You may recall how in 2016 Trump boasted that “”I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” His re-election in 2024, after the disgraceful behavior by him and his supporters on January 6, 2021, must have confirmed that view in his mind because after taking office in 2025, he acted as if he could say and do anything, and even insult his supporters to their faces at his rallies, and they would stick with him.

David Remnick writes about the many ways in which this disdain was manifested.

[W]hat is so striking about Trump’s second term is that he entered office intent, it now seems, on flaunting his cynicism, his greed, and his scorn for the American people. It was as if he actually meant to squander his support as quickly as possible. How else to explain the heedlessness of his behavior in office? On Day One, he gave pride of place at the Inauguration to a lineup of moguls who had agreed to bow to his power and his ego. They regularly traipsed to the White House, delivering gaudy house gifts and large donations to his pet projects. They smiled weakly as they were compelled to listen to his moronic rants and admire the latest ungapatchka embellishment of the gilded Oval Office. They spent tens of millions of dollars on his wife’s documentary about how taxing it is to endure the attentions of the help and how lonely it is to shuttle from one place to the next in limousines and private planes. As in any tin-pot autocracy, this was the price of doing business. Trump’s populism was always a fraud. Now he plainly didn’t care who knew. At a “jungle-themed” Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, costumed guests enjoyed seafood delicacies and a caviar bar. There was a caged zebra. Circus performers dangled from the ceiling. “Rich people, they spend nine hours getting ready,” the President merrily remarked of his pals. He was dressed in his usual blue suit. “I had ten minutes, so I came as Donald Trump.”

Trump has shown contempt for the law, as he hollowed out the Department of Justice and ordered federal agents to menace American cities from New York to Minneapolis to Los Angeles. He has shown contempt for culture and education, as he threatened and defunded one invaluable institution after another. He has shown contempt for competence, by stocking his Administration with preposterous, often odious, fourth-raters: Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller (incredibly, the new chief of staff), the Son-in-Law, the Ubiquitous One with the portable printer.

Abroad, Trump’s contempt for restraints on his power has been equally conspicuous. The United States’ closest allies found themselves coping with his arbitrary tariffs, his threats to shatter alliances, and his periodic intimations of invasion. What was the world to make of an American President who, with immense self-satisfaction, slathered praise on dictators like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Xi Jinping, while seeking to humiliate heroic democrats like Volodymyr Zelensky? Trump ordered his government to invade Venezuela, imprison its President, elevate a more compliant one, and start extracting that nation’s oil and gold. It was a regression to an earlier era of U.S. imperialism, when military intervention in Latin America was a standard instrument of Presidential power.

But as with all megalomaniacs, Trump went too far, flew too close to the sun, and has come crashing down. People were sick of the flagrant corruption and enrichment of him, his family, and friends at the expense of everyone else, his cruelty towards minorities, whether they be ethnic, religious, or sexual, and the flaunting of his contempt for the affordability issues that were hitting many people so hard.

This is a moment of enormous relief and celebration. Trump can still do damage, and, in defeat, may prove even more unhinged and vengeful. But restraints in Congress and beyond are now far stronger. This aging autocrat, repudiated by an electorate he once believed to be under his spell, has been significantly weakened.

This is a critical moment in US democracy. It is vital that the new congress take Abdul El Sayed’s and Zohran Mamdani’s playbooks and focus relentlessly on delivering on the bread-and-butter issues that brought them victory, and show that the cruelty that we can be sure will be displayed by Trump and his consigliere Stephen Miller can be combated.

People are expecting a lot. People will forgive the Democrats if they aim high but get blocked by Trump and Miller as who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep going on the same track. That will show people that they need to add the presidency to the list of offices to be captured. What they will not forgive is if the neoliberal Democratic leadership takes a mealy-mouthed approach of watering down the goals under the guise of being ‘realistic’ or ‘working across the aisle’. That is the excuse they give for not doing what the voters elected them to do.

I am not too hopeful that there will be a change in the leadership of the Democratic party within Congress. Both putative leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are steeped in the establishment neoliberal culture and thus likely to try and tone down the more ambitious plans of the incoming congress, many of whom are young and fired up.

Schumer’s position is more precarious because he has already been senate majority leader from 2021-2025 and although he was competent, his neoliberal and accommodationist tendencies make him unsuitable for the aggressive posture that is necessary to confront Trump in the next two years.

Jeffries is more of a closed book, since he has not been the leader when the party was in the majority. If elected, he would become the first Black speaker which is a significant achievement. The question is whether he can read the writing on the wall and adopt the kind of aggressive leadership posture the times require.