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What Trump’s cabinet picks reveal so far
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
This is what we're watching in US politics this week: It's Trump's transition, of course. Lots of activity happening over the course of the week with some unexpected developments, including a lot of very unusual cabinet appointees. Sean Duffy at Department of Transportation, former "Real World" star and congressman, who has very little experience with transportation other than presumably driving a car, and of course, competing on the "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" is going to be in charge of the transportation department.
Other picks like Pete Hegseth have been a little more controversial. The former Army National Guard member and Fox News host has been accused of sexual assault. Not a great look for the incoming Secretary of Defense. But he's nowhere near as controversial as the recently withdrawn pick, Matt Gaetz, the firebrand Congressman from Florida who resigned his seat in order to become Trump's attorney general, and then found out that no Republican wanted him in that job.
Gaetz's withdrawal will allow some of the more controversial attention to be focused on people like RFK Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, somebody with a long career in the nonprofit management space, but no experience in public administration and who's been extremely critical of the US's Public Health Administration, including on toxins in foods, additives in foods, vaccines, and the approval process for them. And he's tapped into a strain of anger among Republicans at the public health apparatus that they say failed to protect the public during the COVID-19 epidemic, pointing to inconsistent and sometimes unnecessary masking guidelines. Things like social distancing, keeping the schools closed, and of course the vaccine recommendations that a lot of Republicans rejected during that pandemic. RFK's confirmation odds, however, look pretty good if you look at the relatively warm reception that he's been received with by most Republicans.
One area that's still totally in doubt for the most part is Trump's economic team. It's been two weeks since the election, there's no treasury of the secretary, there's no USTR. There is a commerce secretary pick, another Trump ally who has no experience in public administration, Howard Lutnick, a lot like Wilbur Ross in the first administration, but potentially leaving Trump's trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, without any clear role. So there's a lot more clarity on the national security side than there is on the economic side for now. That may change over the weekend. And of course, the one thing with President Trump is you could always expect the unexpected.
All of Trump’s horses and all of Trump’s men
With world leaders descending upon Brazil this week for the annual G20 summit, the specter of Donald Trump’s return looms all around. The summit, along with this month’s COP29 climate summit, bookend the Biden interregnum - a period that opened with a deadly global pandemic and saw the start of two wars.
As we now know, foreign policy did not determine the 2024 election outcome. The pivotal question voters wrestled with was the one Trumpput to them: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” A majority of voters across the electoral map answered this question in the negative. Despite the hyper-polarized political moment, and all the fault lines in US politics – gender, generational, racial, party identification – it was the economic one that proved most salient.
Yet, when Trump is inaugurated in January, he will take the helm of the United States at a moment of vast geopolitical uncertainty. By Trump’s own assessment, the world is on the brink of World War III. Inan interview earlier this year, Yuval Noah Hariri suggested that WWIII may have already started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and “we just don’t know it yet.” Certainly, reports of North Korean troop deployment to the Russia-Ukraine war theater do little to assuage these fears. Nor does US President Joe Biden’s late-in-the-game policy shift this weekend to allow Ukraine to deploy US-provided, long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory.
Since his resolute victory two weeks ago, Trump has made quick work assembling the team he wants around him for the challenges ahead. It is a team of loyalists and Trump-world insiders (many Washington outsiders)tasked with preventing World War III, restoring peace in Europe and the Middle East, and putting the world together again.
With his cabinet and leadership selections, Trump makes clear that direction will come from the very top. Appointees will be expected to execute the president’s agenda. The pick of veteran and television host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense is perhaps the clearest indicator of the model to come.
With Europe deeply on edge about whether the US will remain steadfastly committed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukraine, and Europe’s common defense, Hegseth’s bureaucratic inexperience offers little clarity or comfort. Known more for his television work and pardon advocacy than any particular security policy position, Hegseth’s promotion to American dignitary has left Europe scratching its collective head. It signals to European leaders that Trump’s transactional, unpredictable approach will dictate the next four years.
Elsewhere, in the Indo-Pacific, a giant question mark hangs over how the second Trump administration plans to engage with a host of partnerships and plans initiated by Biden. Outgoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his counterparts in Australia and Japan this weekend for a Trilateral Defense Ministers’ Meeting. In a joint statement following the session, the leaders affirmed the longevity and enduring commitment of the partnership.
