Who can say? But in the second Trump term, I’d bet on the latter.
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“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Washington to be born?”
It’s extremely cold in DC this week, and at the moment of Donald Trump’s triumph of the will, the forecasters tell us that single-digit temperatures and gusty winds will greet him. My habit of attending these things varies with the weather, so your humble correspondent may well be hunkered down at home, like most of you, with a dog and a laptop and a mug of hot chocolate to witness it on TV, even though I’m only a ten-minute bike ride away.
If I can bring myself to watch.
My feelings will be, well, complex. There is a wave of relief that the decrepit Biden has finally gone, that the muggy political air has been cleared for a bit, and that the insistent Kulturkampf of the woke left may finally relent a little. We may even move out of our post-neocon paralysis in foreign policy.
At the same time, of course, I have what can only be called intermittent waves of nausea and panic triggered by the memory of the last, long four years of being tethered to a mercurial, malevolent bully who wouldn’t ever shut up or leave us alone.
But attached to that nausea is something else: boredom. He just doesn’t get to me the way he used to. When I read about his provocations toward Canada and the Panama Canal, for example, I merely found my eyes rolling gently backward. Good one, Donnie. But you’re not gonna trigger my amygdala this time. You busted it already.
Same with the Bobby Kennedy nonsense and the Elon Musk madness — a man whose political judgment seems as finely honed as an autistic 14-year-old who just discovered TikTok. Musk is an American genius in some things. No question about that. But so, so fragile and immature, as Sam Harris gently dissects here.
Assessing the incipient administration on policy grounds also seems a bit pointless. Everything will be determined by one individual’s whims, and those whims will change on a dime. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before. Unlike most presidents, Trump also has a party that regards him as a kind of fusion of a king and a pope: a sovereign with infallibility. This is strongman rule, not liberal democratic governance. We have no idea what could come barreling down upon us. But whatever it is, Mike Johnson will say yes. Please. Sir.
And what Trump has promised, after all, is quite something: world peace in 24 hours flat, a miraculous disappearance of 11 million migrants, huge new revenues from tariffs balancing the budget, and massive savings from waste in the federal government. Let’s just say it’s not entirely clear if this means much.
In January 2017, if you recall, it seemed blindingly clear that Trump would build a wall and deport illegal immigrants on an unprecedented scale. But in his first year, he seemed almost bored by the topic, and wound up deporting far fewer illegals in his first term than Obama did in his second. Trump built a mere 52 miles of his big beautiful wall, none of which Mexico paid for.
Nonetheless, the factors favoring him actually getting stuff done in his second term are real: his experience of four years in office, his greater legitimacy after a decisive re-election, high public support for immigration control, a wounded Democratic Party leery of another lawfare campaign against him, and a few appointees — Rubio, Bessent, Bhattacharya, Homan — who could actually do some positive things. Many talented people are hovering around, and a hell of a lot of private capital.
But the factors restraining Trump will also be formidable — first and foremost, his insanely narrow House majority. Tyrants need more than a five-seat majority — the narrowest in nearly 100 years — and that margin has shrunk further with his cabinet picks. And his constant need for approval means that the second any of these policies prove unpopular, he could very easily bail. Remember how he reversed himself pronto on the family separation policy in his first term? Expect more of the same.
The other big problem is that the revived conservatism that Trump promises remains as incoherent now as it was in 2016. The populist right is far more effective as an opposition movement than as a governing regime, as Boris and Trump found out the first time around. Give the new right power, force them to make choices, and the contradictions mount. A populist working-class party is somehow also dedicated to lowering taxes on the very wealthy. A coalition designed to protect domestic workers from immigrant competition is also in favor of expanding H-1B visas and allowing more legal immigration. A “tough” commander-in-chief nonetheless will have few qualms about handing over part of Ukraine to Russia. A man dedicated to ensuring a new era of energy wants to halt wind power entirely. The little H-1B flap a few weeks back is just a taste of the conflicts to come.
A coalition framed by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, in other words, is destined for internal chaos. I’m reminded most vividly of Boris Johnson’s similar triumph in 2019. He ran on cutting immigration, won a huge majority (unlike Trump), and then in office, he decide to import record numbers of non-white, unskilled, non-European immigrants. Business interests and his own cosmopolitan instincts demanded more migrants; the newly acquired working-class base wanted the opposite — a mess never fully masked by Boris’ performance art.
