As the sun rises on 2025—at least in the parts of the country where there is January sunlight—America's basic predicament has become clearer. The country has one political party that can govern but not consistently win elections, and another that can win elections but can't seem to govern.
Americans chose to give the latter group virtually unfettered power in November, and three weeks into 2025, the Republican Party will complete its takeover of Washington with the second inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. The looming question is whether he will be able to get much of anything done given one of the narrowest House majorities in American history, the reality of his lame duck status, and emerging fissures in the Republican coalition that are cracking open weeks before Trump is even sworn in.
Overall, the transition period has not been an encouraging sign for MAGA enthusiasts hoping to radically reorient American trade and immigration policy, wage a multi-front administrative war on "wokeism" and somehow also not accidentally break an economy they just spent several years trashing as a disaster, only to now inherit responsibility for it wholesale. Trump himself has shown his age and disastrous instincts in multiple ways, wasting precious political capital on transparently absurd personnel choices like Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. These are strange, unqualified people whose already worrisome scandals seem to have their own sub-scandals.
The idea that Trump would come into office a second time with a seasoned, battle-ready staff, sporting an expansive and legally-vetted day one agenda has run headlong into the reality that the beating heart of MAGA world still appears to have no earthly idea how to effectively wield power on a moment-to-moment basis. Instead, it has once again been amateur hour for close to two long months, with 48 more to go. Meanwhile, the President-elect's frivolous lawsuits intended to silence press critics and non-profits have inadvertently roused the resistance from its post-election hangover.
The fact that prominent Republicans are trial ballooning the idea of making Elon Musk the Speaker of the House is a clear sign they believe the ship they've built isn't actually seaworthy. It's not just that current Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) briefly couldn't find the votes for a basic government funding stopgap that would be pro forma for any functioning political party; it's that some in the GOP believe that among the hundreds of elected Republicans in Congress, there isn't a single one capable of doing the job, including the one who already has it, who himself has held the gavel for barely a year. That's not because the job of Speaker is inherently impossible, but rather, beacause the Republican Party's baseline dysfunction has for years been papered over with reliance on Democrats for key spending votes that routed around the austerity hardliners and created a mirage of continuity and competence.
Belowdecks, a mutiny is brewing that may force a reckoning with the fundamental contradiction of MAGA, a movement that seeks, at least rhetorically, to burn down the post-WWII liberal order both at home and abroad but also needs to reliably service the millionaire-and-billionaire classes who write the checks to the movement's think tanks, candidates, and SuperPACs, and who collectively extract far more out of that dying order than they put in. Just before the holidays, more than three dozen Republican austerity hawks stood their ground against the full heft of the right-wing machine and refused to rubber stamp a two-year debt-ceiling suspension without cuts to the entitlements that Trump literally just promised the voters he wouldn't touch.
That points to perhaps the bigger problem looming over a second Trump term, which is his own waning influence vis-a-vis the cartoon billionaires that helped put him into office, mostly Elon Musk, but also the rogue's gallery of wealthy hangers-on and influencers like Vivek Ramaswamy and David Sacks, for whom Trump has invented bizarre new patronage jobs. Sacks has been made "Crypto and AI czar," presumably to grease the skids for these two insanely predatory industries to burrow even further into our collective lives. Exactly what will happen, to the economy and to Trump, when it becomes clear that, as Edward Zitron argues about AI, "the entire tech industry has become oriented around a dead-end technology that requires burning billions of dollars to provide inessential products that cost them more money to serve than anybody would ever pay" is anybody's guess, but it won't be pretty.
As Trump basks momentarily in the adulation of people who until recently wouldn't give him the time of day, he is quickly losing sight of the reason he was put into power by the people in the first place, which was to rein in prices, get the border under control, and to somehow magically bring back the long-vanished society and economy of 2019. This should have been obvious all along, but that combination of goals will prove to be fundamentally unworkable. The American people got duped into voting for a time machine and what they got was a poorly conceptualized Rube Goldberg Machine that looks like it is failing from the outset.
The guess here is that this will all unravel much faster than anyone currently thinks, leaving the country, and its new government, adrift and voters counting the days to the midterm elections.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
English (US) ·