What to expect from a second Trump presidency

Diane Rehm: On My Mind

During the run up to the election, Donald Trump made big promises about immigration, about the economy, about remaking the bureaucracy of the United States government.

And now it seems he will get a chance to follow through on those promises.

“This is a much broader rejection than a rejection of Biden and by extension Harris,” says Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “It is a rejection of a larger sense of who has been running the country, all the elites.”

Few know the workings of the U.S. government as well as Ornstein and though he says “the elites” (himself included) have much to learn from the extent of Trump’s victory, he warns that people might not understand what they have gotten themselves into.

“For a lot of Americans who think that you can get rid of the bureaucracy, get rid of government and all will be fine," he say Ornstein, "they’re going to discover what it does in terms of disruption to their daily lives.”

Ornstein joins Diane to make sense of what we saw on Tuesday – and what a Trump second term will look like.