Whatever you think will happen in 2025, you're probably wrong.
If Donald Trump's first term has taught us anything, it's that there are limits to preparedness. Mr. Trump's skill at inciting a high degree of uncertainty has kept the media on edge, even as he upsets the balance of his opponents. This leaves the next president in a uniquely powerful position before he even considers his own ideas. governing trifecta.
A return to President Trump's constant Twitter-driven news cycle may work, but it will be a nightmare for Americans whose sense of cultural context is already in tatters. A recent Pew Research survey found that Americans almost equally divided About whether the American Dream still exists. There are now record numbers of Americans don't trust the mediaIt has gotten to the point where many people live a reality shaped more by their particular media viewing habits than by actual facts.
President Trump's nine years of out-of-context rants… destroy public trust News based on ideas and institutions that most Americans once considered fundamental: fact. Democracy. free and fair elections. Trump has been successful enough to know that his toxic political model is working with a significant portion of the American electorate. In his second term, we can expect President Trump to push his cult of personality as far as possible and Democrats to once again underestimate their opponents.
Trump will lead a very different country than the one he ousted from office four years ago. Since then, millions of Americans have told campaign pollsters that they value their personal loyalty to President Trump more than their belief in the Constitution. The number of people willing to consider alternatives to democracy is at levels last seen during the crisis of the 1930s.
Trump knows he speaks for these people, and from his pledge to occupy Panama and Greenland; Pardons nearly 1,000 federal criminals locked up in prison for their respective roles January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Even more concerning is President Trump's increasingly explicit pledge to “suspend” federal law to prosecute political opponents. This is something President Trump talks about a lot – he revealed his plans. More than 100 times Rarely an interview during the campaign goes by without President Trump erupting in anger at political opponents from Liz Cheney to Merrick Garland. President Trump will soon find himself in the Oval Office with few real limits to his ability to take revenge.
It doesn't take a political scientist to know that the America President Trump has in mind cannot coexist with democracy, and that his most loyal voters actually don't want it to coexist with constitutional democracy. I can also understand. Now, even more Republicans appear to be aligning with President Trump's authoritarian views. Just one year ago, 3 in 10 Republican voters told Fox News They said they wanted a president “willing to break rules and laws.” That number is now closer to half of all Republicans.
A Monmouth University poll conducted last month found similar results. Asked if they were concerned about President Trump's repeated pledges to suspend laws to imprison political opponents, most Republicans said they were. didn't bother them at all.
In fact, the number of Republicans who told pollsters they were concerned about President Trump being suspended or breaking the law has declined every month since this summer. But the problem isn't just MAGA believers. Last month, the Washington Post Found Even independent voters who lean toward Trump say they are growing accustomed to a lawless presidency. In June, 68% of voters said they would be concerned if President Trump suspended the law. As of December, that number had fallen to just 55%.
The frightening reality of 2025 is not that President Trump may try to circumvent the democratic process. That means he might not need it. Both MAGA believers and pro-Trump independents are still in a race to the right in terms of what to absolve the Trump administration of. If Democrats think they can rely on the same anti-Trump message that powered them in 2020, they are fatally mistaken. That audience is gone, never to return. Democrats cite the law against people carrying swords.
The harsh reality is that too many Americans are skeptical and alienated from our democracy, and are willing to use fairly extreme authoritarian “reforms” as an outlet for that skepticism. be. they are I'm tired of the news and doubt the other person. They are the Americans who will decide how much Trump reorganizes our government over the next four years.
At the moment, only one side has reached them. That's bad news for democracy.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
