A spectre of unchecked power is likely to haunt America in the next four years — a terrifying prospect for many, but in equal if not greater measure, a rousing prospect for others. America’s midwest and south have rebelled against its coastal elites. This kind of rebellion is now called right-wing populism. Such populism uses electoral democracy to elect those who crush liberal democracy and, in particular, “discipline” dissenters and minorities.
Given America’s worldwide presence and power, weaker than before but still substantial, the international system may also be shaken to the core. Political moments such as these have conventionally been called perilous. They are hugely welcome to some, but equally errant to others.
In winning power again, Donald Trump has achieved something he earlier lacked. Like 2016, he has defeated his rival in the electoral college, but he is also winning the popular vote, a feat that was beyond his grasp in 2016 and 2020. He is doubly empowered and restored.
To understand how he might exercise power, it is important to consider the other top-tier institutions of the polity. In a presidential system, the legislature can exercise a check on the power of the executive. Senate approval is necessary for Cabinet-level appointments and the House of Representatives, by denying budgetary resources, can even shut down the government. “Divided we govern” is a well-known dictum of American polity. America’s founding fathers instituted these checks to ensure that the president would not become a British-style monarch, against whom the US fought the War of Independence.
How would these constraining institutions fare in Trump’s second term? These elections, in addition to picking a president, also selected one-third of the upper chamber of the legislature, the US Senate, and all 435 members of the lower chamber, the House of Representatives. The Senate now has a Republican majority. While, at the time of this writing, the fate of the House of Representatives remains undecided, it seems also to be headed towards a Republican majority. And even if the House of Representatives gets a slim Democratic majority, can it really take on a president so passionately opposed to the idea of institutional checks on his power?
The US Supreme Court, another independent institution in theory, has a substantial number of life-time judges appointed by Trump in his first term. And philosophically, a majority of Supreme Court judges subscribe to the view that the job of courts is to aid executive power, not constrain it. A few months back, the US Supreme Court allowed the president virtually unbridled powers in the execution of public responsibilities and functions. Only the use of presidential power for private purposes would be judicially bounded.
We thus have an institutional environment at the polity’s top tiers that is eminently well-suited for a relatively unfettered exercise of presidential power. More importantly, it is in accord with how Trump wishes to rule.
His oft-repeated wishes include how he wants some other theoretically independent institutions, such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI, to function. In his campaign, he often emphasised that he would like to use government machinery to prosecute “the enemies from within”. The internal enemies, he said, are worse than external enemies. The DOJ will be the arm of the US government entrusted with this task. And the DOJ’s actions would not be judicially hampered so long as their purpose is the defence of state and national interest, often a legal fiction to penalise dissenters and critics.
If that is the likely institutional reality under Trump, what else can we say about the issues that governed these elections? Anxieties about the economy, hostility to immigration from the southern border, an inward looking foreign and economic policy, and a White majoritarian political impulse dominated Trump’s platform. The Harris platform emphasised reproductive rights for women (especially covering abortion), a more racially inclusive America, threats to democracy posed by Trump and a globally oriented foreign policy, heavily favouring international alliances.
Trump’s platform has handsomely won. Citizens most concerned about the economy and immigration heavily voted for him, whereas those concerned with reproductive rights and threats to democracy voted for Harris. The statistical point, of course, is that the former group far outnumbered the latter. Harris could not make abortion and threats to democracy bigger than economics and immigration for the electorate at large.
This leads us to the final question. How do we understand which sections of society supported whom? Solid statistics will take some time to come. But exit data, though always less than final, do allow us to identify the bigger statistical points.
Of the many inferences that can be derived, two stand out. The first point is racial. As expected, a clear majority of Whites voted for Trump, as did an overwhelming majority of Blacks for Harris. It is the Latino and Asian communities that moved substantially towards Trump. Latinos are as big as the Black community today, if not bigger. Moreover, unlike the Asians, they are important in some swing states. In a widely noted Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, a White speaker chosen by the Trump campaign described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, which did not make any material difference to the vote. Latinos either have serious internal divisions and Puerto Ricans are not internally liked, or enough Latinos don’t mind White hegemony of American socio-political space.
Second, in terms of gender, while White women voted more for Harris, they could not make up for the much higher White male vote for Trump. One way to interpret this is that for them, abortion was not the only important issue; instead, for many of them, economics, immigration or race were more important. Hence their vote for Harris was not larger. Misogyny, thus, triumphed in the end.
The US under Trump will be less racially inclusive, more immigration-unfriendly and selectively retributive. There will be tax breaks for the rich and tariffs on imports — the China policy will especially come wrapped in tariffs. There will be a move towards pro-Russian and pro-Israeli war settlements in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. There will also be a serious pressure on NATO, benefiting Russia greatly.
That is what the victory of Trump implies. There is no beating around the bush.
The writer is Sol Goldman professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute. Views are personal
