Three questions about the next four years

We were producing it in real time, before we knew who won the election and before we knew what would happen when President Donald Trump and some of his supporters didn’t accept those results. Because of that, I think we created a great snapshot of the upheaval and transition of the moment we were in.

And it crystallized for me a few big questions about the four years ahead.

The only thing that’s really clear is that the end of the Trump presidency is a fork in the road for the Republican Party. The former president has departed Washington, but he leaves behind a party that remade itself in his image, as well as fierce loyalists in Congress. Trump left under a cloud following the Capitol riot, but he still holds sway over the GOP. The question is, how much?

Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman, was not very optimistic about the future of the GOP, even before the riot.

They’re not going to take the White House at 2024. Who’s voting for them? How do you get 8 million more votes four years from now? If Donald Trump is still sitting there on the sidelines, bringing in everything that you do. I mean Republicans right now can’t even say the election is over and that they lost and Joe Biden is the next president without fear of the ire of Donald Trump. So how do they then go into our community, and the Black community, into Hispanic communities or any community and go: “Just ignore the last four years. That we were just kidding. You know, don’t tell Trump I said that.” This idea that it all just suddenly, like, cleanses itself and goes away and we start fresh in two years in the ’22 cycle, in four years in ’24, is BS. It’s not happening. Donald Trump won’t let it happen.

That largely depends on what Republican voters want, and many of them remain faithful to Trump. Even if the forces controlling the party want to put some space between themselves and Trump — and that’s a big if, after he got tens of millions of votes in November — it won’t be a clean break.

For example, newly elected Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), whom I interviewed for that episode, called out her fellow Republicans for the role they played in perpetrating the election fraud deception that motivated the rioters. But she wasn’t willing to fully repudiate Trump via impeachment.

The post-Trump GOP is still being shaped, and it’s not even clear how post-Trump it actually is.

Millions of Americans have lingering questions about the fairness of Biden’s election, and millions of others want to see Trump held accountable for the harms caused during his administration.

Biden is aware of just how tall a task he has ahead of him, as he said in his inaugural address, which focused on the country coming together.

The disunity didn’t begin with the Trump administration, but one aspect of it reached a fever pitch during the stress of a pandemic and economic downturn: our history of racial injustice. The movement after George Floyd’s death appeared to open the eyes of many Americans to systemic racism, but the backlash to it left little hope for a great American reconciliation.

Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, spoke to me for Episode 1 about the year that preceded the election:

I actually think that this specific era with this specific president, polling data has shown that as a result of this president, there’s been a steady growing awareness among the American people that racism is a problem. And I think that put up a mirror to the many Americans who were denying their own racism. And I think they moved to sort of potentially be different. Now, I think that was critical in the tipping point. And then of course it tipped over with, with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

There was a time following those summer protests when Congress and the White House wanted to move forward to reform policing in response to Floyd’s death. But the momentum stalled out, and nothing was passed. Biden promises to address inequities, but it’s unclear how he’ll have any better success.

For example, after his speech filled with talk of unity, Republicans castigated the flurry of executive actions Biden took in his first days as president, although Trump also signed a slew of executive actions during his own term.

Being all things to all people is becoming increasingly difficult in a nation that appears to be getting more diverse, and more irreparably divided, by the moment.

But the pursuit of unity has to happen, because it will be nearly impossible for Biden to get anything done without working across the aisle — an ability that he campaigned on — saying that he had what it took to make bipartisanship a hallmark of his presidency.

Biden was elected with one of the broadest coalitions to ever get behind a presidential candidate. With the support of majorities of women, voters of color, millennials, suburban voters, urban voters, working-class Americans and other groups, the Democratic Party proved that its message could be appealing to a wide swath of the electorate. But keeping that momentum isn’t a given.

Biden won the presidency by a comfortable margin, but his party has the barest majority in the Senate, and it lost a slew of House seats, taking Democrats down to a small margin there, too. They’re probably going to have a tough time repeating their success in the 2022 midterms.

Former U.S. housing secretary Julián Castro, who ran against Biden in the Democratic primary contest, argued that to stay in power, lawmakers must use their time in a way that actually leads to results for their constituents.

“I think the biggest way to lose our advantage as a party going forward is if we don’t produce the results. That’s part of what [Republican Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell understands very well,” Castro said. The former San Antonio mayor said one way to do that is to look beyond Washington.

You can patch together an impressive portfolio of successes if you go, for instance, to state legislatures that are agreeable with more paid sick leave, or with taking action on climate change, or with actually putting more accountability into the way that law enforcement operates. Same thing with cities. You start thinking about all of the big cities in this country where those city councils and those mayors agree on a lot of these issues because you know, they are electing Democrats, and they’re more likely to support taking climate change seriously and doing something about accountability and law enforcement and making investments in better educational opportunities. We need to understand that the game is not just in Washington, D.C. We need to produce results in state capitals and in city halls — and then herald that effectively across the country as evidence of results.

Coming up with solutions that get voters the outcomes they want could be a challenge when there are so many diverse voting blocs — from those on the left represented by lawmakers in big cities and on the coast to those more moderate Democrats who barely won their races in conservative strongholds.

Thus far, there seems to be no infighting, and multiple wings of the Democratic Party seem genuinely interested in coming together to do what is required to remain in power. Then again, we’re only two days in.