The first days of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have not really been distinct from the last weeks he spent waiting to reassume the office. There is an unmistakable aura of vindication shared between him and his supporters. By returning to the White House—and doing so with a popular vote victory—Trump can claim to have clear and irrefutable evidence of the durability and appeal of his political project, as well as ample proof that he is not, in fact, a loser.
For his supporters, his victory in November represented something similar. During Trump’s first term in office, the mainstream was defined by a near monolithic resistance to his administration; his supporters, by contrast, were treated like a subculture when they weren’t shunned outright. For many, a red MAGA hat was not just a show of support for Trump, but proof of one’s irredeemability: a racist, misogynistic symbol of hate. But Trump’s new victory adds a new shade. Trump didn’t just win the popular vote, he built a coalition, wrought from new Black and Latino support as well as the young-and-disaffected men and political outcasts like anti-vaxxers and libertarians that he wooed to his side via alliances and offbeat media appearances. Trump’s victory was redemptive; it showed they were not deplorable. In the days following the election, a dam seemed to break: Professional athletes danced like Trump, proving that there was no longer a stigma against publicly supporting him. His victory, moreover, showed that they—not cable news talking heads or Hollywood actors—were the real mainstream.
That’s how they see things, at least. Outside that bubble, his victory was neither authoritative nor particularly impressive. Trump won less than 50 percent of the overall vote; his margin in the Electoral College was clear but hardly historic. This was, in other words, hardly a landslide. But Trump and his supporters are determined to live as if it were.
Not that this comes as a surprise. The one constant connecting Trump’s life as a playboy billionaire in the 1980s to his emergence as the country’s foremost nativist is his steadfast insistence that everything he does is huge, authoritative, unmistakable proof of his own greatness. This unyielding insistence on his own magnificence is both a core part of his appeal and what millions detest about him. There’s a reason that people have been calling Trump a liar, a con artist, and a narcissist for decades: He is all of those things.
Nevertheless, Trump and his supporters are right to sense a vibe shift. It really does feel different now than it did eight years ago. Trump’s support has expanded—a remarkable achievement given that he left the White House not only with an underwater approval rating, but facing impeachment for his role in a violent coup attempt. In 2017, Trump entered the White House amid a cloud of illegitimacy and scandal that never left him. Millions took to the streets to protest his inauguration, while Democrats spent years pursuing a damaging investigation into the role Russian intelligence played in his surprise election.
Today, that movement—the Resistance—has all but disappeared. Trump’s second inauguration was met by smatterings of sparsely attended protests. The Democrats, meanwhile, have not only largely dropped the antagonistic posture but have arguably become cooperative, particularly when it comes to Trump’s draconian immigration policies.
Eight years ago, Trump’s movement was embryonic, and his administration was largely staffed by stalwarts of the Republican establishment he had risen to prominence railing against. Today, Trumpism is fully realized and has logged many years preparing to retake the government in order to reshape it in its image. At the same time, he is also leading what is best understood as a coalition government: The nativists and protectionists that have long made up his base have joined forces with vaccine skeptics like Robert F. Kennedy, Silicon Valley titans, and a growing number of minority voters. Without that coalition, he would almost certainly not be president.
This is a bleak moment for Democrats, anti-Trumpers, and anyone who fears for the future of American democracy. After nearly a decade of practically unceasing scandal, a coup attempt, a deadly pandemic, and four years of incompetent and chaotic governance, Trump is, somehow, stronger than ever before. He is not, however, unstoppable or, for that matter, inevitable. The unwieldy coalition that brought him back into power is bound to fray and may ultimately collapse. With the Resistance in shambles and the Democratic Party in the middle of another one of its perennially torturous identity crises, accelerating the collapse of that coalition is the only viable path to halting the momentum Trump enjoys as he returns to the White House. But it may not be that hard to fracture—in fact, it may fall apart on its own.
For the entirety of his political career, Trump has been heralded by admirers and damned by critics as a populist firebrand and a throwback to the nativism and protectionism that were prominent in an older, baser era of American politics. As is often the case, he is both given too much credit for this accomplishment and frequently ascribed a level of coherence that is frankly unjustified given his well-worn history of lucking out and falling up. Trump seems to only hold two strong, consistent political beliefs: He favors mass deportations and draconian curbs on all forms of immigration, and he believes imposing tariffs is the absolute key to American prosperity.