With the US-China relationship the essential quandary of our times, will Hegseth (and Trump) remain committed to these relationships? What happens to AUKUS, the trilateral partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US that’s viewed by Australians as so critical to their security? What about the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with members of the same group plus India? Each of these pillars is viewed by Biden as foundational for the region’s geopolitics, and yet incoming Trump personnel have provided scant details of their plans.
While much is being made of Trump’s flashier picks – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency – it is the repeat performers who telegraph Trump’s policy priorities. As he said every day on the campaign trail, these are immigration, trade, and the economy.
The return of former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan, now as “border czar,” coupled with Stephen Miller as Trump’s deputy chief of staff, confirm Trump 2.0 will be ideologically tough and swift-acting on immigration. Trumpimplemented 472 executive orders on immigration during his first term. Homan and Miller will be hard at work over the next few months readying actions for Trump’s signature on his first day back in the Oval Office.
On trade, everyone overseas is on pins and needles over Trump’s tariff threats. European political leaders and business executives are kept up at night worrying over whether Trump will seek to impose a universal tariff of 10-20% on imported goods, and, if so, under what authority. Against this backdrop, the reported return of former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to an expanded “trade czar” role is being closely watched. Both Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act will be relevant channels for Trump’s tariff ambitions. Having Lighthizer by his side provides the president with a dedicated co-pilot.
Finally, that Trump has seemingly taken the most time to land on his picks to lead the Treasury and Commerce departments is unsurprising. Trump’s election, his mandate, and his plans both at home and abroad in his next term each depend on his administration’s ability to execute its economic vision. Trump’s tax extensions, corporate tax cuts, and economic tools of national security like tariffs and sanctions, must also take action on the pivotal question Trump asked voters in November – they must feel better in four years than they do today.
The pace of Trump’s appointment decisions is evidence that he is ready to get to work. The sooner he can roll back Biden’s initiatives and implement the policies he has been discussing again and again over the last four years, the sooner he can remake the US and America’s role in the world in his image.
Putin visits US voters
Turnout in this US election fell. The world's leading expert on American democracy saw, first hand, why that was. #PUPPETREGIME
US election: GOP could win a Trump-led sweep
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
It's election night in America. And a slightly unexpected result tonight, with the election returns coming back very strong for President Donald Trump. He may actually end up winning the national popular vote, which was not, I think, on anyone's bingo card, really.
Big surprise for Trump has been a surge in rural support where the Trump coalition showed up to vote for him. Meanwhile, Harris has somewhat underperformed in urban areas, and while she did have a pretty good showing with women voters, it wasn't enough to keep her ahead of Trump, at least in the results as we know them tonight.
Harris has been underperforming down-ballot Democrats generally, which has kept the Democrats competitive in the House, which could lead to an unusual situation where all three of the main political bodies in the United States, the White House, the House, and the Senate, flip in the same election. The Senate is in the bag for Republicans. They're going to have somewhere between 52 and 55 seats, it looks like. And Trump is probably the favorite to win in the Electoral College.
The House outcome we may not know in the next 24 hours. Some of the House seats that really matter in determining the majority, which is very close, are slow to count. But right now, it does look like Democrats have some momentum with a couple of Republicans losing key seats.
So stay tuned for more of what we're watching this week in US politics.
2024 US election: What to look out for
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
This is what we're watching this week in US politics. It is, at long last, election week. The US has one of the longest most exhausting presidential election cycles in the world. That basically begins two years before general Election Day. And Tuesday of this week, it all comes to a conclusion. It's unlikely that we will know the results of the election on Tuesday night, although if Harris is significantly ahead in the early counting states, like North Carolina, that's going to be a strong signal that she's probably winning the overall electoral college. Seven key swing states to watch. Trump looks like he has the advantage in Arizona and Nevada. And the election, like it did in 2016, could potentially come down to the three so-called Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. On election night, Wisconsin and Michigan are likely to be known, but possibly not till late in the night. They were called for Biden late in the night on 2020.
Pennsylvania is the real outlier when it comes to counting votes, and this is because Pennsylvania does not count its early ballots until the day of the election, which means that the people who vote in person in Pennsylvania, who tend to be Republicans, we'll know where they are when the polls close in the evening, East Coast time, on Tuesday night. But then overnight, you expect to see what's been called the 'blue shift,' which is as those early and absentee ballots get counted, which are primarily democratic, you will see Harris's vote share start to climb. So if the outcome of the race is not known because the outcome in North Carolina is ambiguous or Trump is leading, and there's no clear winner in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that night, or it looks like a close race, officially calling this race could drag on until much later in the week, just exactly what happened in 2020. Now, President Trump tried to exploit that gap in 2020 by saying he clearly had won in Pennsylvania, and all these late-breaking votes were all just fraudulent, which isn't true, but that's what he claimed. And that could happen again this cycle.
