In about a month, the inauguration will complete a loop: Donald Trump will become president again, eight years after the initial event.
The Trump era of American life will last about 12 years — his two terms and President Joe Biden’s one — or even stretch from the summer of 2015 into the winter of 2029, if his 2016 campaign is included. The country has, to understate it, already wildly changed.
None of us are the same people we were eight years ago. Politics definitely isn’t the same as it was — even people’s reactions to Mr. Trump winning the presidency again are different. This time, it has played out more like a mix of resignation, alienation and openness than the shock and refusal of late 2016. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday morning. He is like a magnet who pulls, repels and reshapes what surrounds him.
There is the constant pull between the idea that what’s happening in the news must have a point and the occasional and disorienting sense of pointlessness, such as the fight over the government funding process over the last few days, only for the proposed end results to not look so different from before in a big picture sense.
That sequence involved three parts that drew on existing political dynamics but were surprising to experience altogether this week: Elon Musk attacked the bill that would have funded the government through mid-March for having too much superfluous spending, Mr. Trump concurrently asked that the debt limit be abolished and a sizable group of House Republicans voted no on Thursday to a deal that Mr. Trump supported. (A new bill passed the House on Friday night with both Republican and Democratic votes.)
A major part of the past two years has been Mr. Trump’s promise that radical, dramatic change is coming, undergirded by the broader movement of national conservatives and the more hard-core MAGA universe, from mass deportations to a rethinking of American power abroad. We’re already in an era of deep change, which happens in big and small ways all the time: We’ve now spent half a decade talking about the industrial base, industrial policy, renegotiated trade deals — nationalistic economic policies and an interest in domestic tech manufacturing that were almost impossible to imagine before the Trump era. But the sudden, enormous presence of Mr. Musk in political life, the rapid re-emergence of big spending cuts as a G.O.P. concern this year and the surprise congressional spending standoff are a good reminder of the discordant way big changes could be coming in 2025.
At the beginning of the year, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were considered potential but not yet certain allies. Now they seem to be deeply intertwined in decision-making about all kinds of things. Mr. Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. barely knew each other a few months ago, and there they are now, together, with a real segment of the G.O.P. base deeply attached to Mr. Kennedy’s outlook.
Another formalized alliance that could have long-lasting implications for Mr. Trump’s presidency is his pick for defense secretary. In the last few weeks, Mr. Trump has been beating the Senate with a club in the form of Pete Hegseth, appearing to make them go along with a nominee that The Times reported even he had considered dropping.
To Mr. Trump, the role of defense secretary is theoretically supposed to be about changing the way the Pentagon works, and that may be how Mr. Hegseth sees it, but in practice, it seems like the nominee could really be anyone for Mr. Trump, if the conditions are right. Mr. Trump reportedly thought about abandoning Mr. Hegseth in favor of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whom Mr. Trump spent a year taking apart, and who would be easily confirmed and probably more managerially equipped to execute the dreams of remaking the Pentagon ideologically.
Instead, Mr. Trump has made running the Defense Department — which encompasses a wide range of geopolitical and logistical questions, from potential airstrikes in Iran to ship procurement with a global work force of more than three million people at a time of deteriorating world order — about the redemption of one man and whether a handful of senators can be compelled to do something they don’t want to as a matter of principle.
There’s real dissonance in the nominees he’s suggesting. The meaning of the word “conservative” has changed in the past decade, conforming at times to what Mr. Trump wants, and at other times becoming something different — a hybrid of the old and the new. There is, in the one place, the idea of the Republican Party as a more worker-friendly, family-focused, national conservatism that can be glimpsed in JD Vance or the Teamsters-backed labor secretary pick; there’s the Silicon Valley-infused Ron Paul outlook, and falling somewhere between these poles are most of the cabinet picks in one form or another.
But the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, from its nongovernmental nature to the sheer power of the resources Mr. Musk may possess and his own demonstrated ability to shape events, is one of those things that you couldn’t dream up a year ago. Through Mr. Musk, spending cuts have roared back as a Republican concern over the past couple of months in a way that was not at all a sure thing given the arc of Mr. Trump’s first term, his resistance to cutting entitlements and the broader goals of some of the national conservatives. DOGE seems like an unpredictable outside force that could be nothing or everything next year, as evidenced in a certain way by the events on Capitol Hill this week.
Unpredictability and ideological inconsistency were always part of the first Trump presidency, and a major and chaotic theme of the past decade overall, as we limp toward the end of another year of wild news events. One of the inescapable conclusions of the 2024 election and everything that has transpired is that, generally, it’d be foolish and ignorant to say that systems couldn’t be run better or rethought, or that the public does not want significant changes to American institutions. But one of the most disorienting, uneasy aspects of this transition is knowing that drastic change is coming — and that the people, mechanisms and big-picture decisions can change from one day to the next.
Even the unexpected can be more unexpected than we think.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
