So, what happens next?

In the absence of a miracle, 75 days from now Donald Trump will become President again, with a Republican-majority Senate, quite likely a Republican-majority House, and a 6-3 Republican-majority Supreme Court that has repeatedly proven itself to be in his corner. Most, though not all, of the brakes have come off the bus. What happens next? What will he realistically do?

First, even before Trump can take office, Vladimir Putin will be emboldened. It was already looking unrealistic that Ukraine would ever regain the territory Russia invaded almost two years ago, much less the territory it invaded ten years ago. But now the terms of Ukraine's surrender have shifted markedly in Putin's favor: he'll no longer be satisfied with those provinces and a promise never to join NATO, but will demand total disarmament, and push towards what he really wanted all along, a puppet government in Kyiv -- which would at least give the Ukrainian people a respite from the bombing that has leveled much of their civilian infrastructure. (Anything short of a puppet government, and Russia will invade again in a year or two.) Tiny Moldova will presumably be the next target, followed by any of the NATO members Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland; I have no idea which of these would be the softest target, but with the United States likely to renege on its treaty obligations to NATO, NATO membership is less of an obstacle to Putin's imperial ambitions.

Benjamin Netanyahu too will be emboldened. Where Biden has chided him ineffectually about civilian casualties and humanitarian aid, Trump will be his chief cheerleader. But in Gaza, there's no question of "negotiating terms of surrender", since Netanyahu won't stop bombing if there's any pseudo-governmental agency left in Gaza to negotiate with. As people more-informed than I have pointed out, Netanyahu has no good options for the day after "beating" Hamas, and will probably have to install a permanent occupying force in Gaza; that would be a lot simpler if there were few or no Palestinians there at all, whether by evicting them (two million more stateless, starving, poverty-stricken refugees for the world to absorb) or killing them, and Trump wouldn't object to either of those solutions as long as the refugees didn't come to the U.S.

Less clear, but quite possible, Xi Jinping may be emboldened to invade Taiwan. Since Trump considers him (unlike Putin or Netanyahu) an enemy, he might not want to invade while Trump is President, but if he invades during the chaos of the transitional period, by the time Trump takes office he might have a sufficiently dominant position to trigger Trump's "side with the winner" instincts. This would enable Trump to take office blaming the Biden administration for Taiwan's loss of de facto independence, and with one less foreign-policy dilemma to deal with himself. Indeed, with Taiwan removed as a point of friction, he might develop as cordial a relationship with Xi as he has with Putin. (The next target might be the Phillippines....)

The Democratic Party will do a post-mortem. Why did they lose (in 2016 and 2024, and almost in 2020) against such a monumentally corrupt and unqualified candidate? They lost the votes of white, non-college-educated, blue-collar workers, and their edge among women wasn't large enough, losing white suburban "soccer moms" worried about immigration, as well as boys on girls' sports teams, men in women's public restrooms, and similar vanishingly-rare threats to civilization. Refocusing the Democratic Party towards the needs of blue-collar workers is probably healthy, albeit too little too late. On social issues, the party will probably throw trans people under the bus and hope not to lose too much ground on the LGB parts of the quiltbag. Even before the election, the Democratic nominee championed an immigration bill containing almost everything the Republicans wanted; in defeat, they may follow the Republicans even farther in an anti-immigration direction.

If Trump had lost this election, after losing in 2020 and leading his party to disappointing results in 2018 and 2022, the Republican Party would have undergone such a post-mortem, perhaps emerging again as a party with recognizable principles, a variety of carefully-thought-out policy ideas, and a respect for objective reality. Now that post-mortem won't happen for at least four more years, and possibly long after Trump's death, since he won't be perceived as taking the party down with him. The Republican Party will continue to be a cult of one man who can do no wrong. Since what he says today must be right even if it contradicts what he said yesterday, the party cannot develop any positions or principles other than "support Donald Trump" until he's six feet underground.

Then, in January, Trump takes office. What are his top priorities? Obviously, shutting down the two Federal criminal cases against him, and making the argument that the Georgia case can't proceed while he's President; his pet Supreme Court would almost certainly support that argument. He'll have at least two years with party control of both houses of Congress, and I think he'll prioritize making sure he never loses that power. He's already promised to reclassify most of the mid-level career employees in the executive branch as political appointees, firing and replacing anybody he considers insufficiently loyal to him; the effects will last for years after he leaves office. He will of course continue appointing Trump-loyalist judges at every level, without regard to the traditional measures of judicial competence, ditto. If the Republican-nominated justices on the Supreme Court show more than a faint flicker of independence (e.g. Barrett's concurring opinion in the immunity case), I wouldn't be surprised to see a bill adding at least two more seats to the Court effective immediately. And, using the momentum of eight years' lies about Democratic election fraud, there might be a bill with a name like "Federal Election Integrity Act of 2025" to increase Federal oversight of state-run elections, so he has leverage to prevent a Democratic takeover of either house of Congress in 2026.