The only situation in which we would get a genuinely ambiguous outcome, where we wouldn't know the outcome for weeks at a time, is if, one, there's evidence of widespread massive election fraud, which has not been the case at any time in recent US history and is a very low probability event. Or if it's such a close race in one of the key swing states, like Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Georgia, where we don't actually know the winner because the margins are within several hundred votes. There is precedent for state-wide elections being overturned in recent US history, but typically, those elections come down to about 500 votes. There's been 31 recounts from the year 2000 before the 2020 presidential election, three were overturned because the margin was so incredibly close. And so, this is a very, very rare event, and it's unlikely to play out in this election cycle, but it could. You never know.
The polls are suggesting this is a very close race. So stay tuned for more watching this election week, and hope you find a nice, comfortable place to watch the election results because it could take a long time to count these ballots.
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- Ian Bremmer & Van Jones on instability & the US election ›
- US election: GOP could win a Trump-led sweep - GZERO Media ›
Putin pulls up to Trump's Madison Square Garden rally
Vladimir Putin showed up in New York to attend Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend and had a big surprise. #PUPPETREGIME
Crisis time for the politically homeless
It is decision time for the politically homeless.
With 18 days left in the coin-toss US election campaign, both Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a form of political fracking, desperately trying to extract pockets of votes in hard-to-reach places. That’s why you saw Kamala Harris take on Bret Baier on Fox News on Wednesday night.
On the surface, it seemed like a waste of time. Most people who watch Fox News are not going to vote for Harris, but she’s betting that Donald Trump has alienated many long-standing Republicans, like Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney, and she wants to offer them a temporary political home. In an election where a few thousand voters in the key seven swing states may change everything, Harris believes polls telling her that disaffected Republicans are a growing, available group.
A recent New York Times/Siena College survey found that 9% of self-identified Republican voters nationally are voting for Harris, a number nearly twice what it was just five months ago. When Dick Cheney no longer feels at home in the big Republican tent, that’s not a Cheney problem, it’s a tent problem.
Democrats have their own tent problems. Some young people disaffected by the situation in Gaza are opting out of the Democratic Party, while some Jewish voters, traditionally Democrats, are backing Trump because of his overt support for Israel and his tough stance on Iran. And let’s not forget that about 20% of Black and Latino voters — especially men — see Trump as a better leader on the economy. As I have written about before, these men idolize the entrepreneurial genius and give-no-F’s aura of Trump hype man Elon Musk, who is consolidating that support. It is no surprise that former President Barack Obama is frantically out on the stumps chastising Black men for their lack of support for Harris.
This is the age of the politically homeless. Don’t like the MAGA Republicans because of their embrace of extreme voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the rejection of free trade in favor of high tariffs and protectionism? Where do you go? The left has also embraced tariffs, and it too has an extreme side, with protest groups calling President Biden “genocide Joe” for supporting Israel’s fight against the terrorist group Hamas.
The right and left have drifted away from the political center in response to pressure from extreme positions on the fringes of their movements.
“There are a lot of politically homeless folks out there, which is a function of the political realignment we’re seeing to a large degree across the Western world,” my colleague Graeme Thompson, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told me. “Some former Republicans can’t stand Trump, some former Democrats don’t like left-wing campus politics, but neither have a comfortable place to land.”
In Canada, a country that could face a federal election at any time given the precarious nature of Justin Trudeau’s minority government, it’s not so different.
“More than 4 in 10 people likely consider themselves homeless in Canada,” Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founderof Nanos Research, told me. “Major swaths of voters are not voting FOR anything — they are voting against things — in many cases someone they dislike. The enthusiasm is directed against someone.”
What this means is that the center cannot hold. “The Liberals’ move to the economic and cultural left under Trudeau has forced out a lot of fiscally conservative, socially moderate ‘blue Liberals’ who might end up voting for the Tories but don’t feel it’s a natural fit. Similarly — although to a lesser degree — this is true for so-called ‘red Tories,’” says Thompson.