During his first presidential campaign, the term “populist” was broadly accurate. Trump’s rapid rise in the Republican Party and his 2016 victory both stemmed in part from his break from the dogmas that had long defined the Republican Party: He lambasted the warmongering neoconservatives; he also pledged to protect entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
But Trump on the campaign trail is not the same as Trump in office. Once ensconced, it’s rather quickly revealed that all that populism is more myth than reality. Indeed, both his first term and many of the efforts to backfill the considerable gaps in what is now called “Trumpism” favor the same bog-standard regulatory and tax cuts that have been the cornerstone of the Republican Party for decades. The biggest (and only significant) legislative accomplishment of his first term was a massive corporate tax cut.
His deepening alliance with Elon Musk, moreover, has only made him seem more like the Republicans he railed against in 2016. The tech mogul has pledged to cut $2 trillion in spending via a task force he will lead in the Trump White House. Its name—DOGE, a reference to a dated internet meme—is pure Musk. But the concept could have been concocted by Grover Norquist. Frankly, DOGE may simply be a much weirder version of the deficit commissions that President Barack Obama was forever trying to impanel.
Musk’s fellow titans of industry, meanwhile, have also lined up behind Trump and his fellow Republicans, in part because they favor his regulatory and tax policies, but also because they see them as necessary allies and protectors as more Democrats embrace antitrust policies and advocate for breaking up massive companies like Amazon and Google. In Trump, they also have a president who is willing to offer no skepticism of their crypto and artificial intelligence schemes, largely because he doesn’t understand them.
On one side, you have Trump’s popular base, which sees him as a strongman who can, through sheer force of will, via immigration and trade policy, return the country to an Edenic era of widespread middle-class prosperity. On the other, you have his power base, a group of some of the wealthiest people in the history of the world, who simply see him as a tool to make them richer. In December, we got a preview of where the biggest fault lines lay: Trump’s aura of indefatigability was punctured as rival camps duked it out over immigration policy.
That fracas has been dominated by Steve Bannon, the vehemently alt-right guru who helped Trump win the 2016 election and served as his chief strategist for the first seven months of 2017. Bannon has recently emerged as a frantic antagonist of Musk, whose inexhaustible wealth played a pivotal role in Trump’s 2024 victory—and who appears to currently hold favored-nation status in the new Trump administration. For the dogmatic Bannon, Trump must close the borders to more or less everyone; Musk and his fellow Silicon Valley oligarchs insist that there need to be exceptions, specifically for the restrictive H-1B visas that supply a significant portion of Silicon Valley’s workforce. Trump ultimately backed Musk but only after several days of name-calling, which culminated in Bannon (not inaccurately) calling Musk a “toddler.”
Over the ensuing weeks, that feud has continued to simmer. Last week, Musk cast doubt on a $500 billion artificial intelligence deal Trump had announced with one of Musk’s archrivals, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, tweeting that he had it on “good authority” that only a tiny fraction of that funding had actually been secured. For Bannon, eager to pry Musk from his position at Trump’s side, this was an opportunity. “There’s something fundamentally wrong here about the structure and about his understanding of the structure.” Bannon said about the breach of decorum. “This is not Silicon Valley. This is not tech bros.”
The feud between these two would-be puppet masters is clearly personal. But it is also ideological, unresolvable, and possibly lethal. When Trump appeared at his inauguration flanked by tech elites—Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were all seated behind him as he took the oath of office—Bannon sneered. Referring to them as oligarchs—notably the same term deployed by President Joe Biden to describe them in his farewell address—Bannon portrayed them as pathetic losers who had been cowed by Trump’s dominance. “He broke them, and they surrendered,” Bannon told NBC’s Chuck Todd. One cannot imagine Musk taking kindly to Bannon essentially describing him as an unruly dog, though that is likely the point. For Bannon, the growing influence of Silicon Valley billionaires is a clear threat to many of his own political goals.
