On January 20, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, beginning his second term. This is a sentence that would have read as rank parody in 2015 or even early 2021, when Trump was spurring on an insurrection at the Capitol. Instead, like a Nixonian phoenix, Trump authored one of the great political comebacks in American history, and he will be governing with his strongest hand yet. He won the popular vote for the first time, and Republicans have full control of Congress. His MAGA movement has utterly annihilated dissent within the GOP. In his first term, Trump had to contend with a bevy of old-line Republicans who were skeptical of his project, including John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Paul Ryan, then the Speaker of the House and a rising political star himself. There is no equivalent opposition today, and the median congressional Republican is either slavishly devoted to Trump or actively quaking in fear of one of his outbursts. The federal bureaucracy will be crammed with Trump loyalists — no more John Kellys or Rex Tillersons muddling through — and many of them will be poring over Project 2025 like the pages of the New Testament.

And Trump beat the rap. He will, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan of New York, become a felon but will not suffer otherwise for getting indicted four times by federal and state prosecutors. He outran Jack Smith, his great tormentor. For those who came up in the MAGA movement in the mid-2010s, when Trump was a fringe and fading celebrity braying about Mexican migration and the Barack Obama birth certificate, this stretch of time, from November 5 through the inauguration, is nirvana. It is no less thrilling, for them, than Obama’s ascension was for the liberal left, when anything, for a few months in 2008 and 2009, seemed possible. Trump and Obama: two political outsiders who now belong, inarguably, to their own parties’ modern Mount Rushmores.

What the MAGA faithful don’t want to hear is that it will never be so good........

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