| When Trump takes the oath of office today, he will do so indoors, at the rotunda of the US Capitol, because of extremely cold weather. While that means only 600 people will be able to attend in person, many, many more were hoping to do so: as his second term begins, the returning president has no shortage of wannabe friends. “It feels like a great capitulation is happening,” said David Smith. “Like a lot of things in life, people are numb to it the second time around.” Here’s a rundown of the favourable political climate that awaits Trump once he’s sworn in. Republicans | A new GOP establishment When Trump took office in 2017, he was the flagbearer of a hostile takeover of the traditional GOP by a new populist flank. From the beginning, he faced sceptical Republicans on Capitol Hill who feared he was dooming them to a generation out of office. Meanwhile, GOP institutions – like the influential Republican National Committee – were run by business-oriented traditionalists, and many of those who joined his administration saw their job as being to impose some kind of guardrails on the unpredictable new president. The story in 2025 is very different, David said, with Trump in complete command of his party and with allies and loyalists in just about every position that will shape his presidency. “There has been a purge of the rebels,” he said. “Dissent has been crushed. Some have taken retirement; others have been beaten in primary contests, most famously Liz Cheney. The party is in his image now, and that’s another guardrail that has gone.” He can expect complete loyalty from the new leadership of the RNC, Michael Whatley and Lara Trump (clue’s in the name). And the composition of the White House is very different. “In the first term, he defaulted to more experienced, establishment people, and there were reports of them literally removing papers from his desk so he wouldn’t sign them,” David said. “This time, he is surrounded by compliant loyalists, and they may be much more efficient about getting things done.” As Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, tells David in this piece: “You’re watching these guys walk into this administration having known each other a lot longer … They have been able to use these four years out of office to plan a return in a way that no administration in modern history ever has been able to do.” Democrats | Fears that confrontations with Trump turn off voters While Democrats are in the minority in both the House and the Senate, that was also true in 2017 – and back then, they interpreted their mandate for opposition as being to stand up to Trump at every opportunity. But this year, while there are many competing narratives that contain a grain of truth about the reasons for their defeat, one of the most influential is the idea that they were perceived as too “woke”, too focused on “resistance”, and too obsessed with Trump as an anti-democratic force. “There are a hundred theories about why Harris lost,” David said. “But there is a case being made that they fell into the trap of being out of touch, and that regular people didn’t care much about an abstract concept like democracy.” That’s why prominent Democrats are largely avoiding early confrontations with Trump as he returns to office – and falling in line on issues where they fear Republicans may, fairly or not, be able to paint them as radical left-wingers. Earlier this month, for example, 48 of them joined with Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass a bill that could see undocumented immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes deported, with almost every Democratic vote in favour coming from those with smaller majorities in their seats. And in this video, many of them declare: “We are not here because of who we are against … we will work with anyone if they want to make life better for you.” “It’s just accepting the reality that Trump won. And us just saying he’s a chaotic guy goes nowhere. That’s just baked into people’s consciousness,” Peter Welch, the senator for Vermont, told Semafor. “The fact is, people want change. So that means we have to be willing to change as well.” Business and tech leaders | CEOs vie for attention at Mar-a-Lago Many businesses fell over themselves to condemn Trump after the 6 January insurrection. But after he won again, it didn’t take long for chief executives of America’s biggest companies to start to find that other principles were available. Many companies have already abandoned climate change commitments and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Senior executives at Visa, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab and many others joined him for an event at the New York Stock Exchange in mid-December; the Wall Street Journal called it “the week CEOs bent the knee to Trump”. Tech leaders – an awful lot of crypto CEOs among them – have meanwhile made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to curry favour with a president whose view of whose interests to advance most closely resembles a medieval court. “You can never be too unsubtle for Trump,” David said. “Flattering his ego remains the most effective way to get the policy changes that you want.” “We have a lot of great executives coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they’re all calling,” Trump gloated at a press conference last month. “In the first term everybody was fighting. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Many of them have also donated lavishly to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk – obviously – were expected to attend the ceremony today (although no update yet on changes to the guest list because of the move indoors). Zuckerberg reversed Meta’s position on factchecking with the same alacrity that he took the opposite position after Biden’s win; Trump said quite frankly that he was “probably” responding to threats that he has made in the past. All of that stood behind Joe Biden’s farewell warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.” “If you do have these tech overlords at the ceremony, it will be a remarkable image of 2025,” David said. “It suggests that Biden was accurate about the arrival of a new tech-industrial complex. And the question for many people will be whether they are paying homage to him, or whether they are in control.” The public | Resistance movement in a state of exhaustion In 2017, more than 1 million people took to the streets across the US in protest at Trump’s arrival, with about 500,000 on the Women’s March in Washington DC alone and many more around the world. They chanted: “Welcome to your first day, we will not go away!” But eight years on, they have largely gone away: at the People’s March on Saturday, the successor event to the Women’s March, about 50,000 were expected – and just 5,000 showed up. US progressives are fatigued, and much less shocked. Trump’s margin of victory in November is a world away from his first win in 2016, which c despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, making the case that he is an anti-democratic presence more complicated to argue. “The fact that he won the popular vote was very deflating to the opposition,” David said. “It became much harder to say that ‘this is not who we are’.” If that is a depressing diagnosis, and while Trump is at the zenith of his power today, progressive optimists might hope that means the only way is down. “Like pretty much every president before him, the downward trajectory begins on day one,” David said. “But if he doesn’t fulfil his promises, the question is when disillusionment starts to set in.” | 