Elections and the electoral pendulum remain as guardrails on presidential power, with the possibility of midterm elections in two years and a presidential election in four years allowing the pendulum to swing back.

Trump did not run on dismantling USAID, acquiring Greenland, or the US occupation of Gaza, so the current flurry of announcements represents something beyond campaign promises and suggests either a loss of self-confidence or ideological capture.

When the US threatens countries with tariffs and trade conflict, they will not confront the US directly but will instead shift their alliances to China for investment and technology, which will accelerate over the next four years even if the immediate effects are not visible on US news cycles.

The Trump administration ran on legitimate critiques of post-9/11 overreach and failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promised greater discipline from a national security establishment that has been slow to learn lessons from forever wars, which are meritorious critiques.

The risk of nationalism in multiple places with multiple older strong men (all men) is great power conflict, which is particularly precarious given active conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and the Taiwan situation.

Trump will try to divide European countries against each other using tariffs to pick winners and losers, but Europe should resist this trap by finding ways for like-minded EU countries to coordinate on issues like Ukraine or trade without waiting for Brussels consensus.

The suppression of Palestinian and Palestinian American speech and narratives is a chilling preview of what will happen to other marginalized groups' speech on DEI, women's rights, and other issues if the pattern continues.

Autocrats and ethnonationalists depend on cynicism and apathy, so resistance requires artists, writers, civil society, and individuals maintaining hope and solidarity across boundaries to prevent the normalization of authoritarian worldviews.

Democrats failed to stand up to their own donor base on issues and this failure was worse after Trump's first term when Democratic donors told Kamala Harris to moderate her populist message and adopt pro-entrepreneurship positions instead.

Bipartisanship in foreign policy is still possible because there are substantive areas of agreement (Ukraine, agricultural trade, etc.) and Republican senators who know they'll still be there after Trump leaves office.

Trump's opposition to the Iran nuclear deal was not based on substantive disagreement about centrifuge operations or uranium enrichment monitoring, but on identity-based opposition to Obama negotiating with 'brown people' and giving them money.

When everything in politics becomes identity signaling, it's hard for people to pick and choose on issues because picking selectively (like supporting Trump on tariffs but not USAID) signals disloyalty to the identity group.

China's AI applications in robotics and manufacturing are more aligned with what most developing countries want from AI than US chatbots, so the US may win the 'race' for the best chatbot while China wins the geopolitical competition.

The period ahead presents an opportunity for reconstruction if the country survives it, and universities are central to that reconstruction as sources of alternative knowledge and institution-building.

The Trump administration's pledge to expand US territory in the inaugural address represents the first explicit presidential endorsement of territorial conquest in contemporary history, signaling a return to pre-World War I thinking where territorial acquisition is on the table as policy.

Trump cuts a familiar picture from history as an aging strong man musing about territorial expansion for personal consolidation of power and legacy construction, a transactional ethnonationalist in a world full of similar figures.

Individual citizens should understand what they value, where they get information, what they participate in or not, and start from that level of reflection before thinking about community and policy, as the foundation for political change.

The unconditional provision of military assistance for the obliteration of Gaza by the world's largest superpower for a year and a half is a fault line that should concern all people about what kind of world we will live in.

Building solidarity across countries and institutions that insist on right and wrong, true and false, objective reality versus disinformation is necessary to weather the current rough period and preserve capacity for more rational approaches to international affairs.

Trump made foreign policy into an identity politics issue starting in 2014 when the Republican Party ran ads linking Ebola-infected ISIS members crossing the border with Iranian support, which presaged Trump's later use of foreign policy for identity signaling.