The biggest question in politics right now is what the second Trump administration will actually look like. The most honest answer is that nobody knows for sure: Its leader is so chaotic, and his followers so divided against themselves, that predicting anything with full confidence is a fool’s errand.

With that in mind, I still want to engage in a bit of an exercise: to try to lay out what I think is true about the American right today, and then make some tentative predictions about the upcoming Trump administration based on those premises.

The idea isn’t just to make guesses for the sake of guessing. Rather, it’s to generate some testable predictions for my view of Trump and the right — to see whether my ideas are pointing me in the right direction, and to adjust them if they prove wrong. I’ll be doing that retrospection in my newsletter On the Right; if you’re interested and/or want the chance to tell me I’m wrong, please subscribe!

Let’s start with the premises: The things I think are true about the right today.

Talking about “the right” today is mostly talking about the Trump coalition. Obviously, ownership of being “on the right” is contested — with many Never Trumpers claiming to be the true conservatives and calling Trump’s followers apostate sellouts. But at this point, with Trump and his allies in firm control of both the GOP and its aligned external institutions, the right as an actually existing political force is mostly just the Trump coalition. This coalition includes people with varying degrees of ideological fervor, ranging from Stephen Miller-style true believers to more reluctant knee-benders, but it is still a coalition aligned behind a particular leader.

The right’s first uniting principle is anti-liberalism. The various factions of the Trump coalition share a core belief that American liberalism is something worse than merely wrong: that it is an actively malign force in American public life. Liberals, in their eyes, are not mere political opponents but enemies — threats to the essence of America itself. This justifies extreme measures against them.

The right’s second uniting principle is the person of Donald Trump.........

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