Are you ready for Trump unbound? You may have thought the former and future president was already pretty unrestrained, not least because Donald Trump has never shown anything but brazen disrespect for boundaries or limits of any kind. And you would be right. But, as an earlier entertainer turned president – and Trump combines the two roles – liked to say: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
That’s because the 47th president will enter the Oval Office free of almost all constraints. He will be able to do all that he promised and all that he threatened, with almost nothing and no one to stand in his way.
To understand why, it pays to start with the nature of the win he secured on Tuesday. He did not eke out a narrow victory on points, as he did when he squeaked through the electoral college in 2016. This was a knockout that has Trump on course to bag every one of the battleground states and to be the winner of the popular vote, the first Republican to pull off that feat in 20 years. All of which enables him to claim what he lacked in 2016: an emphatic mandate.
But even that is to understate the transformational nature of this election. Trump won big and everywhere: gaining ground in 48 of the 50 states, in counties rural, urban and suburban, across almost every demographic, including those groups such as Hispanic voters, who were once reliably Democratic. “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980,” according to Doug Sosnik, a former political adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House.
What drove that red wave was the same anti-incumbency mood that has toppled governments all over the democratic world, including in Britain. And it is not too hard to explain. Americans are still feeling the hangover of the inflation shock that followed the Covid pandemic. Any conversation with a Trump voter, and I had many this week, would rapidly turn to high petrol prices and unsustainable grocery bills.
In that climate, the impulse is to kick out the party in charge. This week, that basic urge proved stronger than any misgivings about Trump. Throw in fear of migrants and the accusation that Democrats are the party of the liberal coastal elites, in thrall to the progressive fringes and out of touch with ordinary people – both sentiments expertly inflamed by Trump – and you have the ingredients for a crushing defeat.
The result is that Trump will have control not only of the White House, but also the Senate and most likely the House as well. Admittedly, Republicans had majorities on Capitol Hill when Trump took office eight years ago too, but here’s the difference. Back then, there were at least a few moderate, Trump-sceptic Republicans in Congress ready to defy the president. Not now. Trump’s hold on what has become the Maga party is total. There are next to no John McCains to give Trump the thumbs-down this time, certainly not enough to cause him trouble. What he wants, he’ll get.
Which means he can nominate whoever he likes to all the key posts, knowing his yes-men in the Senate will give him the confirming nod. Last time, he felt pressure to appoint responsible adults to his cabinet or to head federal agencies, officials who then went on to dilute or even thwart his wilder schemes. This time he can surround himself with true believers, including the apostles of the notorious Project 2025 plan that Trump disavowed during the campaign but which he is now free to implement – thereby ensuring a full-spectrum takeover by Maga loyalists of the machinery of the US government.
It’s no good looking to the supreme court to act as a restraining hand. Thanks to Trump, that bench now has a six-to-three rightwing majority, and it has already issued the blank cheque he craved. In a July ruling, the court granted the president sweeping immunity for his official acts. The threat of legal jeopardy that once hovered over Trump will melt away. To his delight, the multiple criminal cases against him are set to be suspended, on the principle that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
What, then, will be left to hold Trump in check? It won’t be fear of losing the next election: he’s constitutionally barred from running again (though you wouldn’t bet against him testing that limit too). The conventional media will do their best, but if the Trump era has shown us anything, it’s that the information ecosystem of the US is changed utterly. Fifty years ago, if three broadcast networks and a couple of east coast newspapers declared the president a crook, that president was finished, as Richard Nixon learned to his cost. Now, the mainstream press can reveal the most damning evidence about Trump and it goes nowhere. His supporters either never hear those revelations – because they get their news from Trump-friendly TV and social media channels – or, if they do, they flatly dismiss them as lies. We truly live in the age of “alternative facts”, and that gives Trump enormous freedom. He could do heinous things in office, or simply fail as president, and tens of millions of Americans would never know about it.
The prospect of Trump unchecked is not merely an offence to abstract notions of democracy. It poses multiple dangers, all of them clear and present. To take just one, there is nothing to stop the old-new president making good on his promise to put the anti-vax fanatic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr in charge of public health. If that happens, there are already warnings that polio or measles could return to afflict America’s children.
Or consider the climate. In Salem, Virginia, last weekend, I heard Trump hail the glories of “liquid gold”, meaning oil, leading the crowd in a chant of “Drill, baby, drill”. He promised to extract oil from the last pristine wilderness in North America, Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge. Joe Biden had moved to preserve it; Trump will send in the rigs. That will accelerate yet further the climate breakdown, a crisis that was unmistakable that day in Salem, where the temperature reached a weird 26C in November.
Trump is now free to abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves, free to make Nato a dead letter – which it will be the day Trump is sworn in on 20 January. We know that Trump has contempt for Nato’s core principle of mutual defence. Without that, the alliance falls apart. Yet there is no one to stop him.
Ultimately that task will fall to the Democrats. Except they will soon wield no formal power in Washington. I asked one seasoned hand what practical tools the party had to restrain or even scrutinise Trump, given that they will soon lose their current ability to launch congressional investigations and convene official hearings. The answer: “They can hold press conferences.”For now, Democrats are turned inward, engaged in a round of recriminations as competing factions blame each other for Tuesday’s disaster. That process is inevitable, but the longer it goes on the more it helps Trump, by removing one more check on the power he will soon wield.
We know how Trump wants to rule because he has said so, telling a Fox News interviewer he would be a dictator “on day one”. We know which leaders he admires because of the way he gushes over Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. The assumption had always been that these fantasies of his would remain just that, because of the institutional checks and balances that fetter an American president. But when Trump renews his oath on 20 January, those restraints will look either badly frayed or entirely absent. He will be Trump unbound, free to do his worst.
AP