What would I hope for in Trump 2.0? I’d say a coherent evolution of the GOP into a classically conservative party: leery of big government and foreign interventionism, culturally conservative and pro-family, champion of Medicare and Social Security, restrictive of immigration, defender of color-blindness and merit. I would be thrilled if they really got rid of DEI throughout the federal government and made federal college funding conditional on ending DEI initiatives in higher education. Vance gets it, I think, and he remains the best hope for a serious new right. But if Trump were the necessary reagent to bring this about, he’s also an obstacle to it. He doesn’t have the message discipline, legislative skills, and strategic cunning to pull it off.
What do I fear? Among the possible horribles: some kind of dumb-ass Trump overreach on immigration, prompting far-left street protests/riots, followed by some leap into the draconian dark with the US military on the streets, its reputation in the toilet; a spike in inflation caused by tariffs and an economic downturn as cheap immigrant labor disappears; a crisis over Taiwan that we bungle. Or yet another criminal move by Trump precipitating another crisis in the rule of law.
What do I expect? Not much. Trump has two years with a razor-thin margin in the Congress before he becomes a lame duck. His team currently has no agreed-upon legislative strategy — one big bill via reconciliation? two bills with immigration control first? tariffs before tax cuts? — and this never bodes well. The Speaker himself hangs by a thread. When I think of Reagan and Thatcher, I recall shrewd legislative outreach, a plan for economic pain and then relief, and a strategy designed not to get too far over the skis (Thatcher took her own sweet time to take on union power, as Andrew Neil remembers in the Dishcast this week; Reagan was always aware of going too far). No such foresight is currently visible to me in Trump world.
Trumpism, in other words, remains unrivaled as an opposition force, but weak as a philosophy for government. So the sanest approach, in my view, is to give Trump time and space to do what he says he wants to do, lay off the constant, insistent demonization of him, and merely present the results of GOP governance to the voters in 2026. Unless the Trump peeps up their game a lot, the internal contradictions could swallow them whole.
That’s going to be our approach here at the Dish. I want Trump to succeed the way I want every president to succeed. Since the American people have given him a mandate, I’m going to ignore the past as much as I can and look at him afresh. My focus is going to be on one thing and one thing only: is Trump getting anything done, and are his policies working? I’m not going to be distracted by the drama, the lies, and the provocations. Yes, of course, the Dish will monitor his autocratic tendencies. But I’m going to judge him by the results, and compare them to his promises.
He has no excuses left, in other words. So let him deliver. Or not.
My bet, as provisional as ever, is on the latter.
New On The Dishcast: Andrew Neil
Andrew Neil has long been one of the finest journalists in the UK, a hard-nosed interviewer, and an old friend. He used to be chairman of The Spectator, chairman of Sky TV, editor of The Sunday Times, and a BBC anchor, whose interviews of politicians have become legendary for their forensic brutality and mastery of detail. He’s currently a columnist for both the UK and US versions of The Daily Mail and an anchor for Times Radio.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Europe’s steady decline, and Trump’s cluelessness on tariffs. That link also takes you to a bunch of commentary on last week’s episode with Adam Kirsch on “settler colonialism.” We also hear from more readers on the gang-rape scandal in the UK and dangerous orthodoxies, as well as the language around homosexuality. I respond at length.
Money Quotes For The Week
“Ultimately, each life is a mystery until we each solve the mystery, and that’s where we are all headed whether we know it or not,” – David Lynch, RIP.
“Let’s get something in mind about the border: when I became president, the numbers came way down,” – Joe Biden, completely out of it.
“The world is made up of people with either killer instincts or without killer instincts. And the people that seem to emerge all the time — it doesn’t mean they’re the best people, and it doesn’t mean they’re the happiest people, and in fact in many cases, and in most cases, they’re probably not. But the people that seem to emerge are the people that are competitive and driven and with a certain instinct to win,” – Donald Trump in 1980.
“I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated. He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else… He’s a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me,” – Steve Bannon.
“If Amy Wax’s case proceeds to discovery, Penn may be forced to disclose the racial distribution of law school grades — information that is likely to become its own news story and which could inspire additional lawsuits,” – Aaron Sibarium. Sweet!
“The Biblical narratives throughout the Old Testament and the New trace a trajectory of mercy that leads us to welcome sexual minorities no longer as ‘strangers and aliens’ but as ‘fellow citizens with the saints and also members of then household of God’,” – Richard B Hays, the hugely influential evangelical theologian who famously changed his mind on homosexuality.
“People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture … If you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples’ fears on numbers,” – Margaret Thatcher in 1978, when migration was far, far lower.
