U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is poised to kick off his second term at the White House, a four-year stint that will likely see major shifts in domestic and foreign policy and transform the functioning of a wide range of American public institutions. The fact that he defied the odds, as predicted by pollsters and some sections of the U.S. media, to sweep the seven swing States of the country in the 2024 election, win both the popular vote and the electoral college, and end the presidential run of Democrat candidate Kamala Harris speaks to the disenchantment of the electorate with the previous administration, the reasons for which are still being debated widely.

Yet, it also says something about the entity that is Donald Trump, a man who remains a saviour to some, an enigma to others, and a symbol of an abhorrent brand of politics to many, including, perhaps, the majority of the 73 million who voted for Ms. Harris. To understand what the next four years portend for the U.S. and for the world, it is instructive to peer through the haze of weaponised propaganda on all sides and disambiguate what Mr. Trump truly stands for.

Mr. Trump has worn many hats over the long arc of his 78 years, and as he dons the mantle of the oldest President to enter the Oval Office, the sheer dexterity with which he has moved across career ‘avatars’ — from inheritor of a real estate empire to a cult TV show personality and then the head of a sprawling conglomerate to ultimately being a two-term President — reflects on the deep changeability of his core, and the lack of a fixed view — his detractors would call them values — on his professional mission.

Born in Queens, New York, in 1946, as the son of a successful real estate developer, Mr. Trump studied at the New York Military Academy and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. When he took control of the company of his father, Fred Trump, in 1971, he named it the Trump Organization, a corporate group that would go on to operate in a range of sectors, including commercial and residential buildings, resorts, hotels, golf courses, and casinos.

Among his several books was The Art of the Deal, published in 1987, which offers early hints about his belief that dealmaking is the true measure of success and the sole means to achieve it — a paradigm that runs contrary to the long-standing belief in, say, the U.S. State Department, that successful diplomacy entails “patiently building and deepening alliances and partnerships… playing a constructive role in regional institutions and investing time, at the highest levels, in regional summits”.

In a move that once again reflected what appeared to be Mr. Trump’s devotion to gimmickry and theatrics, at whose altar the loyalty of all his employees would be tested and judged, in 2004, he launched the hit reality television show The Apprentice. With his now famous dismissal line of “You’re Fired” going viral as a pop culture meme, the show solidified Mr. Trump’s credentials in the world of entertainment television, even if it prompted questions about his business ethics as they applied broadly across the Trump Organization. Especially by the time of his first presidential campaign in 2015, it became clear that no major U.S. company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection more than Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casino empire in the last 30 years — four distinct filings. In each of those cases, the implied corporate restructuring allowed Mr. Trump’s companies to stay afloat while shedding the unsustainable debt that it owed to banks, employees and suppliers.

Surprise win in 2016

With his record steeped in Wall Street shenanigans and proximity to power-broking at the highest echelons of the system, it came as a shock to many that Mr. Trump rose to meteoric heights in his campaign for the 2016 presidential election, all the while marketing himself as a man of the people, the saviour of blue-collar jobs in the Rust Belt, and as a political maverick far removed from Washington’s elite policymaking circles. Even his campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, was widely marketed to the benefit of the Trump campaign — reports suggest that, in a single year during 2024 alone, more than a million hats were sold at $40 per piece. However, on the eve of the 2016 election, major newspapers projected 90% odds that his rival, Democrat and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would win the presidency — a failure by the U.S. mainstream media to recognise that Mr. Trump was in fact at the helm of a global nativist-populist movement that was poised to upturn the liberal economic consensus in the West and deglobalise its trade, investment and strategic cooperation paradigm by gradually eroding the rules-based international order.

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While he lost the popular vote to Ms. Clinton, the electoral college saved Mr. Trump and put him in the White House for his first term, four years that witnessed a slew of policies that flew in the face of received wisdom for public policy on immigration, healthcare, defence and foreign relations. While his eyebrow-raising record as the 45th 46th Commander in Chief is well known, his most controversial policy outcomes included bungling mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic response that led to “tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths”; his broad-brush hostility towards minority demographics exemplified in the ‘Muslim ban’ and family separations carried out against undocumented migrants; his triggering of a trade war due to protectionist trade policies, including tariffs on in foreign aluminium, steel, and other products; his attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into seeking evidence of corruption against President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter; and, most egregiously, his role in encouraging a violent mob that attacked and ransacked the U.S. Capitol buildings in early 2021 disputing his certified loss to Mr. Biden in the presidential election a few months earlier.

Yet, two impeachments, four criminal indictments, one fraud case conviction and an $83.3 million sexual assault judgement later, Mr. Trump has not just apparently won redemption in the eyes of the American voters, but has romped home to the White House on the back of a “red shift” in voting patterns that impacted almost every State — red and blue — in his favour. This time, post-election analyses suggest, independent and undecided voters in swing States were not even debating major questions of economic policy, such as the actual performance record of the Biden White House. Instead, it was “media appearances” such as the three-hour podcast conversation between Mr. Trump and Joe Rogan, a popular conservative commentator, that appeared to shift the mood in favour of Mr. Trump, as much as the optics of Mr. Trump warning Americans from the campaign podium about the dangers of unchecked immigration.