One consistent error the bleeding center makes is to blame the extremes for the polarization. There is a relentless focus on the “weird” or “crazy” things that happen on the edges. But all this misses the larger point. It’s not that the fringes are inherently attractive — most voters live in the center — but the center has failed to make its case for relevance. There is precious little self-reflection on why the center is suddenly so soft and why it has failed to deliver for so many voters.
“Small ‘l’ liberals seem to have forgotten that liberalism isn’t self-evident, revealed truth — its case has to be made in the political arena,” says Thompson. “Moderates are on the back foot, in part, because “the other guys are worse” isn’t compelling enough in difficult times when voters are demanding answers.”
In his book “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy,” David Frum, maybe the most famous politically homeless Republican, does a superb job of outlining how the Burkean conservatives he championed squandered their arguments, especially on issues like the Middle East, the economy, and climate change. “In the twenty-first [century],” he writes, “that movement has delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq War to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency.”
So while Republicans are trying to pick off small groups of politically homeless Democrats, like Black men and Jewish Americans, and Democrats are going after disaffected Republicans who believe Trump is bad for the country, the larger question remains: What can be done about it? Is the political center doomed, or can a new center emerge?
In the UK, Keir Starmer tacked to the political center to lead the once-more leftist Labour Party to a huge majority just a few months ago — a majority he now seems to be squandering.
But merely mouthing centrist words is just political lip-synching to cover up the fact that small “l” liberals no longer know how to play the instrument of government in a way that will solve the problems. Genuinely alienated voters have bolted to the fringes because they no longer believe government can actually solve the problems it promises it will solve. What to do about the cost of living, housing costs, and a feeling of powerlessness? These are deep problems that small “l” liberals have to solve to earn trust. That requires more than blame-game slogans.
“Being moderate isn’t a political program. You have to stand for something,” Thompson argues. “If there’s going to be a liberal, centrist, moderate political revival, it has to speak to the concerns of people.”
The paternalism of a government that spends money and gets involved in solving every problem for people not only fails to live up to its promises — it can’t solve everything — but it also creates a passive dependency, sending an implicit message that citizens can’t solve their own problems, only the government can. “When liberalism was successful in the past, it was about empowering people,” Thompson says. It doesn’t just rely on technocratic solutions from on high.
This doesn’t mean a new centrist party will emerge in the US or Canada. There is no real pattern for that, while the mainstream parties in both countries have a long history of changing and self-renovating, going from the extremes to the center and back again.
But for now, the fringes are ascendent, leaving behind wandering, zombie-like groups of politically homeless folks who can’t stand either side. These people are looking for reasons to vote Republican or Democrat without betraying their core principles, excusing crude mendacity, ignoring pressing problems, or ending up on the wrong side of history.
“With the advent of social media, voting against candidates or parties has been on the increase, which supercharges a negative political discourse,” says Nanos. “This has corresponded with increased anti-establishment sentiment. The impact is short-termism. Who can we punish today? Where can we vent our anger? The casualty is that discussions about long-term decisions are punted in favor of immediacy.”
That immediacy will likely mean most voters will ignore things they can’t stand and pick one salient issue — tax rates, climate, abortion, Israel, or Gaza — and cast a reluctant ballot.
“It’s hard to see the politically homeless being decisive this time around, either in the US or Canada,” says Thompson. “Except to the extent that they’ll hold their noses and pick a side.”
Why freedom is on the ballot this November: Historian Timothy Snyder
Listen: On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with author and historian Timothy Snyder to discuss the importance of freedom in the final stretch of one of the closest and most contentious presidential races in modern history. Snyder uses his new book, “On Freedom,” to discuss the many ways freedom has been used and, often, misused in politics and society.
Snyder suggests we expand our understanding of freedom to incorporate the notion of freedom "to" rather than just freedom "from." Freedom, he says, is about envisioning a better future rather than just protecting oneself from an outside threat. It's the freedom "to" have healthcare or to love whom you love rather than just the freedom "from" oppression or prejudice.
Snyder also delves into the critical role that newspapers and the press play in talking about freedom. Amid the rising tide of misinformation, Snyder warns that “if we...have different facts, we're not going to end up in a free world because whoever has the most power over fantasy is going to end up deciding things.”
Snyder concludes by discussing how freedom can be applied more globally. In exploring different interpretations of freedom, he highlights Ukraine’s view of freedom as an ongoing journey. Freedom, he says, is the means to a better life rather than the end goal.
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