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Editor’s Note: This is the second of a five-part series that looks at how Donald Trump mounted the greatest comeback in American political history, how he is preparing for what he and his own team describe as a potentially tumultuous second term, and what all that might mean for those who support him — and those who don’t. Read the first part here.
Court is in session at Mar-a-Lago, and it is the kind of court the owner likes.
Even when he was president, Donald Trump seemed to prefer the golf shirts and sunshine of his Florida home over the formality of the White House, and a watchdog group clocked him making 134 visits to that private club and golf course during his first term in office. There, many observers noted, he basked in standing ovations when he walked to his private table for dinner. He greeted an endless stream of friends and admirers.
And now, it is a river: Job and influence seekers, friends of friends, the rich, famous and powerful, even people who have paid members of the club to get them past the front door – all jockeying for any stray minute with the victorious president-elect. The list of those seeking an audience will grow to include some of the biggest names in business: Tim Cook from Apple, Sundar Pichai from Google, Ted Sarandos from Netflix, and Jeff Bezos from Amazon.
“I had dinner with almost all of them and the rest are coming,” Trump will eventually say of his fellow billionaires, dryly noting the change in atmosphere. “The first term everybody was fighting me. This term everybody wants to be my friend.”
It seems hardly coincidental weeks later, when Mark Zuckerberg of Meta decides to cut fact checkers from Facebook and Instagram – a feature right-wingers have often howled about.
Some outside observers, such as CNN’s Jim Acosta who covered Trump’s first term, are watching the pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago skeptically. “It seems bending the knee is in for 2025. A lot of people think that will take you places, and it tends to lead to bad places… with Trump.”
Still, after the long months of campaigning, he is reportedly content to let the world come to him for a change. While loyal staffers scramble to simultaneously prepare for the transition and house hunt in DC, the boss is playing golf, talking to candidates for administration jobs, and meeting favor-seekers on the patio. “He’s been very active, but he gets to do it from base camp. He’s happy laying low right now,” a Trump adviser tells CNN.
And what better place to rock boats than a seaside town?
As promised during his campaign, Trump is wasting no time laying out an aggressive, immediate – and for his foes, alarming – agenda. “It’s going to be at lightning speed,” adviser Stephen Miller says of the coming changes on Fox News, noting the new White House team is “prepared, under President Trump’s leadership, to implement historical, transformative, long-awaited change to make this government accountable to the people of this country once again. It will be as Donald Trump said, a new golden age for America.”
On his pledge to make the economy better and pull inflation down even further than President Joe Biden already has, Trump has a one-word answer: Tariffs.
“I’m a big believer in tariffs,” he tells NBC’s “Meet the Press” in his first post-election network TV interview, echoing comments from his campaign. “I think tariffs are the most beautiful word. I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich.”
Many who have shared Trump’s orbit for years say he profoundly believes in the power of these fees imposed on goods imported to the US from other countries. He cites tariffs as an almost mythical fix for trade imbalances, loss of domestic manufacturing jobs, and a potential key to eliminating taxes up to and including the federal income tax. He likes to talk about the tariffs he launched during his first term, some of which the Biden administration maintained. “I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars, and we had no inflation.”
The problem? An overwhelming majority of economic experts say that last part is untrue, and most of Trump’s ideas about how tariffs work are flatly wrong. For starters, since the cost is frequently passed on to consumers, in practical speak, tariffs are taxes. And an analysis by the non-partisan Tax Foundation of some of the tariffs Trump applied in his first term is damning:
Trump instigated a trade war by imposing new tariffs (taxes) on imports of washing machines and solar panels…steel and aluminum…and billions of dollars’ worth of consumer, intermediate, and capital goods from China…throughout 2018 and 2019. Based on levels of trade before the tariffs went into effect, the new levies amounted to a tax increase of $80 billion a year.
And while tariffs can increase federal government income, budget analysts widely agree even massive tariff hikes would come nowhere near replacing the taxes Trump has targeted.
Trade experts broadly say the new tariffs Trump wants to slap on the US’ biggest trading partners – China, Mexico, Canada and perhaps scores of other countries – could raise prices on televisions, smartphones, household appliances, furniture, clothing, cement, sporting goods, medicine and many more products. Analysts at the Yale Budget Lab predict Trump’s new tariffs, if fully realized, could decrease the purchasing power of the average American family by $1,200 annually.
