Trump will have a virtual lock on all three branches of government

American governance is supposed to be protected from extremism by time-honoured checks and balances.

So what? From the very start, Trump 2.0 looks unchecked and unbalanced.

He will have formal or de facto control of

• the White House
• the Senate and
• the Supreme Court

He has threatened to intervene in the running of the Federal Reserve and to turn the Department of Justice on his enemies. In addition, as usual for a president, he will be Commander-in-Chief of the world’s mightiest military. And he has already set a brisk pace for his transition.

Faster, faster. Trump didn’t wait for his victory to be widely confirmed before he got on stage. After Pennsylvania was called for him, he didn’t need to. At 2:30 am local time he addressed his supporters in Florida to declare a “new golden age of America”.

Trump’s comeback doesn’t stop there. Republicans also secured control of the Senate with wins in Ohio and West Virginia. If they win the House, it will give Trump near-total control over Washington for the second time in eight years.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he said.

The Senate. A Republican majority of at least two will mean control of which bills are sent to Trump for signature whoever controls the lower House.

• In West Virginia, Jim Justice, a 73-year-old coal baron and the state’s Republican governor, easily beat the Democrats’ Glenn Elliott.
• In Ohio, Bernie Moreno, a 57-year-old Colombian immigrant, ended Sherrod Brown’s long Senate career after the most expensive Senate race this year.
• The GOP also held its ground in Senate races in Nebraska, Texas and Florida, with potential pickups still to call in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

A GOP majority will also make Senate confirmations straightforward whomever Trump chooses for his cabinet. He said last night that Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist, would “help make America healthy again”.

The House is still too close to call. But it’s going to be much closer than Democrats seemed to believe in the bygone era of Tuesday afternoon, when Nancy Pelosi predicted that the current House Minority Hakeem Jeffries would be the next Speaker.

If… Republicans win the lower chamber, they will regain the legislative power they last won in 2016. But in the past eight years, the GOP has been remade in Trump’s image.

• In 2017, the Speaker of the House was Paul Ryan – a dull fiscal conservative whose only real passion was slashing the budget. The Senate caucus still included people like John McCain – in no way a moderate, but someone with a clear disdain for Trump and Trumpism.
• In 2024, a House Republican caucus in which Marjorie Taylor Greene looks less radical every year will be led by current Minority Leader Mike Johnson – a previously fringe cultural conservative who doesn’t believe in climate change, IVF, evolution or same-sex marriage.
• It’s unclear who will lead the new Senate majority, but it has lost most of its remaining moderate voices including Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse, both of whom voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial.

Scotus Potus. In his first term, Trump assembled the most conservative Supreme Court in a century. Republican senators expect at least one vacancy during a second term, while two openings (Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74, could retire) would mean Trump could appoint over half the court. It takes 51 Senate votes to confirm a Supreme Court justice, so Republicans may not need any input from Democrats.

“We would have even more getting rid of precedents. You’d have more Dobbs-like decisions,” Sen. Mazie Hirono told NBC, referring to the overturning of Roe v Wade.

The Fed. The world's most powerful central bank is meant to be independent and make its own decisions on interest rates. Trump has other ideas, telling an interviewer in September he felt strongly “that the president should have at least a say in there”. He said he had better instincts than senior Fed officials including the chair, Jerome Powell, whom he appointed. The evidence suggests otherwise:

• He has frequently promised rate cuts if elected.
• In a worst-case scenario that could mean cuts intended to lift markets but with the unintended effect of fuelling inflation.

Policy. With a lock on two or even all three branches of government, and expansive permission from the Supreme Court, Trump could plausibly

• extend the tax cuts of his first term whatever the cost;
• end aid to Ukraine;
• repeal or overhaul the Affordable Care Act, as Speaker Johnson has promised; and
• end federal green energy subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act.

“I think with a trifecta, plus the Supreme Court, enormous pressure will be brought to bear on any [moderate Republican] holdouts,” says political scientist Ben Ansell, host of the Tortoise podcast What’s Wrong with Democracy?. “Checks and balances will remain in principle but in action, I don’t suspect we will see a huge amount of checking nor balancing.”

For instance: progressive voters hoped the majesty of an election would enable them to regain access to abortion – of which 63 per cent of US voters approve, but which the Supreme Court denied them. It has not worked out that way.

A final US election special edition this evening will look at what went wrong for Kamala Harris’s campaign.