Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But he generated a Trumpist movement that is likely to survive him. During his four years in power, Donald Trump introduced a new way of doing politics on the Right that has been openly authoritarian, racist, xenophobic, and opposed to science. This politics has been supported by an electoral coalition comprising at least 40 percent of the electorate. Should he be able to maintain this support, he could run for president again in 2024 at the ripe age of seventy-eight. Whether he does so will depend on a number of factors, including whether he will continue to control the Republican Party.

Any Republican challenge to his control faces a steep uphill struggle, having to overcome the fact that he received 47 percent of the vote in a record turnout election. And he leaves with a Republican Party emboldened by its strengthened presence in the legislative branch as a result of the reduced Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Whether Republicans lose control of the Senate after the runoff elections in Georgia in January, the Republican presence will remain quite powerful, with the help of conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Especially important for Trump’s party is its success in defeating the Democrats’ attempts to make inroads in the state legislatures that will preside over legislative reapportionment based on the results of the 2020 US Census. In carrying out the decennial redrawing of the boundaries of state legislative and congressional seats, Republicans will continue their gerrymandering practices to the detriment not only of the Democratic Party but also of the representation of black and other minority populations (aided, surely, by Trump’s recent decisions to shorten the time allowed to carry out the census, which will surely undercount minorities and the urban population, the principal stronghold of the Democratic Party).