As our year comes to an end it is clear that the biggest event of 2024 was the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and the election for a second time of Donald Trump as president. The outcome sets an ominous tone for the new year, with Trump, as usual, talking all kinds of trash about what he plans to do — deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and banish wokeness and DEI efforts, as well as attempting to place far right-wing followers in pivotal government posts to dismantle our current form of democracy and exact revenge on his political rivals and the people who prosecuted him for his numerous crimes.

When Trump returns to the White House on January 20, he will be somewhat better prepared than he was when he first took office in 2017, as he was an incompetent president unqualified to govern the nation. But he continues to show a failure to comprehend he is not the chief executive of his privately held company but the chief executive of “the people’s company” where, by design, power is shared with two other branches of government. As such, he has far less power to simply command things to happen than he evidently thinks. Just look at the president-elect’s failure to get members of Congress from his own party to fall in line behind what he wanted in a budget deal to keep the government open.

Much of what Trump says he’s going to do he cannot get done on his own. Take mass deportation: It would take billions of dollars beyond the current budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other Homeland Security agencies to identify, round up, house, process and transport 11 million people out of the country. Under the Constitution, Congress holds the power of the purse. Trump may think having a Republican-controlled Congress for at least two years makes it a given he will have at his disposal however much money he needs. But the Republican majorities in both chambers will be slim, meaning only a few party dissenters can scuttle just about anything.

There will be about a dozen Republican Hispanics in the House and a half dozen in the Senate, and not all of them are down with mass deportation because they know how much social and economic disruption that would cause in their districts. After the election, one Republican Latina from south Florida interpreted Trump’s campaign promise to apply only to undocumented immigrants with criminal records, for instance. There are also fiscal conservatives in his party who would likely want to find offsetting cuts, which won’t be easy to find on the scale needed without provoking a political backlash.

In his first term, Trump stocked the Supreme Court and lower federal courts with conservative acolytes of the Federalist Society (although President Biden has made strides to rebalance the court’s ranks). But Trump makes a mistake to assume federal judges will go along with whatever he wants. The judiciary is a separate coequal branch of the federal government, which has reserved for itself the power to be the final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning. That includes a ban on unreasonable search and seizure and the guarantee of due process under the law, rights that clearly obtain in any mass roundup of undocumented immigrants (or anyone else, for that matter).

Trump’s vow to ban wokeness shows he has little understanding of the 1st Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and, by extension, thought. No president can ban an attitude or perspective — a perspective in this case that the incoming president scarcely understands in the first place. Free speech has long been one issue that the political left and right have agreed on, each side seeking to protect its own loyalists. Who knows how Trump thinks he will try to ban wokeness, but should he give it a go, look for the courts to tie him up in knots.

Both the judicial and legislative branches of government jealously protect their own powers. Chief Justice John Roberts, for all his wrongheadedness on considering race and ethnicity in college admissions, appears to understand and take seriously his responsibility to guard the federal judiciary from intrusions on its power from the executive branch. So do incoming Republican congressional leaders like Majority Leader John Thune and committee leaders who politely rejected Trump’s request to forego the Senate’s “advise and consent” power under the Constitution and let his nominees be installed without vetting or votes as recess appointments.

Trump is also imagining executive overreach when it comes to banning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the public and private sector. A president has no direct power over the internal operations of state colleges or local school districts or private corporations. He could try to direct the retro Justice Department he is assembling to file lawsuits under perverse interpretations of civil rights law. Legitimate civil rights lawyers could tie such cases up in courts for years that extended beyond the four in office Trump is limited to.

The parliamentary skills of the leaders of congressional Democrats will be tested. Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, as New Yorkers, ought to have insights into how to maneuver a president-elect who started as a real estate developer in the city. They need to employ all the delaying tactics at their disposal to slow down the Trump train and, whenever Republican dissent leaves him needing Democratic votes to pass legislation, extract as much as they can in concessions.

That’s not to suggest the next four years will be anything less than trying times for people who believe in the nation’s creed of fairness and equality under the law for all. They will be. We’ll have to pace ourselves, reserving the expenditure of emotional energy on outrage for the most outrageous from him. He will say many outrageous things. The place to focus on is what he does.

It’s a testament to the strength of the nation’s civil society that the country survived one term of a wannabe dictator. That should give us confidence about surviving another. Draw strength from your family and friends this holiday season and remember …. This too shall pass.

Ronald Mitchell Publisher and editor, Bay State Banner