1 day Ago
The ballots are counted (and in some few places, recounted). The blame is being distributed (but only in one of the two parties). The lawn signs have been struck (but some are being kept as collectibles, reminders of dreams redeemed or dismantled).
Yet several mysteries remain, and a passel of new ones has emerged. It is, at times like this, the mysteries that matter as much as the certainties. They will linger long past Thanksgiving, but they provide a feast of their own.
Here are some of them: — What’s the future of abortion, and abortion politics, now that Donald Trump has been elected? This question is suffused with hopes, fears and uncertainties. Those full of hope look at the president-elect’s role in overturning the Roe v. Wade decision creating broad abortion rights.
Those full of fears look at the same ruling and see more to come — increased numbers of counties and states that are abortion-rights deserts, requiring those with unwanted pregnancies to travel if they can and suffer if they can’t. It’s the uncertainties that prevail. Trump never has cared much about abortion, employing the issue principally as a political tool — to divide Americans along cultural lines that are largely set by the issue, to court votes as a means of solidifying his political base.
Now that he’s heading back to the White House — now that he cannot run for president again — the utility of this issue is in his rear-view mirror. How do we know that? Because his outlook has ranged widely: contributor to Planned Parenthood, then opponent of abortion rights, then celebrant of the Dobbs decision, then using its doctrine of turning the matter to the states to skirt any well-developed position. Prognosis: Abortion and Trump, not ordinarily the master of the sound of silence, are so yesterday.
— What will be the new relationship between the president-elect and the chairman of the Federal Reserve System? Same as the old one. Wary, then hostile, then an enforced, uncomfortable peace. The relationship between Trump and Jerome Powell has been fraught when it hasn’t been frosty.
Powell refused to take the former president’s hints on interest-rate levels in Trump I. And Powell’s resume is studded with no-fly-zones for the new administration: Princeton, Georgetown Law, the Carlisle Group investment powerhouse, his appointments by the bete noires of the MAGA movement. It’s not so much his selection by Barack Obama and Joe Biden (forgiven because choices like Powell were expected in Democratic administrations), but he carries the taint of George H.
W. Bush, the reigning symbol of the courtly style and bipartisan impulses that have been banished by Trump and are reviled by Vice President-elect JD Vance. Powell is ready for the onslaught.
He’s prepared to fight and is readying a legal case. Prognosis: This looms as the first of several instances where Trump will think he’ll be bailed out by his court appointees — but won’t be. — What will Vance’s role be? Ordinarily, Republican vice presidents (Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, the senior Bush, Dan Quayle, Mike Pence) approach their new jobs with high hopes, only to find themselves in roles best described by the first vice president, John Adams: “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
” Indeed, Bush, who like Adams served two terms in that toothless job, summarized his remit as a series of visits to the funerals of foreign leaders: “You die, I fly.” Not so Vance. His donor group, the Rockbridge Network, last weekend provided the forum for the first consequential planning meeting for the new administration.
The PAC that propelled Quayle to the Senate in 1980 and that provided him with the visibility that led to his selection as Bush’s vice president held no such event. Nor did any Democrat in the role, even Walter Mondale and Al Gore, both credited with being effective vice presidents. Prognosis: Vance is primed to be the most influential vice president in American history, eclipsing Dick Cheney, an important voice, especially in national security matters, in the George W.
Bush administration. Trump’s bewildering announcement last weekend that former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wouldn’t be in the new administration was a clear sign that Donald Trump Jr. and others at the top of the Trump team don’t want high-profile competitors to Vance for the 2028 nomination.
— So what kind of people, and what kinds of ideas, will constitute the top positions in the new administration? Maybe not the bros who helped send him back to the presidency. Only a few veterans of the first Trump administration are likely to win White House passes. Look for those with ties to MAGA-friendly organizations and media outlets.
Trump may have disavowed Project 2025, but that was for political expediency; the Heritage Foundation may be the only conservative organization with Reagan roots to provide proposals and personnel for Trump’s new team — which won’t resemble the old team very closely. Bush administration experience is an especially deadly stain on a resume. Even the most tenuous ties to the Cheney family will be fatal; that’s an important impediment because Cheney was White House chief of staff, a member of the House leadership, defense secretary, chief of a giant energy firm and is identified with both wars in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan — all providing him with tentacles throughout conservative America.
Some of the Trump-endorsed Senate and gubernatorial candidates who were defeated (such as Doug Mastriano, beaten for Pennsylvania governor in 2022 by Josh Shapiro) can nurture faint, but probably vain, hopes. Trump hates losers. He doesn’t mind late converts to the cause, however.
Vance is the most prominent. And look who is about to be the next ambassador to the United Nations: It’s Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who only a few seconds ago in geologic time was the symbol of everything Team Trump despises: not only George W.
Bush lineage but time in the office of his chief of staff; ties to Paul Ryan (now exiled from the Republican Party for which he once was the fresh new face); and a moderate profile before Trump became president. Plus, a Harvard degree. Prognosis: America remains the land of opportunity, and opportunists.
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