Yet Trump, who often says he trusts his gut over anything else, brushes aside the critiques. When asked about the cost consumers paid for his last term tariffs, he bristles. “They cost Americans nothing,” he said in that December NBC interview. “They made a great economy for us.”
In the days after his victory, that steamroller approach is applied to all his big priorities.
His promise to sweep up and deport 11-20 million undocumented immigrants (Team Trump widely disputes the lower, established number) is short on details and long on questions: How will these people be found? Where will they be held? How fast will this happen and how much will it cost? But Trump proclaims his first-day-in-office goal as if it is the easiest thing in the world: “I want to close the border,” he says.
And his newly named border czar Tom Homan acts almost as cavalier. In his more nuanced moments, he suggests he will first go after dangerous criminals who have entered illegally. But he also feeds Trump’s MAGA base with attacks on the idea of sanctuary cities and calls for families fearful of being split up by the Trump plan to self-deport en masse. “They put themselves in the position. We didn’t,” he tells CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. And despite the myriad challenges, Homan, like Trump, steadily talks this up as possibly the largest deportation in US history. “I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden has released into our country … you better start packing now,” he said at a rally.
Amid all the frenzy of planning in Florida, perhaps no players are viewed more curiously and skeptically than Trump’s picks for remaking the government itself: the richest man in the world, Tesla and SpaceX impresario Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Those two have been chosen to head what Team Trump calls the Department of Government Efficiency.
The DOGE duo initially promised to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget – almost a third of it – by eliminating waste, unnecessary jobs, regulations the administration sees as needless or counterproductive, and frankly who knows what else?
For the MAGA nation, cutting big bad Washington down to size is a key tenet of their movement. At its core, DOGE is the tip of the spear for taking out bureaucrats. Many knowledgeable DC hands consider such people the backbone of the government. But in his first term, Trump was clearly irritated by workers he saw as constantly citing regulations, laws and customs that thwarted his instincts – the so-called Deep State.
On X, Musk has railed: “The power of the unelected Federal bureaucracy has grown to become an unconstitutional ‘FOURTH BRANCH’ of government! Especially with the creation of their own internal court system, it has become the most powerful branch of government. We must fix this!”
Critics suggest the two men don’t know what they’re talking about. A massive share of federal spending is not merely protected by law but legally required on programs like Social Security and Medicare. There is simply no way DOGE can come even close to their wish list of cuts, according to California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren. “The impoundment of funds that have been appropriated by the Congress is unconstitutional and illegal.” Furthermore, she adds, “There is no such ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’ It’s made up. So good luck to ’em.”
None of the pushback seems to slow the whirlwind, leaving Democrats more dismayed by the day. But then, their party is reckoning with other issues too.
Democrats confront their loss as finger-pointing begins
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results.”
The day after the voting, Kamala Harris is finally onstage at Howard University, doing what Trump never did despite his defeat in 2020. She admits her dash to hold the White House for Democrats has failed. Her gathered fans are despondent. She is defiant. “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.”
It is an interesting choice of words because her party has another fight on its hands. Within hours of Harris’ speech, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who twice sought the Democratic nomination, fires a blistering shot at the party’s whole approach to the election. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he posts on X. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Old guard Democrats rage against Sanders’ assessment, but the blame game is underway.
“The Democratic Party should have one simple mission,” California Rep. Ro Khanna says on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” “and that is to address the economic hardships and struggles of many Americans — not just working-class Americans — a large slice of Americans who feel the American dream has slipped away for their families and their kids.”
Some Democrats are convinced, after Harris inspired an initial blast of enthusiasm, that she retreated too quickly into safe, traditional campaigning, which was a poor match against Trump’s bombast. Some say she refused to trumpet loudly enough the accomplishments she shared with Joe Biden, while others say with so many voters wanting change, she did not push Biden far enough away – pointing to her appearance on ABC’s “The View” when asked if she would have done anything differently over the past four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, “and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had an impact.”
“They blew it,” says CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who sees a host of problems and a standout issue that sank Democratic hopes. He cites a Gallup poll showing how 28% of voters wanted to decrease immigration in 2020, but now the number stands at 55%. “The first big error was the Biden administrations’ blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border,” he says. “They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years.”
