In what was billed as a statistical dead heat, Republican nominee Donald Trump once again repudiated the experts and struck a decisive blow in the 2024 United States (US) presidential election, catapulting himself to a second, non-consecutive term in the White House.
Trump, no stranger to shredding the political rulebook, led a sweep of the seven critical “swing states”, eliminating any plausible path to victory for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris’s best route to the White House always lay through the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump not only smashed this bulwark, but he also ran the tables in the “Sun Belt” states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina.
In the current era of US domestic politics, “big” victories are often measured in the hundreds of thousands of votes. In this light, Trump’s 2024 triumph qualifies as sweeping. Although ballots are still being counted, Trump is on track to clinch both the popular vote, and a decisive electoral college majority.
The recriminations within the Democratic Party have already begun. Should an aging, unpopular Joe Biden have withdrawn earlier? Did Harris err in choosing Minnesota governor Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of electorally critical Pennsylvania? Could Harris have distanced herself from the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza crisis? Did the Democrats focus excessively on the threat Trump poses to liberal democracy?
These are valid questions but largely beside the point. The American public was clamoring for change, something that any sitting Vice President was ill-suited to champion. The soaring price of household goods from groceries to gas left tens of millions of Americans seething. The specter of illegal immigration, amplified by right-wing media, further fueled disenchantment. Save for college-educated women and those above 65, there was a broad Rightward turn that included men and most ethnic minorities.
Now that the electoral verdict in America is clear, what might it portend for the US, India, and Indian Americans?
For the US, no word comes to mind more readily than “uncertainty”. As former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently explained, putting Trump in the White House means having someone in office who keeps others, including foreign leaders, constantly guessing as a way of extracting leverage.
In his first term, Trump ushered in an unabashedly chaotic managerial ethos that left friends and foes unsure of his next move. Trump’s volatility, however, should not obfuscate the fact that Trump 2.0 is much better prepared to implement its agenda than Trump 1.0.
For starters, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) ecosystem has spent four years vetting executive branch personnel who are faithful to Trump, above all else. The establishment Republicans who occupied key cabinet positions in Trump 1.0 have no home in the new administration.
This hardline coterie will advance a take-no-prisoners approach to policy, albeit one that could be tempered by a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives (whose fate is unclear). On illegal immigration, Trump’s passion project, aide Stephen Miller has already warned that “the first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss — followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable.”
Institutional niceties about an independent justice department working to impartially enforce the rule of law will be trashed. Other than illegal immigration, Trump’s principal law enforcement priority is using the nation’s investigative agencies to prosecute his political adversaries. The politicization of the justice machinery will be made easier if Trump fulfills his long-standing desire to strip thousands of government officials of civil service protections. The US Senate, control of which rests in Republican hands, could lend air cover to these efforts.
As far as India is concerned, some in Delhi believe that India successfully managed Trump during his first term through a mix of flattery and transactionalism. Others are (rightly) skeptical that India can fix Trump so easily this time around. Trump’s foreign policy, much like Biden’s, will remain embedded within a larger framework of strategic competition with China. But India is vulnerable on multiple counts.
Trump, aggrieved by America’s bilateral trade deficits, has never seen an economic problem that tariffs — the “most beautiful word in the dictionary” — cannot fix. This includes the possibility of an across-the-board import tax on manufactured goods. In theory, additional trade restrictions targeting China could create an opening for new Indian exports, but the evidence suggests India has only modestly gained from the “great reallocation” away from China to date. India’s green energy partnership with the US is also likely to fall on hard times. Just months after his inauguration in 2017, Trump famously withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, calling out India’s investments in coal production in the process.
Finally, this brings us to Indian Americans. The recently released Indian American Attitudes Survey suggests that the Democratic Party’s grip on Indian American voters has weakened: The Democrats’ 70:20 advantage in 2020 has become a 60:30 split today. The bulk of this shift is explained by Indian American men under the age of 40. This echoes findings from exit polls and several pre-election surveys showing a discernible erosion in the Democrats’ traditional hold over minority voters. As with the American public, this shift in Indian American preferences was driven by economic anxiety, fears of illegal immigration, and concerns about identity politics. Trump will seek to consolidate this support but his efforts to curb legal — not just illegal — immigration, curtail efforts to combat the climate crisis, and restrict reproductive freedoms could undermine this effort.
In his January 2017 inaugural address, Trump announced that the era of “American carnage” was over. For America, the election may be finished, but the existential challenges for democracy and governance have just begun. There could be more carnage around the corner.
Milan Vaishnav is senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. He is co-director, with Sumitra Badrinathan and Devesh Kapur, of the 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey. The views expressed are personal
