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Trump
Businessman-turned-politician Donald Trump, poised to win the 2024 US Presidential Election, said in the early hours of Wednesday, 6 November, that this was a "magnificent victory".
The Republican Party, which he represents, flipped the Senate — the Upper House of the US Parliament, also known as the Congress. The party appeared to take control of the House of Representatives — the Lower House — as well.
With the control of both houses firmly in its grasp, the Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), should now have little problem implementing its conservative agenda.
The fact that the US Supreme Court has a conservative super-majority — six conservative judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts, as compared to three liberals — should make things even easier.
This court has already helped implement at least a couple of conservative plans, and that too since Joe Biden took over as President in 2021.
For one, it repealed the right to abortion and threw it back to the states by overturning the Roe v Wade decision, which had been held as a legal precedent for half a century. All three judges appointed by Donald Trump in his first term as president — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — had said they would not overturn this legal precedent while being confirmed to the Supreme Court.
The court also overturned affirmative action, as part of which government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programmes granted special consideration generally to groups classified as historically excluded, and specifically racial minorities and women. In 2023, it ruled against affirmative action in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard.
Now, with Project 2025 on the horizon, Trump looks poised to implement the ultra-right-wing agenda that marked his campaign and increasingly extreme speeches.
What lies ahead for US?
One of the first things to expect from this term of Donald Trump's presidency is a surge in Christian nationalism, which is expected to bring a theocratic bent to governance in the US.
People cannot also discount Trump's campaign promise of being a "dictator for a day" on the first day of his presidency. And then there's Project 2025, the transparently right-wing "presidential transition" roadmap published by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. Among other things, Project 2025 envisions that government agencies such as the Department of Justice would be abolished, and the control would go directly to the president. It also called for the abolition of the Department of Education. It also calls for stricter monitoring of pregnancies, abortions, and even miscarriages. It outright calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family". Project 2025 also envisions a clampdown on pro-environment action, instead focusing on greater energy production and energy security. In short, the US could be looking to produce and burn more fossil fuels. A BBC analysis of Project 2025 also reveals that the roadmap "aims to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes in schools and government departments". For India and the world Trump has run his campaign on, among other things, an anti-immigrant and "America-first" platform. If he were to stick by his words, it would make life difficult for not only Indian-Americans but also Indians waiting for US visas. According to reports from April this year, the second group numbered around a million! Even otherwise, Trump's proposed enforcement-heavy immigration policies could tread the lines of the Muslim immigration ban from his first term as president. In his first term, he also did away with a lot of environmental guardrails, a road down which he is expected to travel even further this time. That could be bad news for the world in general and India in particular, as greater climate change would obviously make living conditions harsher in the country.
