When the United States Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that presidents are entitled to the presumption of immunity for all official acts, it was Donald Trump’s conduct that was at issue. His opponents were quick to foresee nightmare scenarios of a Trump unbound, returned to office as “a king above the law”, as dissenting Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor put it.
Yet Trump has been democratically chosen, winning both the electoral college and (for the first time) the popular vote. Within the US, fears over what he might do with a second term have coalesced around the document known as Project 2025, with its promise to round up illegal immigrants, abolish entire government agencies, dismantle a pro-Democrat “deep state” and wind back the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden years by drilling for oil.
Does Trump really intend to let Elon Musk do to the US public service what he did to Twitter? Will he let Robert F. Kennedy jnr reshape how vaccines are delivered? Will he implement the massive tariffs on imports he has repeatedly proposed, potentially sparking a global trade war? Is this president-elect, as some would have us believe, the end of American democracy?
Or is it possible that the notoriously transactional Trump will jettison........