The View From Your Window
Cranston, Rhode Island, 4 pm
Dissents Of The Week
A reader responds to last week’s column on dangerous orthodoxies:
Your claims about the estimated number of grooming victims of Pakistani British men are popular but unproven. The source you cited for “tens of thousands” — the Independent — refers to a figure of 19,000 victims in 2018-2019. But this statistic is about grooming victims in the UK as a whole, and while it mentioned Pakistani perpetrators, it made no mention of them being the sole or majority of perpetrators.
We cannot assume that Pakistani British are all, or even most, of these offenders nationwide (as opposed to in specific cases like Rotherham and Rochdale, where they clearly were the overwhelming majority). That may be the case, but we just don’t have the data to support that at this point. A Quilliam Foundation study determined that 84 percent of those convicted of grooming offenses in 2005 were Asian — but, as the Home Office noted in 2020, most studies have found that white men are the raw majority of offenders in group-based child sexual assault across Britain (though this does not preclude an overrepresentation of Asian or Pakistani offenders per capita).
In terms of overall cases of sex-crimes against children (see p.38), there is no evidence of any Asian or Pakistani Muslim overrepresentation. I do think this is important context to mention, as the far right is giving the impression that child rape is largely or mostly something Pakistani people do in Britain, which is false. However, it’s also important not to misuse these data to hand-wave the specific atrocity of the grooming gangs, as some liberal commentators are trying to do.
I wrote “tens of thousands over several years,” not just 2018-2019. I was very careful not to state things we simply do not know. A widely cited fact-check this month debunks claims of “one million” and “250,000,” but concludes, “We’ve not found any authoritative estimate.” According to a UK government report last year, “In the last 12 months the crack team of expert investigators and analysts has helped police forces arrest over 550 suspects, identify and protect over 4,000 victims.” And grooming gangs have been a problem for decades.
Another dissenter writes:
The most contemporary police data — which was leaked today actually — indicates a two to four times per-capita overrepresentation of Pakistani British in grooming gang offenses in England and Scotland. But since Pakistani British are still a small minority of Britons, the large majority of groomers (according to these data) are not Pakistani British, and indeed are white.
Another reader points to a source that clarifies the following line I wrote: “And if a white Brit had been found guilty of organizing the brutal gang-rape of a Pakistani 12-year-old girl, it’s hard to imagine him receiving a sentence of just three years.” From the source:
Shakil Choudhury actually received a sentence of six years, but was released after three years. The website dedicated to this case is apparently conflating this distinction. Nevertheless the end result is shocking: a man responsible for multiple rapes of a 12 year old schoolgirl only spends three years in prison for his crimes.
One more dissent for now:
While nothing you have said is incontrovertible, isn’t it a little disingenuous to blame the current UK government after only six months in power? Keir Starmer did get prosecutions rolling as DPP, but that ball was dropped with the government change then. The Tories had 14 years to implement some of the report’s 120 recommendations made to combat these atrocities, and not one has been implemented to date. You think yet another 1,500-page report is going to solve anything other then kick this can even farther down the road? I am for doing rather than politicking.
But I didn’t blame the current Labour government for any of this. My only criticism of Keir, whose record, as my reader notes, is quite decent on this as director of public prosecutions, was on his support of criminalizing speech on social media.
More dissents are on the pod page, including ones on Zionism. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
A soothing music video from Khruangbin:
In The ‘Stacks
- The latest in the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
- Don’t blame DEI for the LA wildfires, says Leighton Woodhouse. Noah Smith sorts through the real reasons. (You can help the displaced dogs here.)
- Joe Klein sizes up the Hegseth hearing.
- Abigail Shrier sees Trump’s picks as the revenge of the cancelled.
- As censorship in Europe ramps up, Josh Barro cheers the end of fact-checkers at Meta.
- NPR still doesn’t get it when it comes to free speech.
- Top Dems still don’t get it when it comes to identity politics — but these Blue Dogs are working to change that.
- Contra Biden, the US military engaged in combat 226 days last year.
- He was never the moderate POTUS he promised to be.
- Trudeau was a “poor steward” of the economy.
- Will Canada finally get its own CIA?
- A great title for a pod: “A Nation of Immigrants Votes for Deportations.”
- MAHA gets its first win — banning a food dye.
- The House just passed a bill banning males from female sports.
- Kier Adrian Gray explains why “I stopped using they/them pronouns after 13 years.”
- Kat Rosenfield interrogates “consent” and agency in the wake of Neil Gaiman.
- Chris Ryan is tired of all the fear-mongering over casual drinking.
- The New York Post is winning.
- Hathos Alert: Jenn Rubin takes her takes to Substack. The platform is also welcoming TikTok refugees.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.
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