With the vote-counting in the 2024 US elections finally over, analysts are pointing to inflation and immigration as the two primary drivers of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Liberals can argue that inflation, caused by Covid-related global disruptions, was not Joe Biden’s fault and had already started declining.
The number of migrant encounters – after peaking in 2023 – had fallen sharply by mid-2024, and the recent bipartisan immigration Bill that Kamala Harris had pledged to sign would have significantly improved the immigration bureaucracy. Unfortunately, Democrats’ inability to mitigate these concerns, combined with the overreach of the cultural warriors, seems to have pushed many voters to gamble with our entire system of constitutional checks and balances.
This preliminary analysis comes with one caveat related to the popular vote ignored by most of the pundits. In 2020, Biden won 81.2 million votes to Trump’s 74.2 million. In 2024, Harris won 74.7 million to Trump’s 77.1 million. Harris’s loss of 6.5 million votes and Trump’s gain of 3 million votes is all the more intriguing when one considers the addition of 8 million eligible voters to the electorate in 2024 alone. As young, first-time voters tend to lean liberal, they were supposed to seal the deal for Harris. Despite her reportedly extensive ground game to mobilise votes, the numbers are a damning indictment of Harris’s messaging and outreach.
Nonetheless, the embarrassing detail presents the Democrats with an opportunity. If American political power, diffused at multiple levels, is wielded effectively during Trump’s tenure, it can minimise the damage to the system until Democrats claw their way back to power in Washington, DC. While the list of priorities is long, the Western liberal order, climate action, and women’s health policies should be at the top of the list.
In the international arena, the emerging China–Russia–Iran alliance poses the biggest threat to the liberal global order led by the United States. With the free hand Trump is about to give to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the West can expect Iran’s further weakening in the region; the Palestinian cause being the unfortunate collateral damage. Perhaps it is food for thought for the Arab American voters who chose to snub Harris because of Biden’s handling of the Mideast war.
However, the hard-nosed, centrist foreign policy consensus in Washington, DC will consider this as a partial win with a Palestinian asterisk that can be addressed in the post-Trump era. If the Democrats win back the House in the 2026 mid-terms, enhanced aid to Palestine can partially address the humanitarian crisis. In the meantime, it would be worth observing whether Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar or other Arab states step in to mitigate the crisis.
For all the legitimate fears of Trump siding with Russia at the expense of Ukraine, the United States and the European Union (EU) have been collectively spending $150-200 billion annually for the past three years in the form of weapons sales and other aid to Ukraine. If Trump cuts off direct American aid to Ukraine, the EU is looking at a $400-800 billion price tag for two-four years.
While Trump might scoff at spending American taxpayer dollars on Ukraine, the Israel-Palestine conflict has reinforced another decades-old truism – there is bipartisan consensus to bend all the US State Department rules to sell American weapons. American defence industry, with a significant presence in Republican-led states, will pressurise Trump to take this middle road and keep the weapons flowing if the EU is willing to foot the bill.
Additionally, Biden’s recent announcement of allowing American military contractors to operate in Ukraine will help fill the void left behind by the withdrawal of American military support and training. The Western alliance will survive the Russian threat as long as the EU considers the two-four-year price tag worth supporting Ukraine’s war effort.
Even in Taiwan versus China, where Trump’s transactional nature could pose the biggest threat, the bipartisan economic consensus in the US, combined with Elon Musk’s vested interests, could save the Western alliance the blushes. As this author had pointed out in 2020, Biden honoured the then-prevalent American business sentiment and continued with the economic screw-tightening against China initiated by Trump 1.0. The carefully calibrated tariffs spanning two administrations, and Trump’s desire to dial them up in his second term, should complicate Xi Jinping’s efforts to bring China out of the ongoing economic malaise and indulge in a full-scale war withTaiwan.
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Musk’s business interests in electric vehicles and solar energy, together with Biden’s AI-related executive order and microprocessor-related export controls, will further complicate China’s efforts to revive its economy. Sensing a lack of interest in the Trump White House to defend Taiwan, Xi might be tempted to strike Taiwan when the Western allies are at their weakest ebb in decades.