A Cabinet of loyalists

Now that Mr. Trump has the backing of the federal government trifecta — the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate controlled by the Republican Party — and a Supreme Court stacked with a 6-3 majority favouring conservative justices, he has a relatively free hand to reshape U.S. policy and institutions. The Cabinet that he has picked appears to have prioritised personal loyalty through the campaign season above all else — his former associates-turned-detractors, including Nikki Haley, have been sidelined, and instead a new cohort of conservatives has been picked despite their glaring lack of prior experience in the White House.

Notable among them are Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary, Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, Tom Homan as “border czar”, Pete Hegseth as Defence Secretary, Lee Zeldin as EPA Administrator, Mike Huckabee as U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as heads of Department of Government Efficiency.

While Ms. Wiles has experience as a political operative in Florida, Mr. Rubio, who hails from the same State, is known to be a hawk on China. Mr. Gaetz was once under investigation for sex trafficking of underage girls and is known as a MAGA lawmaker in the House who fiercely defended Mr. Trump and his policies on the floor on several occasions. Mr. Kennedy has been described as “a hardcore anti-vaccine and misinformation peddler [and the] last time he meddled in a state’s medical affairs (Samoa), 83 children died of measles.” Ms. Gabbard does not have any experience in intelligence and she is staunchly opposed to U.S. support to Ukraine in the latter’s fight against the Russian invasion. Reports also suggest that her “views on Russia and her 2017 meeting with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad have drawn controversy.”

Mr. Homan was the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump administration and Mr. Trump has said he “will be in charge of all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin”. While Mr. Hegseth has experience as an Army veteran who was deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, he has since been a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekends”, a show on the conservative news channel. Mr. Zeldin is a former New York Republican Congressman who Mr. Trump said would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards”. Mr. Huckabee is also a TV personality – he has hosted a show on Fox News as well, and a radio programme, though he has a State-level public sector experience as Governor of Arkansas, from 1996 to 2007. Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy — ironic though it might seem to have two heads of a department designed to reduce government waste and excess — are from the private sector but have been noteworthy for speaking out strongly for Mr. Trump throughout his 2024 campaign. Between all of these potential nominees — assuming they are confirmed by the Senate, still a tall order in the case of several of Mr. Trump’s nominees — the presumed agenda would be to implement the Trump MAGA vision to the fullest extent possible over the four years.

Unfinished agenda

At the top of the list of Mr. Trump’s campaign slogan, “Promises Made, Promises Kept”, will likely be an attempt to carry out a mass deportation of undocumented workers, who number 11 million at last count, a figure that has been more or less constant since 2005. However, across several States, major urban hubs have emerged as “sanctuary cities” – those that have passed laws that restrict local law enforcement cooperation with the ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making it politically challenging to carry out any sort of detention and deportation activities on a scale that could matter. Then there are logistical and economic challenges — the non-partisan American Immigration Council estimates that such an immigration proposal could potentially cost taxpayers more than $300 billion. However, Mr. Trump will likely take certain actions that will win him some political capital from the immigration hawks that will circle his administration. After all, under the previous Trump administration, around 1.5 million people were deported, and the Biden administration came close to that figure — both of which were dwarfed by their predecessor, Barack Obama’s record of deporting nearly 3 million people over two terms.

Secondly, a corporate tax cut is likely, at least the renewal of the lapsing cuts that Mr. Trump had introduced in 2017, through the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The problem is that while the policy reduced taxes for most people, it was criticised for disproportionately benefiting the wealthy: the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policies Priorities noted that under this law, households with incomes in the top 1% would receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60%. Additionally, the Trump tax cut “Was expensive and eroded the U.S. revenue base… and failed to deliver promised economic benefits,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted.

Third, in the foreign policy space, a retaliation-based trade war of uncertain proportions is almost a certainty on the global economic stage, as Mr. Trump has promised a 10-20% cross-cutting tariff on all $3 trillion worth of U.S. goods imports and a special, punitive 60% tariff on Chinese goods. Beyond that destabilising action, and based on the first Trump administration’s plan for the U.S. to exit the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, UNESCO, UNHRC, NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and more, it is quite likely that America’s inward withdrawal from global, multilateral, and regional engagements will continue apace. This may well have a strong impact on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and broader conflicts in West Asia and the South China Sea, besides innumerable bilateral and regional arrangements that may fall into disarray, perhaps to the detriment and chagrin of U.S. allies and partners across the world.

Trumpism unleashed

After four more years of Mr. Trump, the U.S., and indeed the world, may be a very different place. His second term is coterminous with the zenith of the MAGA movement. What began in 2016 as a poignant political assertion of the basic principles of Trumpism — a complex blend of concerns over genuine economic despair and social disempowerment of White America with an unapologetic articulation of baser sentiments rooted in racism, misogyny and bigotry — will now find free flow and seep into every public institution of the U.S. and transform the very core of the socioeconomic landscape of the country. Mr. Trump’s time at the helm of this movement will end one day, but the forces that he has unleashed may live well beyond that time.