I suspect he would very much like to repeal the 22nd Amendment, preventing him from running for re-election in 2028, and he could probably get that through Congress, but he wouldn't get 3/4 of states to ratify it in a mere four years. So there's a bright spot, a remaining guard-rail. OTOH, he might persuade his Supreme Court that the 22nd Amendment, like the 14th, is not self-executing and doesn't work without a specific Congressional implementing act, so he can run for re-election in 2028. Or he might just run for re-election anyway and ask "Who's going to stop me?"

Trump will appoint a bunch of Cabinet secretaries with personal loyalty as the main consideration, and even less concern for their competence, honesty, or knowledge about the department in question than in 2017. Some of these nominees may be so bad that the narrowly-Republican Senate won't confirm them, in which case Trump may keep them in place indefinitely with an "acting" in front of their titles. As in 2017, many of them will be involved in high-profile financial scandals, but Trump will be less willing than before to remove them from office for such trivialities; only disloyalty to him will get you fired.

In 2016, his top campaign promises were about illegal immigration and building a wall, and he did in fact move on both of those in his first year. In 2024, his top campaign promises have been about illegal immigration and tariffs, so I think we should assume he'll actually move on both of those in his first year. As before, there will be lots of illegal (and a substantial number of legal) immigrants rounded up, detained in conditions that wouldn't be acceptable in a prison, intentionally separated from their families to maximize suffering, and deported. As before, the various forms of legal immigration will be sharply curtailed, unless you have white skin and/or money (preferably both). If the numbers are anything close to the millions he's promised, there will be an abrupt shortage of labor in agriculture and construction, raising the prices of food and housing.

If some trusted advisor convinces him that tariffs cause inflation, he might postpone the tariffs until shortly before the 2026 election, so he can run on a promise kept before the American people see the consequences. But if not, he'll probably enact high import tariffs in his first year, raising the prices of all imported goods (especially from China) and the domestically-produced goods that compete with them. There will be a brief uptick in domestic employment, until our major trading partners retaliate with import tariffs of their own. Never one to back down from a fight, Trump would instinctively raise tariffs even farther, causing a trade war that could tip the world into another Great Depression -- or simply cut off the United States from the trade that enriches the rest of the world.

His 2017 tax-cut bill includes many provisions scheduled to expire in 2025 (when he was expecting to be out of office, so the blame would fall on his successor). He'll probably extend those provisions for at least another four years, and perhaps add even more goodies for billionaires and large corporations. The Federal budget deficit will grow rapidly, as it did in his first term.

On abortion, Trump isn't a "true believer"; he supported anti-Roe judges only in exchange for right-wing Christians' votes. In recent months he's backpedalled, seeing abortion as an electoral vulnerability, and promising not to sign a nationwide ban. But then he and his party won the election, so it must not have been such a vulnerability after all. I have no idea which way he'll jump on this; four years from now we may still be a nation divided into states where abortion is possible and states where it isn't. Or, between enforcing the Comstock Act and signing a nationwide ban, we might be a nation where abortion is possible only if you're rich, and where it's illegal (but still possible, if you're rich) to leave the country to get an abortion in another country.

Oh, and of course he'll pull out of the Paris accords, and slow-walk any renewable-energy work authorized under IRA until he can repeal it altogether, and remove all mention of climate change from government websites.

Speaker Mike Johnson said something last week about getting rid of Obamacare, but Trump hasn't made that a central focus of his stump speeches this time around, so it may not be a high priority for him. Trump has promised not to cut Medicare or Social Security, notably omitting Medicaid from that list (or maybe he doesn't know it's different from Medicare).

Trump has repeatedly promised to "lock up" a long list of people: anybody named Biden, any nationally-prominent Democrat, pretty much anybody who's ever dissed him. I don't know how seriously to take that: he was President for four years before, triggered some IRS audits of political opponents but never successfully brought charges against any of them, much less got them locked up. He might have an easier time now, with a lot more Trump-appointed judges and district attorneys, but the court system moves slowly even under a despot.

That'll do for now; I need to eat breakfast and do some deep-breathing exercises. Lots of deep-breathing exercises over the next four years....