Donald Trump loves to keep us guessing. This is exactly what we’re all doing as his second term in the White House begins. It’s one way he controls the narrative.
Trump’s off the cuff, unfiltered, controversial statements infuriate opponents and delight his supporters. The rest of us are left trying to figure out the difference between the shenanigans and when he’s actually serious.
At a recent news conference, Trump was in an expansionist mood, telling reporters he wants to take over Greenland, annex Canada, and return the Panama Canal to U.S. control. But is this all a part of a negotiating strategy to get something else?
For extra measure, he also declared “all hell will break out” if a deal to release Israeli hostages held by Hamas was not done before his inauguration on January 20, 2025. Both Israel and Hamas wanted to avoid finding out what his comments mean as both sides reached a ceasefire agreement within days of Trump’s threat. Now he’s getting credit for movement in negotiations that had been stalled for months.
Will the next four years be like his first administration? Yes and no. While Trump himself doesn’t appear to have changed much, apart from getting older (quite a bit older) and more experienced in the ways of Washington, his administration could be far more disciplined than the chaotic first four years.
Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff—Trump’s closest advisor—says backbiting and drama won’t be tolerated in this White House. Wiles is a politico pro, seen as a steady and experienced hand who played a key role in Trump’s well-run 2024 campaign. She will control information and access to the Oval Office, set the president’s daily agenda, and manage his White House staff.
Unlike the first time around, Trump’s top picks for his second term were announced very quickly. All but a few nominees are poised to win easy approval in the Republican-run Senate.
From Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HEW and Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence to Scott Bessant at Treasury and Marco Rubio at State, the new administration will include a surprisingly broad range of opinions, from brash tech entrepreneurs and traditional corporate conservatives, to conspiracy theorists, and Make America Great Again (MAGA) populists.
Are diverse viewpoints a sign of confident strength or mere confusion and chaos? We are kept guessing and only time will tell.
While the president-to-be and his loudmouth MAGA allies have cowered all but a handful of Republicans in Congress, the Trump coalition is already facing a bitter split over immigration. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the big business wing of the Republican Party think that admitting more skilled immigrants, including brainy scientists and technology wizards, would be good for business innovation and the economy. Trump’s hardcore populist supporters want to shut the door on newcomers. So far, Trump seems to be siding with Musk.
We know that many will be angered by what Trump does, but exactly who he surprises and who he offends is almost impossible to predict. Despite what you may read from ever-confident pundits online or in the columns of your favorite newspaper, we’re all guessing. Perhaps that is all part of Trump's negotiating strategy.
In a best-case scenario, a second Trump administration will boost growth, reduce undocumented immigration in an orderly way, manage China, and broker a ceasefire in Ukraine. But the worst case would include an assault on democratic norms and trust in public institutions, along with more political polarization and violence in the streets. Under Trump, the U.S. may help Putin and America’s adversaries by turning its back on long-time allies, undermining NATO and Ukraine, and getting into a full-on trade war with China, leading to higher inflation and an economic crisis.
The possible outcomes range from exhilarating to deeply alarming.
For almost a decade Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have been banging at the gates of power, challenging the elite, and ridiculing the government. And now there's a chance to prove they can go from complaining about the problem to implementing solutions.
Now he’s in charge. It’s his show. His supporters are the new establishment.
So this question for the next leader of the free world: Will you lift up more than you tear down? We’re still guessing what the outcomes will be.
Richard Davies is a podcast consultant, host, and solutions journalist at daviescontent.com.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.