It is tempting, and perhaps correct, to be fatalistic about Donald Trump’s catastrophic reelection. The simplest, clearest explanation is that he did not win the presidency so much as Democrats lost it, and perhaps a long time ago.

Across the globe, incumbent parties have been defeated thanks to outrage over high inflation. The Biden administration not only delivered rising wages and full employment; it was more successful at fighting rising prices than any other G-7 nation and perhaps any government in the world. It didn’t matter. Voters hated rising prices more than they liked President Joe Biden’s successful economic policies and responded the same way people have pretty much everywhere: by voting out the sitting party.

At the same time, it is increasingly clear that Biden’s decision to run for reelection was disastrous. Had he announced he was stepping aside after the Democrats, energized by female voters turning out post-Dobbs, overperformed in the 2022 midterm elections—and when it was already clear that voters thought he would be too old for a second term—it is possible that the party could have nominated a candidate who might have created more distance between themselves and his increasingly unpopular administration. By the time Biden dropped out on July 21, however, his vice president was the only plausible choice to succeed him. Voters hated Biden, and they punished Kamala Harris for her closeness to him.

Ironically, the benefits of the Biden economy, so slow to manifest, are starting to appear. Inflation has cooled, interest rates have come down, and the cost of prescription drugs has been dramatically reduced. It was all too late. The 2024 election was a stunning rebuke to Democratic governance. Donald Trump won every swing state and the popular vote; his party will hold the presidency and, it appears, both houses of Congress. That victory reflected the most troubling conclusion from the 2024 election: This was a widespread, though not quite total, rejection of the Democratic Party and its approach to politics.

For nearly a decade, the Democratic Party’s approach to Trump has been to continuously remind voters of his character (racist, misogynistic, unhinged), his policies (extreme and punitive), and his approach to governance (chaotic and revenge-driven). From 2018 to 2022, Democrats won by centering Trump—and by arguing that they would make the government more effective and responsive and less, well, Trumpian. But over the Trump era, the Democratic Party’s own policies have always come second in their messaging: They only have to be better than the hideous Trump. On November 5, it was clear that a majority of voters rejected both the Democrats’ Trump-heavy focus and their political program.

Inflation and a truncated campaign were formidable headwinds for Harris. But it’s also clear that she—and her party—failed to answer a simple question. Voters wanted to know what she would do to make their life better, and she never really answered it. At the same time, Democrats had grown too comfortable in their assumption that Trump’s myriad, obvious defects were disqualifying to a majority of voters. The election showed something terrifying: Trump and his increasingly fascistic rhetoric have become normalized, even embraced, by huge swaths of the populace.

Will there be a reckoning? Based on early signals from Democratic Party power brokers, it seems that a shift rightward is inevitable. Never mind that Kamala Harris’s key surrogates were Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban; or that she ran on the party’s most restrictive immigration platform in a century; or that she embraced fracking, crypto, and a smaller increase in the capital gains tax—none of this seemed to measurably gain her votes. Nevertheless, party leaders, surveying the devastation, appear poised to conclude that an even tougher immigration message is the answer—and better jettison all that progressive economics and “identity politics” stuff, while we’re at it.

Even assuming the country has moved to the right, following voters there does not solve the biggest problem facing the Democratic Party. Voters want to know what the Democrats stand for, and if the answer is “Donald Trump policies, but less so,” it is highly unlikely to succeed. And this approach still elides the most important question: How can Democrats convince voters that they will make their lives better?

In October 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that “if these people’s lives don’t actually feel different, we’re done. You know how many Trumps there are in waiting?” Four years later, it’s become clear that it only takes one.—Alex Shephard

Shock and awe. That’s what lies ahead for our immigration system: President Trump and his allies will attempt to create the impression that they are acting with lightning speed to seal the border and rid the country of undesirables. Expect splashy displays like ramped-up workplace raids, dramatic deportation operations, and a big escalation in state-sponsored anti-immigrant propaganda.

The reality will be more complicated than the superficial displays suggest: Trump and his allies will encounter serious resistance and many obstacles. Still, the results will make our immigration system more legally chaotic, more violent, more wantonly cruel, less hospitable to those who have built lives here and are meaningfully contributing to American life, and generally much less conducive to the rule of law and the national interest.

That may sound surprising. Isn’t Trump just planning to enforce our immigration laws, keep out undocumented immigrants, and restore order to the border? Well, no. Actually, he plans to dramatically limit legal migration, in a way that could redefine our national identity.

Some of these planned restrictions on legal immigration will be high-profile: Trump will reinstate a version of his ban on migration from some Muslim countries. Other moves will get........

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