Trump’s political approach to this fraught coalition threatens it as much as the ideological disputes that have already arisen. When RFK Jr. offered to back whichever candidate presented him with the best offer, Trump leapt at the opportunity to win over his small but loyal base of vaccine skeptics and other weirdos. When he won, RFK Jr. got the prize he wanted: Trump nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where he will have considerable influence over vaccines and public health.
A true believer in many wacko cures and medical conspiracy theories, RFK Jr. is determined to remake HHS in his image. His goals, however, diverge from those of the far less dogmatic Trump, who is largely motivated by a belief that the Covid-19 pandemic was engineered to hurt him politically. When RFK Jr. oversteps and causes controversy, which he inevitably will, Trump will face a difficult choice: Keep a nutty HHS secretary who endangers public health, or ditch him and risk losing a portion of his base. For now, Trump has apparently hired a babysitter for RFK Jr., a former UnitedHealthcare lobbyist who has been tasked with reining in his wilder ideas. It’s an appointment practically guaranteed to cause bad blood and friction—unsurprising given that Trump’s preferred solution to most conflicts is more conflict.
Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump tapped to serve as his director of national intelligence, presents a similar problem. Gabbard’s endorsement was attractive because, like RFK Jr., she was a former Democratic presidential candidate who had recently emerged as a fierce critic of the party, with a particular focus on its foreign policy, especially its support for Ukraine. Her support bolstered Trump’s (exaggerated) antiwar bona fides during the election and now will likely cause headaches as her admiration for several current and former dictators, including Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al Assad, faces scrutiny. If confirmed, which is far from guaranteed, she will undoubtedly spar with other figures in Trump’s national security team.
There is another more quotidian but significant threat present, as well. For all of the ideological conflict among Trump’s newly minted coalition, all of its most influential figures are strong-willed, and most are used to getting their way. Some, like RFK Jr. and Gabbard, hold deeply eccentric views, while others, most notably Musk, are highly annoying and have a long history of rubbing people the wrong way. Personal animosity is inevitable; indeed it already has broken out between Bannon and Musk.
In a similar vein, there are compelling reasons to doubt the sturdiness of the voter coalition Trump forged in November. The gains he made with Black, Latino, and young men have many Democrats panicking. But time will tell if this is a lasting shift or one specific to unique circumstances, in this case a term-limited candidate and an election that followed an extended period of record inflation. Trump, meanwhile, is a singular politician, but he is hardly invulnerable. During his first term, he was subject to public opinion shifts that have only grown more thermostatic, with voters seemingly primed to quickly sour on incumbents. The fickle electorate that turned on him during his first term helped him win in 2024, but there’s no reason to believe they won’t turn on him again if he can’t deliver on his promises.
Having survived two impeachments, several prosecutions, an electoral loss, and two assassination attempts, many assume that Trump is indestructible. The reality is the opposite. Trump’s first term was marked by deep unpopularity that showed him to be subject to the same laws of political gravity that nearly all leaders are. That said, Trump has returned to Washington with an unexpected advantage in the form of a diffident and gun-shy Democratic Party.
The contrast is stark. From the moment he was sworn in in 2016, Democrats were teeming and unrelenting. They highlighted his chaotic style of governance, his incompetent handling of the pandemic, his questionable ties to foreign adversaries, and his general boorishness. If a Democrat, anywhere in the world, was getting public attention—be it in a hearing, a television appearance, a stump speech, an Instagram reel, etc.,—then the focus was on Trump’s fundamental unsuitability for leadership and the danger he posed. It greatly aided the Democrats’ cause. Voters never really gave him a chance; his favorability numbers were underwater for the entirety of his presidency. A fighting spirit led Democrats to victories in 2018 and 2020 and helped defeat the typical anti-incumbent mood of the 2022 midterms.
Now that he has been reelected, Democrats are questioning this approach, believing that it backfired last November. Trump may be a fascist and an existential threat, but it’s clear that many Democrats are suddenly ready to dismiss those claims as overheated political rhetoric, or don’t care. Given how successful their attacks on Trump were during his first term, the fact that they have been unable to settle on a new strategy is a big problem that must be addressed. Luckily for them, while they figure it out, Trump will be dealing with a problem of his own: holding together the fractious coalition that won him the White House but could now destroy his presidency.
