His second act begins in eleven days, and at that point, the past is over — victories and failures alike. How will it end? There are three possibilities.
Understanding politics is partly about understanding ideas and policies — their power, their persuasiveness, and their practical effects. It is also partly about understanding people — the personalities of leaders, the sentiment and pulse of voters, and the demographic trends that shape both. But there’s also an indefinable extent to which political events and careers tend to follow certain patterns and trajectories that often repeat themselves across time and place. If I can be forgiven for a little interlude of MacGuffinization of politics, that’s been on my mind as we enter the second Trump term.
There came a point in the 2024 cycle that it began to feel necessary in terms of biographical narrative for Donald Trump to be reelected. He had to be reelected because Trump’s story is an epic drama, and it just doesn’t seem appropriate as myth for a character as large and as flawed as Trump to be brought down by his enemies. As much as Trump’s legal and other woes were partly self-inflicted — like Richard Nixon, he gave his enemies a sword — a defeat in 2024 would have meant that the resistance won. Even to the extent that it was the result of his postelection tantrum in 2020 and its detritus, Trump’s loss would have been the result of his inability to handle defeat.
Instead, his return to the White House showcased a virtue that ended up mattering more than his many vices: it stands as a triumph of resiliency. But the second act starts in eleven days, and at that point, the past is over — victories and failures alike. How will it end? There are three ways. First, it could end in victory, the way Ronald Reagan’s presidency did: the old man sauntering offstage, having bequeathed to his successor (whether or not his handpicked heir JD Vance) an enlarged coalition and a train of policy wins. Second, it could end with a gradual decline. That could go the way Barack Obama’s presidency did: a lengthy series of modest but cumulative setbacks that leave him to walk away undefeated but diminished, in ways frustrating to his fans and his foes alike. Or, in the more dramatic version, the way George W. Bush’s did, or Grover Cleveland’s did: events just spin out of control all at once, wiping away all memory of what a political juggernaut he and his party seemed at the outset of the second term.
But there’s also the third, Nixonian ending: Trump, having laid all his enemies at his feet and surmounted all of his defeats, is laid low instead by his triumphs. That is the tale of hubris told by so many tragic-hero lives in Greek myth, the Old Testament, Shakespeare, and Plutarch. It seems the most fitting way for Trump to end, even if we can’t yet envision how. It feels like the reason why he had to win, elevating him before the Fall.
Is that how it will really happen? We will find out soon enough. Certainly, some version of hubristic overreading of a reelection victory is a common bane of second-term presidencies. True, most of them don’t include a four-year wilderness interlude, but there’s no particular sign that Trump will be returning a humbled man. What remains to be seen is whether events conspire to impose some humility on him by more forcible means.