Others say the bias against female and minority candidates played a role, or that the deluge of criminal cases against Trump triggered sympathy, or that anger over violence in Gaza suppressed votes that might have favored Harris. For Democrats, untangling the possibilities is painful and more so because Harris lost to a candidate so many Americans have told pollsters is deeply flawed, mistrusted and disliked.
Legendary Democratic campaign guru James Carville, who had predicted a solid win by Harris, comes on CNN to admit his mistake and to talk about what must come next. “It’s very depressing,” he says, “but if you’re doing political strategy, you know, if you have an airplane crash, you’ve got to go back and find out what went wrong. You don’t say, well, let’s just forget about it and move on.”
For Van Jones, a CNN senior political commentator, some of the blame belongs to misplaced mechanics. Harris relied too much on a traditional plan of door knocks, TV commercials, and phone calls, he says, while Trump went rogue – flooding the internet with memes, pumping nonstop clickbait into millions of cell phones, and wallowing in non-traditional campaign stops such as that three-hour interview with Joe Rogan. “We were making fun of Donald Trump for having thrown away his ground game and doing some weird stuff online,” Jones says. “We thought they were idiots. It turns out we were the idiots.”
Then again, some political observers wonder if the party might be over-correcting, because while Republicans are hailing their victory as monumental, the raw numbers tell a different story.
“I wrote them down and I have them on my bulletin board,” says CNN’s Acosta, pointing to the scrap of paper with scribbled figures tacked up behind his desk. They show Trump’s total margin for victory in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin was just under 230,000 total votes out of more than 152 million cast across the country. Far less than 1%. “Had Kamala Harris won those states, she would have won the Electoral College, and she would have won the presidency.”
But of course, that is not what happened. Trump took every battleground and expanded his support in almost every demographic, including some where Democrats least expected it. Minorities, especially Latinos, drifted toward him over immigration and the economy, the very issues the Republicans at Mar-a-Lago are preparing to attack now. Young men bought into what many Democratic analysts had dismissed as Trump’s hyper-masculine pandering. Red rural areas bent hard into their support, while unexpected shares of suburban and urban voters tilted toward Trump too. He didn’t win in every district or state, but he boosted his numbers and blunted Harris’ almost across the board. Her metrics expanded beyond Biden’s only among college-educated women.
Still, the race remained close. Sorting through all the math to determine where Democrats truly lost ground and Republicans truly gained will take time.
“There’s some things we don’t fully know yet,” Harris strategist Dan Kanninen says as he warns against anyone holding too firmly on to the early assessments of what went wrong for his candidate. “The real person-by-person data that tells you, ‘Did you actually have a spike?’ That’s not really going to be in place for Democratic campaigns and the voter action network until February or March.”
That data may reveal that Trump re-aligned the electorate, or Kanninen notes, those numbers may show the race was pretty much a coin toss even at the end.
Another former Harris adviser, Ashley Etienne, is also not convinced the Democratic position was poisonous. “We don’t have to throw away the baby with the bathwater,” she says as she sorts through other possible factors. “Was it a message issue? Was it a candidate issue?”
Perhaps, she argues, the ousting of the incumbent party in the White House was a relic of the long tail of the Covid pandemic. Or maybe Trump was just the right figure at the right moment with the right message – much like Barack Obama.
“This is a little provocative,” she says, stinging from the loss but, like Harris, looking for a way to not concede the fight. “I think you study Trump. There is something to be learned from what he was able to do. Trump is more sophisticated, more astute, and more strategic than we give him credit for.”
Republicans plan for Day One
All the woulda-coulda-shoulda by Democrats is just background noise for the incoming Republican juggernaut. Perhaps not even that. From the GOP vantage, the razor-thin election margins, anxiety about Trump triggering a whole new level of government dysfunction, and fears about the careening chaos of his ever-shifting worldviews are nothing. The fact he won is everything. Even all their hand-wringing over election security has vanished in the smoke of victory.
For the swirling storm of people around Trump as he prepares to move north from his exile in Florida and set up residence in the White House again, this is not the time for looking back, but for leaning forward, staffing up and drafting executive orders to batter the status quo. Where others see a date on the calendar – Monday, January 20, 2025 – Trump’s true believers see a day of reckoning when a vast share of political power in the most powerful nation on Earth will fall into their hands.
Trump will soon be inaugurated once again, the nation of their imaginings will be reborn, and this time it seems nothing can stop them.
