Donald Trump is king of America and his family are the new Kennedys, but trouble awaits
Donald Trump spent his first day as president-elect like a king. Surrounded by family, the Kennedys without the bad luck, his advisers, and powerful backers such as Elon Musk, this was a president enjoying his moment in the sun.
Donald Trump spent his first day as president-elect like a king. Surrounded by family, the Kennedys without the bad luck, his advisers, and powerful backers such as Elon Musk, this was a president enjoying his moment in the sun.
No president in US history had ever shown off his extended family in such a show of familial and collegial loyalty. His children and their spouses. His teenage granddaughter Kai who caused a sensation when she addressed the crowd at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July was paraded once again. Even Ivanka, who appears to have drifted apart from her father’s political campaign, was beaming alongside her husband Jared Kushner.
And he has many more moments in the sun to come. Until his inauguration in late January, which Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have ensured will proceed, he will enjoy power without responsibility, as the former president radiates vindication and the various criminal charges against him wilt.
Trump is unlikely to focus on the detail. He’s 78, after all, and himself conceded during his rallies last week that the marathon speeches would end if he were successful. But he will be lucky in this second term.
The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution on July 4, 2026 will trigger momentous patriotic celebrations in which the 47th president will insert himself. And of course he’ll pretend he understands soccer when the US hosts the World Cup in the same year, and cap off his final year in office by opening the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
In between all the festivities the new president will have three challenges: war, prices, and immigration.
His first big challenge will be the Russia-Ukraine war, which risks tearing apart his own party: it’s evenly divided among old fashioned Bush-style interventionists and isolationists.
Trump has been careful to avoid the details of how he would end the 2½-year vicious war between the two former Soviet-bloc nations, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not call Trump the day after the election, as many other leaders did.
Having cast himself as the anti-war but pro-America candidate, this will be his biggest challenge. If he fails, Democrats will seize on it. Putin has publicly stated he would have preferred a predictable Harris presidency, continuing the Biden policy: supply Ukraine with weapons enough to defend itself but not enough to win.
Trump, who has boasted about his relations with both Putin and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, has said repeatedly he will finish the war in a day or two. But what will he concede to Putin, who’s increasingly dominant in the military theatre and has formally annexed 20 per cent of the democratic nation?
The politics will be diabolic for a new Trump administration: concede too much and be cast as defeatist and weak; concede not enough and be attacked for failing in his promise.
Russia has clearly said it launched the war to keep NATO out of Ukraine, which Trump has not renounced as policy.
The biggest challenge and political vulnerability of the Trump administration will be prices: were you better off four years ago, as the most resonant and salient question of his campaign. No western government has been re-elected after such inflation, and indeed Biden-Harris wasn’t. Most Americans believe they were better off, but there’s really no way a second Trump administration can reduce prices back to where they were in 2020 or earlier, as many Trump supporters are expecting.
Trillions of new dollars have been released into the economy and they can’t be withdrawn. The damage is done; inflation might return to low-single-digit levels, but the reduction in living standards is complete.
The President-elect has also talked about slashing spending, by as much as $US2 trillion according to Elon Musk, who Trump has promised to lead a new Government Efficiency Commission. Like most politicians in all countries, once the politics of cutting spending becomes apparent, they baulk. Musk’s number is about a third of all US spending, which would cause enormous economic disruption and rage among the many tens of thousands bureaucrats who would lose their jobs. It’s a good idea, but politics matter.
And remember what happened to the Truss government in the UK: big tax cuts announced without spending cuts and bond markets revolted. The same could happen to the US, whose fiscal position is even beyond World War II level.
Also, how will the federal government realistically be able to remove upwards of 6 million immigrants, illegal or not, from the US. The administrative burden would be extraordinary, not to mention the cost to the businesses, who vote Republican, who will chafe at losing their cheap workers.
Finally, an early test of Trump’s mettle will be his promise to release the entirety of the JFK files, thousands of documents that both Trump as president and Biden refused to release to the public despite legislation ordering the executive to do so.
Trump in theory could do this on day one of his presidency in January; I’d bet he won’t. The CIA and FBI have and surely will push back aggressively against their release, as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo once did, according to Trump himself, because of the embarrassment it would cause the US government.
Maybe it will all prove too much and the 47th president, having been spectacularly vindicated, will stand aside after a few years and make way for president JD Vance, who’s become the undoubted heir to the MAGA movement.
