Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book looks at the return of Donald Trump.
He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.
Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman at NYT:When Donald J. Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with news cameras rolling, the moment perfectly captured two of the president-elect’s biggest obsessions: the stock market and television.
Mr. Trump’s fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington.
Those guardrails are not foolproof, of course: Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shatter longstanding political and legal norms in Washington while enduring the crush of condemnation from his adversaries at home and abroad.
But more than a dozen people close to Mr. Trump say he sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices. And they say he is so obsessed with how he comes across on television that a barrage of negative coverage can make him hesitate, or even reverse course.
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The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.
The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.
