Donald Trump waves as he walks with former first lady Melania Trump at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center, on Nov. 6, in West Palm Beach, Fla.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
An earthquake rumbled through the United States Tuesday, and the world is feeling its aftershocks.
In only a few places and a few modern instances – when the American patriot rebels repelled Great Britain from the 13 colonies in North America, when the French Revolution led to the Napoleonic wars, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, when Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor – did an event in one country have implications that were felt worldwide.
It is too early, perhaps too facile, to suggest that Donald Trump’s imminent return to the American presidency is one such event, but the significance of Tuesday’s election – and the prominent, surpassing role that the United States plays in global economics, trade, geopolitics and culture – renders that a plausible notion.
That is the fervent hope of Mr. Trump’s adherents. That, too, is the dreaded fear of his opponents.
But at this juncture, in the aftermath of a searing, historic election, it is incontrovertible that major tectonic changes in the character of the United States are in motion.
The first Trump victory was a phenomenon. The second is a trend. And it will bring to office in 2025 a man more resentful and vengeful, and less shackled by the conventional and the decorous, than he was in 2017, when he seemed more a passing storm than a climactic change.
As a result, seemingly immovable elements of the American political landscape are shaking.
Even with the Ronald Reagan anti-government movement of the 1980s, the basic contours of American life remained intact; the size of the government’s work force and its share of GNP actually increased. And while Mr. Reagan railed against what he called “bureaucratic sabotage,” the combat against what contemporary conservatives call the “deep state” was more a skirmish than a war. Mr. Trump is set to undertake a remorseless clash against the very government he will head.
Even with the “culture war” that conservative commentator-cum-presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan declared in a landmark speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, that battle was comprised of isolated tussles and surface divisions that didn’t disrupt the broadening of American rights, extending them to the disabled, to gay Americans and, in many corners of the United States, to transgender people.
The 2024 Trump campaign put contemporary cultural issues out front, even airing lurid advertisements about trans people during timeouts in NFL games. The support that, among others, white males provided Mr. Trump now is a promissory note for fresh efforts to provide increased parental rights in the content of their children’s education, to restrain trans rights and, at the least but perhaps more than that, to discomfit those who support abortion rights and the LGBTQ community.
These may be American domestic issues, but in an interdependent world stitched together by invisible but powerful threads of social media, the boundaries between countries are less rigid than they were even a quarter-century ago.
National boundaries, of course, are the source of the frisson involving Mr. Trump’s key issue, the restrictions on immigration – in the mind of the president-elect and his supporters a threat to American sovereignty, in the mind of their opponents an immutable value for a country that has embraced the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and whose ancestors were, apart from the Indigenous families that preceded them to North America, migrants themselves.
Immigration and inflation were, besides the cultural matters, the issues that propelled Mr. Trump toward his rendezvous with democratic destiny.
“Voters blame Democrats for the inflation that occurred over the last few years and did not give Democrats much credit for the low unemployment rate and the fact that inflation has subsided,” said Daniel Stone, an economist at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. “Voters seem to expect that prices for groceries would not only stop rising quickly but would also decline.” They didn’t.
Mr. Trump’s renaissance and rehabilitation are vaguely reminiscent of the comeback of Richard Nixon, who won the 1968 presidential election after being defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960, and by the resurgence of Andrew Jackson, who was denied the presidency even though he won a plurality of electoral college votes and the popular vote in 1824 only to win the White House in 1828.
“Jackson reorganized the political atmosphere since his initial loss,” said Spencer Goidel, a political scientist at Alabama’s Auburn University. “Trump is entering an environment where he has very few people in his party willing to check him and his opposition is almost powerless. Jackson’s democratization processes were mostly self-serving – he tried to build a bureaucracy with loyalists – and we may see a similar effect of the Trump election.”
Mr. Trump will become the first president since Grover Cleveland, who won his second term in 1892, to lead non-consecutive White House administrations. The difference is that the 24th president’s second term was, according to Troy Senik, the onetime George W. Bush speechwriter and author of the 2022 A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, “at odds with the political trends of the day.”
Instead, Mr. Trump’s second ascendancy is reflecting the political trends of the day.
It sets in motion questions about civil liberties, economic policy, national defence, abortion, the status of minorities – and his own legal status. It raises the issue about whether a leader of a country based on the notion that no person is above the law can pardon himself.
It prompts the uncomfortable but unavoidable question of what message a pardon of those accused of crimes growing out of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot would send after Mr. Trump, in his second taking of the ancient Oath of Office, is the beneficiary of the peaceful transition of power – one presided over on Jan. 6, 2025, by Kamala Harris.