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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The writer is an associate editor of the FT, chief economist at American Compass and writes the Understanding America newsletter
Washington was full of optimism this weekend, but not confidence. At receptions and galas where gossip is the main currency, and at podcasts where everyone sells their spin, positivity reigned. “Trump really has a chance. . . “, people said. “There are so many good sides.”
There is no doubt that this is a “vibe change,” as the comments suggest, especially compared to an aging presidential term that is slowly and painfully coming to an end. The return of a president who can do anything will be a huge upgrade by default. But the huge opportunity for reformed governance to usher in a new “golden age,” as Trump’s team likes to put it, is not matched by certainty about how his administration is likely to proceed.
Everyone wants to talk about artificial intelligence, for example—though less because of the excitement surrounding superintelligence than because of the more mundane potential for increased productivity. The problem is that continuing to improve the models and expanding their capacity for widespread deployment will require Herculean infrastructure investments in unlikely timeframes.
In one possible world, Donald Trump and his team focus their economic agenda on construction: rapidly developing natural resources, expanding infrastructure, subsidizing investment and training the workforce. That would make sense, but it’s not something they talked about much. Trump himself is more likely to focus his enthusiasm on cryptocurrencies, while prominent supporters like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have spent most of their energy criticizing American culture and calling for more foreign workers.
Likewise, decoupling the US and Chinese economies has become crucial, and Trump has shown his support for it, including calling for China to end its “permanent normal trade relations” status in the Republican Party platform. Yet despite issuing an executive order to ban TikTok in 2020, he is now turning into its savior. A law requiring the parent company, ByteDance, to hand over the service to the US firm or shut it down by January 19 caused the platform to go down that day. Users were notified that the company was looking forward to working with Trump to reinstate him. And Trump is now saying he will do just that. In response, ByteDance brought TikTok back online, to the delight of users.
Is Trump a China hawk determined to reverse the mistakes of globalization, even if Americans have to suffer the pain of climbing out of a hole of their own making? Or is he more interested in scoring points as the president who protected TikTok after his predecessor let it fail?
There are countless similar questions. Will the fight over the extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 dominate the first-year legislative calendar? Will the government adopt humane tactics to deport illegal immigrants to preserve public support for the action, or will it act in ways designed to provoke backlash and polarize?
Will the administration just enjoy attacking the excesses of the higher education system, or will it work just as hard to build useful new pathways to good jobs other than college? Will the “Department of Government Efficiency” focus on government efficiency or cause constant confusion beyond its purview?
Grounds for optimism lie in the quality of Trump’s high-profile appointments, which represent remarkable improvements over his first-term choices. If administration discipline and execution have come this far from Mike Pence to JD Vance, Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio, or Reince Priebus to Susie Wiles, a new golden age may indeed be upon us.
While in 2016 Trump trumped the supply lines of supporting institutions, ideas and personnel, he can now draw from a deep bench of talent and a fat book aligned with his own priorities. Across the agencies and offices of the White House, he is quietly filling his team with serious players.
But the team captain, coach and quarterback is still Trump himself. Few people were good at betting on the decisions he would make in the Oval Office, least of all when they predicted he would do the expected thing that conventional analysis recommended. The fruit is bigger and juicier and hangs lower than ever, and now everyone is waiting to see what they will harvest.
