It’s been exactly four years since the 2021 US Capitol insurrection, and today Donald Trump will have his recent election win certified before a joint session of Congress. The event will cap off a consequential week that also saw the re-election Mike Johnson as House Speaker. In this Q&A, Thomas Gift examines this new political environment, how challenging it will be for Trump to work with Republicans in Congress, and how the newly re-elected president’s influence continues to re-shape America’s civic landscape. 

How does Donald Trump’s popularity compare now to the end of his first term in office?

Trump has all the momentum right now. There’s no other way to spin it. We’re just in a totally different political environment than we were four years ago after January 6th, 2021. Then, the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, called Trump “morally responsible” for the Capital insurrection. Trump had just been impeached for a second time. Most experts were writing Trump’s political obituary. But Trump has since defied the odds. CNN reported some striking figures just this weekend. In January 2021, Trump’s net favorability rating was negative 20. Today, it’s just negative one. So, Trump is still underwater in his approvals, but there’s been a huge swing in public sentiment. Not only that, but only five percent of registered voters said that January 6th was their most significant memory from Trump’s first term in office.

What does Vice President Kamala Harris presiding over the certification of her own electoral loss symbolize?

The significance of Harris presiding over her own electoral defeat shouldn’t be remarkable. But it is. Before 2021, very few Americans even realized that there was a certification process by a joint session of Congress because it was so pro forma. No longer. Trump has wrought so much damage to America’s civic culture, having taken an ax to virtually every single democratic institution and norm. But Trump’s biggest legacy will be eroding trust in the legitimacy of US elections. After the 2020 election, more than half of Republicans thought that votes were not processed and counted accurately. Now that Trump has won, upwards of a quarter of Democratic voters now don’t think that the 2024 election was fair. This is a problem, and it’s not clear you can put that genie back in the bottle.

“Mike Johnson” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore

How did Mike Johnson manage to retain the House speakership last Friday, when several Republican members initially vowed not to vote for him?

Johnson is the only representative in the House who can speak three political languages: the language of MAGA; the language of “the establishment”; and the language of what you might call the “blow-up-the-system, need-for-drama caucus” that’s radicalized even beyond Trump. One thing that Johnson had going for him is that he’s personally likable. Regardless of what you think about his politics, you consistently hear from representatives that Johnson gets along well with other members. Another point in Johnson’s favor was that there was no real alternative. And the last point is that, in a Trumpified Republican Party, Trump is going to get what he wants — at least in the short term. Trump essentially told Republican holdouts — namely, Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas — to stop the nonsense and to get in line.

How powerful will Johnson be as House speaker now that he’s re-secured the gavel?

Mike Johnson’s grip on the speaker’s gavel will be tenuous. A number of hard-right Republicans said they only voted for Johnson to ensure that the certification of Trump’s election win on January 6th wouldn’t be delayed. From the start, Johnson is going to be put in an almost impossible position of trying to bring together multiple, competing factions in a GOP that don’t play very well together. Republicans were united behind Trump in the campaign, but now is where the fractures start to emerge. Trump says he’s coming in with a mandate. But a mandate for what, is the question. It’s not clear that Trump’s agenda is going to align with the interests of many Republican members of Congress. Trump is going to be Mike Johnson’s master, but even with GOP power in both the House and the Senate, it’s not guaranteed to yield major legislative wins.

What type of House speaker will Johnson be this time around?

With such a small Republican majority in the House, if there’s one thing Johnson won’t be able to do, it’s stand on ideological principle. He’ll need to be a highly malleable House speaker. That means cutting deals. That means horse trading. That means doing everything he can within his ethical bounds to keep a fractious party in line. The fact is, we don’t know what kind of concessions Johnson had to make to nab the speaker’s gavel. But presumably there were some. That was true of Republican Kevin McCarthy when it took 15 rounds for him to become House speaker back in early 2023. And odds are it’s true with Johnson. Trump’s agenda will rise and fall depending on his relations with Congress. So, he’ll need to rely on Johnson to be both his interpreter and his enforcer. But the fact that Johnson begins his renewed tenure as Speaker without the resounding support from his own party means that it won’t be easy.

How will Trump manage to work with Republican Congress members with an independent streak?

One mistake that we often tend to make as a shorthand is to assume that all MAGA Republicans believe the same thing and have the same approach to governance. Clearly they don’t. Trump himself is much more transactional than ideological. He’s not a fiscal hawk, and he even suggested raising or abolishing the debt ceiling in the recent spending bill. Meanwhile, reducing the government deficit is essentially the raison d’etre for much of the Freedom Caucus. So, something has to give. House Speaker Mike Johnson is going to be smack dab in the middle of all this. The question is whether he can tame a very divided lower chamber. The one thing Trump can do is threaten is to primary any Republican who doesn’t get in line. But it’s not clear whether that kind of pressure will work with Congress members with safe seats.

• This interview is based on comments Thomas Gift made on CNN’s “Newsroom” on 6 January 2025.
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
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