However, domestic economic considerations should limit his adventures to menacing war games and enhanced patrolling of the South China Sea. The next American president – even a Republican like J. D. Vance who has sold his soul to Trump – is likely to bring the United States closer to the hawkish American foreign policy consensus of supporting democracy in Taiwan.
Regarding climate action, Trump’s denialism is bound to take a toll on the global efforts of the recent past. Withdrawing from the Paris accord, opening more domestic oil blocks for drilling, and deregulating through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to relax tailpipe and coal plant emission standards could be the most immediate setbacks. However, Biden’s key achievements through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) should survive Trumpism.
The federal subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs) might disappear, but the state of California, the largest auto market in the US, has already announced that it would increase its state subsidies to make up for the loss. Since the IRA funds earmarked for expanding the national EV charging network directly benefit EV sales, Musk is expected to lobby for the continued expansion of the grid. Majority of the EV and related manufacturing subsidies under the IRA have gone to Republican-led districts and states whose officials will push back against any significant rollbacks.
Meanwhile, a high-level EPA meeting immediately after Trump’s victory has already put in motion a plan to protect Biden’s climate legacy from Trump. Individual states’ powers to set their own auto emission policies, California’s clout in the auto market, and its overwhelmingly liberal polity should prevent auto manufacturers from shelving their EV transitions. And attorneys general of Democrat-led states, who are already plotting to thwart any knee-jerk EPA policy reversals by Trump, should help ride out the storm.
Given that Trump’s previous term saw the gutting of the statutory right to abortion, women’s reproductive rights remain the most pressing liberal concern. With unified control of the presidency, federal legislature and the Supreme Court, the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party might sense a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push for a nationwide abortion ban.
A string of convincing state-level victories for protecting abortion rights in the post-Roe era, even in deeply conservative states, should give Trump a pause. Any mischief, like a federal ban on abortions, would almost certainly invite novel, unprecedented, and years-long litigation, in addition to a legislative takeover by the Democrats in the 2026 mid-terms. If Trump has managed to stretch the thorny legal cases against him beyond four years, liberal strategists should be able to use the same judicial system to delay enactment of such a draconian measure until a favourable legislative picture emerges in the nation’s capital.
Anticipating a second Trump term, liberal states had already started stockpiling abortion pills well before the election. Even pro-choice non-profits and advocacy groups are developing multi-pronged strategies to deal with any potential tightening of reproductive rights by Trump. With the emboldened Republicans, underprivileged women in conservative Southern states are bound to suffer the most from denial of abortion services. To alleviate some of these concerns, we will have to rely on nationwide networks established by pro-choice organisations.
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Desperate times call for desperate measures, but they also demand cold-blooded calculations instead of hyperventilation. The adequately distributed levers of American political power should help minimise the damage Trump 2.0 can cause. He is virtually guaranteed to get away with monumental corruption, lining the pockets of his family and businesses, and at least some of the criminality of his previous term. As detrimental as it is to our sense of fairness and justice, we can call it collateral damage if we manage to preserve the liberal world order, climate policies enacted by Biden, and women’s healthcare priorities.
The grift and self-dealing we are likely to witness in Trump’s upcoming tenure could make Richard Nixon look like a saint. It will strengthen the union if it is followed up by institutional reforms akin to the post-Watergate era and the changes in the Electoral Count Act after the 2020 election fiasco.
History of democracies is replete with a choice between bad and worse. For republics, the trick is to live to fight another day. Ask any Indian about Winston Churchill and they will tell you how taking a deep breath can give us some perspective in such tumultuous times. Churchill, the darling of the West and the hero of the second world war, caused the Bengal famine; killing more than a million in India by diverting her foodgrain to feed the imperial army. In the process, he saved the Western liberal order from fascism. As bad as the looming Trump second term seems, things could be much worse.
Mauktik Kulkarni is a neuroscientist, author, entrepreneur, public speaker and a film maker. He is the author of A Ghost of Che and Packing Up Without Looking Back.