Trump will begin his second term with almost unlimited power

US President-elect Donald Trump will have near-total control over the levers of American government now that Republicans have added the House of Representatives to their victories in the White House and the Senate.

He can rely on five key factors as he pushes his populist “America First” agenda:

Democratic legitimacy

With a lead of more than three million votes according to preliminary results, Trump was poised to score a landslide victory in the popular vote against his Democratic rival Kamala Harris.

Trump is on track to become the first Republican president in 20 years to accomplish the feat, once official results are certified.

Trump, 78, secured a clear majority in the Electoral College , which decides the president, by winning 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226.

The tycoon swept all seven key states, winning in each of the battlegrounds that decide the closely contested US elections.

“The United States has given us a powerful and unprecedented mandate,” he declared on election night.

The midterm elections in two years will be the next opportunity for Democrats to test Trump’s power.

Congressional control

Republicans were declared the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, completing their clean sweep in last week’s election.

After more than a week of vote counting, CNN and NBC projected that Trump’s party had reached the 218 seats needed to retain its majority in the 435-seat House, having already captured the Senate from Democrats.

Having control of both chambers of Congress will ease the path to confirmation of his nominations for key administration posts and may also allow him to push through his radical agenda of mass deportations , tax cuts and regulatory cuts.

Having purged the Republican Party of members not aligned with his ” Make America Great Again ” agenda, the president-elect can expect little domestic resistance.

However, most legislation requires a supermajority of 60 votes to advance in the Senate, a figure Republicans will not reach.

Government of loyalists

When Trump took office in 2017 he was a political novice and his staff picks consisted largely of seasoned Republican officials and military leaders.

Given their unpredictable behavior, these moderating figures were labeled the “adults in the room” by party critics and the media.

For his second term, the real estate magnate has made no secret of his intention to surround himself with loyal supporters.

His first picks confirm this: he announced his ally Marco Rubio as chief diplomat, Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, right-wing agitator Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Elon Musk to head a government efficiency agency.

Reformed Supreme Court

By appointing three deeply conservative Supreme Court justices during his first term, Trump helped anchor the nation’s top judiciary to the right.

With its 6-3 conservative majority, the court recently handed Republicans a series of judicial victories, the most notable of which was striking down the nation’s right to abortion in 2022.

Two aging arch-conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito , 76 and 74 respectively, could consider retiring during Trump’s next term, allowing him to appoint two much younger replacements for life and cement the court’s right-wing majority for decades.

Immunity

The Supreme Court ruled this summer that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for “official” acts in office, a landmark decision seen as liberating the power of the presidency.

The ruling arose from the federal criminal case brought against Trump over his attempts to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Now that Trump is president-elect again, that case and others are expected to be dismissed or dropped.