What to expect of the post-Trumpian world

MAGA will endure. The US will be less free and have fewer friends; China may be stronger. India will need to be on guard

- Prashant Jha

Given how different the world is in mid-March compared to mid-January, it is foolish to gaze into the future. But there is a value to thought experiments based on current trendlines. And in that spirit, in the week of the Raisina Dialogue, it is worth posing a set of macro questions about the post-Trumpian world in 2028.

The first question is if Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is a fleeting or an enduring political feature of the US. Beyond personalities, this politics is marked by hostility to the federal administrative State; a belief that the America-led international political and economic liberal order has harmed America; contempt for dependent allies and outreach to strong adversaries; White racial anger against America's changing demography and diversity; suspicion of elite institutions, scientific establishment and the knowledge infrastructure; disdain for climate science; and Christian fundamentalism and social conservatism on the question of race, gender and sexuality and the pedagogy around it.

Just like 2014 marked the arrival of a new BJP on the Indian political stage, 2024 has marked the arrival of a new Republican Party which is carefully creating its own ideological ecosystem, grooming a second and third rung of leadership at all levels, removing constraints on power, and changing the norms and common sense that governed America. And, so, irrespective of electoral ebbs and flows, at least for the next decade or two, one pole of American national public life will be represented by this far-right stream of politics.