its capacity for regulating the economy.

“The other side doesn’t have a clear leader yet, but JD Vance comes close. A lot of his Republican Convention acceptance speech focused on the need to put Main Street over Wall Street, to use the government to increase the welfare and well-being of ordinary Americans. And that impulse has supporters: his Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley. It’s stronger in the Senate and the House.”

For Gerstle, these divisions are what we should look out for, because they don’t just define the Trump second term but where this new era of politics leads.

So much of Trump is performance

From the art of campaigning to the day-to-day of governing. For example, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary nominee, said Trump’s threats of tariffs were a good tool, a means of negotiating allies and rivals into creating better terms for the United States. As Gerstle says, “Are his efforts of deportation going to be mostly performative? A few high-visible raids on Democrat cities to demonstrate cruelty, but performative in the sense they’re going to be quite limited. Or is he going to try and deport millions of people? If he deports millions, you’re going to see extraordinary resistance.”

If much of what happens next is guess work, the key takeaway is that Trump is no longer a fluke.

One other memory I have from that night in West Palm Beach was a supporter saying that we in the media got it wrong: we thought Trump 2016 was the blip and that Biden 2020 was the norm. That was wrong. This is the era of Trumpism. That is certainly true.

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Gerstle says: “He’s now going to be seen as having a presence in American politics as long as Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He now figures as a major presence in American politics from 2015 through, let’s say, 2028. And we will be talking about this as the era of Donald Trump.”

This is the era of Trump, so who and what follows him? A Trump supporter in Michigan told me he wasn’t sure whether he’d vote for JD Vance if he was the nominee in 2028. What happens after Trump may be determined by how the next four years go, and which branch of the Republican Party wins out in his second term.