The Trump Revolution

When the polls opened across the US on Nov. 5, most Americans who voted in the 2024 presidential race thought they were participating in yet another election. By the time the winner became clear in the early morning hours of Nov. 6, it became clearer that they had just witnessed a result that could pave the way for a revolution in how the US is governed.

The electoral victory of Donald Trump is as sweeping as it was unexpected. Very few prognosticators predicted the decisive Electoral College numbers (312 for Trump, 226 for Kamala Harris) — or the fact that Trump would win the popular vote. The election did not drag out for days, as many had feared. Given his victory, nor was there any Trump-fueled controversy over voter fraud, as had been the case in the 2020 election, after which judges eventually dismissed or ruled against over 60 court cases alleging voter fraud. The 2024 election was a mandate to govern.

But Trump won more than just the presidency — his coattails flipped the US Senate to the Republicans, who also held onto a majority in the House of Representatives. If so, when Donald Trump is sworn into office on Jan. 20 next year, he would be backed by the full weight of the executive and legislative branches.

Moreover, Trump will be able to take the notion of a unitary executive to extremes that no president has been able to achieve before, largely on the strength of a Supreme Court ruling that holds that presidents cannot be held criminally liable for official actions while in office. Trump is positioned to do far more than serve as the nation’s chief executive — he plans a transformation in the way the US is governed, away from a system dominated by unelected bureaucrats to one where political partisanship becomes a deciding factor over who staffs the departments responsible for the day-to-day operation of the government.

Mandate for Change

Trump has been voted into office because of a wave of populism colloquially referred to as “Maga,” or “Make American Great Again.” Although Trump ran as a Republican, the reality is that the Maga movement is much more than a simple rebranding of traditional Republican values — it claims to be about realigning political power away from traditional political and economic elites toward a US working class that had previously been divided between a two-party system that courted the same elites while playing lip service to the needs of the people.

Maga is difficult to quantify, given that many of the people who gravitate near its top are themselves quite wealthy and far from working class. Whereas the duopoly of traditional Republican-Democrat political discourse derived power from what could best be categorized as “billionaire elitism,” Maga draws its strength from “billionaire populism,” an odd phenomenon that has people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk making common cause with blue-collar workers in a way that transcends conventional politics, while also prioritizing policies like slashing corporate tax rates. Billionaire populism has likewise transformed the way the US thinks about politics, which is one reason why the prognosticators, drawn from the ranks of more traditional political thinkers, have consistently struggled to track the political strength that underpins the Maga movement.

The traditional Republican party is all but dead, with a few aging senators and congressmen holding onto legacy seats. The future of the Republican Party is defined by Maga, both in name and substance. Take, for example, Trump’s selection as vice president: JD Vance is Maga through and through, unlike Trump’s previous vice-presidential choice, Mike Pence, who was a dyed-in-the-wool traditional Republican. Trump, the first Maga president, will only be a one-term leader. This means that for Maga to survive, Vance will have to succeed Trump as president in the 2028 election.

While the Democratic Party was able to mount a winning challenge to Trump in 2020, it did so with the Democratic “old guard” — President Joe Biden, the Senate’s Chuck Schumer and the House’s Nancy Pelosi. To the extent that the Democratic Party injected new blood into the mix, it did so with a politician so untested and unpopular — Kamala Harris — that she could not secure a single delegate during her abortive bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination. The decisive defeat of Harris is a decisive defeat for the Democratic Party. There is no political “bench” to speak of — so much political capital was squandered on Biden-Harris that there is no viable candidate on the horizon to head a successful challenge for the presidency in 2028.

Trump’s sweeping mandate will provide the Democratic Party with little traction to mount a viable domestic political challenge. Void of any meaningful political pushback from either the Democratic Party or the old guard Republicans, the US could be looking at the potential for 12-20 years of Maga rule — a political run of power not seen in the US since the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Transformative Agenda

In 2016, Trump ran on a platform that promised to confront the Washington “establishment” and “drain the swamp.” As Trump admitted, he was poorly prepared to govern, and was compelled to surround himself with people drawn from the very swamp he had promised to empty. The result was haphazard governance that was further hampered by political resistance from the establishment — politicians from the Democratic Party and non-Maga Republicans, as well as the extensive cadre of government bureaucrats who resisted radical political change.

This time around, there are fewer impediments — practical, political or legal. Trump has surrounded himself with political nonconformists like Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, who will help build a cabinet and political support system designed to challenge the way the US is governed at the federal level — in short, to dismantle the establishment and replace it with a system of governance that is fully aligned with the goals and objectives of Trump’s Maga movement.

Trump has promised to purge from the ranks of government civil servants anyone who, in his opinion, abused their positions to go after American citizens for partisan political purposes — he has cited the so-called “lawfare” conducted by the Department of Justice and FBI in this regard. Trump has vowed to relocate tens of thousands of federal jobs away from Washington, DC, to locations across the nation that are more Maga-friendly in terms of their demographic composition. Trump also wants to conduct top-to-bottom reforms of government agencies and policies that could undo decades of policy-setting by what he claims is a permanent ruling class of unelected bureaucrats.

Radical change — revolutionary change — is in the air. The impetus comes from the pact between Trump and his Maga supporters that puts domestic needs ahead of foreign entanglements. While the US will most likely not enter a new era of isolationism, the single-minded sustainment of the rules-based international order that has defined past administrations is likely a thing of the past. Instead, the world can expect a pragmatic, transactional approach toward global engagement that will not interfere with the transformation taking place in the US.

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