Donald Trump will begin his second term as president the same way he began his first—with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate.

The GOP scored its 218th House-race victory—enough to clinch a majority of the chamber’s 435 seats—today when CNN and NBC News declared Republicans the winner of two close elections in Arizona. How many more seats the Republicans will win depends on the outcome of a few contests, in California and elsewhere, where ballots are still being counted. But the GOP’s final margin is likely to be similar to the four-seat advantage it held for most of the past two years, when internal division and leadership battles prevented the party from accomplishing much of anything.

Such a slim majority means that the legislation most prized on the right and feared by the left—a national abortion ban, dramatic cuts to federal spending, the repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Joe Biden’s largest domestic-policy achievements—is unlikely to pass Congress. “I don’t think they’re even going to try on any of those things,” Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to former Speaker Paul Ryan during Trump’s first term, told me.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

Trump’s biggest opportunity for a legacy-defining law may be extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire next year and won’t need to overcome a Senate filibuster to pass. He could also find bipartisan support for new immigration restrictions, including funding for his promised southern wall, after an election in which voters rewarded candidates with a more hawkish stance on the border.

In 2017, Trump took office with a 51–49 Republican majority in the Senate and a slightly wider advantage in the House—both ultimately too narrow for him to fulfill his core campaign promise of axing the ACA. Next year, the dynamic will be reversed, and he’ll have a bit more of a cushion in the Senate. Republicans gained four seats to recapture the majority from Democrats; they now hold a 53–47 advantage, which should be enough to confirm Trump’s Cabinet picks and judicial nominees. The impact on the Supreme Court could be profound: Trump named three of its nine members during his first term, and should Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are both in their 70s, retire in the next two years, he would be responsible for nominating a majority of the Court.

Yet on legislation, Republicans will be constrained by both the Senate’s rules and the party’s thin margin in the House. Republicans have said they won’t try to curtail the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for circumventing a filibuster. “The filibuster will stand,” the outgoing Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, declared on the day after the election. But he’ll be only a rank-and-file member in the next Congress. McConnell’s newly elected successor as party leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, reiterated his commitment to the legislative filibuster after winning a secret-ballot election for the role.

How many votes are needed to pass bills in the Senate won’t mean much if Trump can’t get legislation through the House, and that could be a far more difficult proposition. The two speakers during the current Congress, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, each had to rely on Democrats to get major bills passed, because the GOP’s majority proved too thin to govern. With Trump’s backing, Johnson should have the votes to stay on as speaker when the new Congress convenes in January. (When Trump addressed House Republicans today in Washington, the speaker hailed him as “the comeback king” and, NBC News reported, the president-elect assured Johnson he would back him “all the way.”)

But the Republican edge could be even narrower next year if Democrats win a few more of the final uncalled races. Trump’s selection of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to serve as United Nations ambassador and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida to serve as national security adviser could deprive Republicans of two additional seats for several months until voters elect their replacements. (Senator Marco Rubio’s expected nomination as secretary of state won’t cost the GOP his Florida seat, because Governor Ron DeSantis can appoint an immediate replacement.)

[Read: Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition]

Still, the GOP has reason to hope for a fruitful session. During Biden’s first two years in office, House Democrats demonstrated that even a small majority could produce major legislation. They passed most of Biden’s agenda—though the Senate blocked or watered down some of it—despite having few votes to spare. And Trump exerts a much tighter grip on his party than Biden did on congressional Democrats. Unlike during Trump’s first term, few if any Republicans hostile to his agenda remain in the House. His decisive victory last week, which includes a likely popular-vote win, should also help ensure greater Republican unity.

“I think we will have a much easier time in terms of getting major things passed,” predicts Representative Mike Lawler of New York, whose victory in one of the nation’s most closely watched races helped Republicans keep their majority. “The country was very clear in the direction it wants Congress and the presidency to go.”

Trump might even hold sway over a few Democrats on some issues. Because Trump improved his standing almost everywhere last week, the House in January will include many Democrats who represent districts that he carried. Two House Democrats who outran their party by wide margins, Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, refused to endorse Kamala Harris, while several candidates who more fully embraced the party’s national message underperformed. Nearly all Democratic candidates in close races echoed Trump’s calls for more aggressive action to limit border crossings, which could yield the new president additional support in Congress for restrictive immigration legislation.

[Mike Pesca: The HR-ification of the Democratic Party]

Like most House Republicans, Lawler endorsed Trump, but he ran on a record of bipartisanship and told me he’d be unafraid to defy the president when he disagreed. As a potential swing vote in a narrow majority, he could have more influence over the next two years. Lawler told me Monday that the GOP should heed the voters’ call to focus on issues such as the economy, border security, tax cuts, and energy production. Pursuing a national abortion ban, he said, would be “a mistake.” And Lawler serves as a reminder that enacting legislation even in an area where Republicans are relatively unified, like tax cuts, could be difficult: He reiterated his vow to oppose any proposal that does not restore a costly deduction for residents of high-tax states such as New York and California—a change that Trump supports but many other Republicans do not.

Trump showed little patience for the hard work of wrangling votes during his first term. Now he’s testing his might on Capitol Hill—and displaying his disdain for Congress’s authority—even before he takes office. Though he didn’t endorse a candidate to succeed McConnell, he urged all of the contenders to allow him to circumvent the Senate by making key appointments when Congress is in recess. After he won, Thune wouldn’t say whether he’d agree. Trump apparently wants the ability to install nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services?—who can’t win confirmation by the Senate.

“The Trump world does not give a damn about normal processes and procedures and traditions and principles of the prerogatives of certain chambers,” Buck, the former GOP aide, said. “They just want to do stuff.” The fight could be instructive, an early indication that no matter how much deference the new Republican majority is prepared to give Trump, he’ll surely still want more.

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A few hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders released a fiery statement saying, in part, that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He concluded that those concerned about democracy need to have some “very serious political discussions.”

The statement drew both praise and pushback from others in his party. But the serious discussions Sanders warned about have indeed begun over the past week. Plenty of blame has been tossed around: Democrats have pointed to the economy, identity politics, Joe Biden, racism, sexism, elitism, Liz Cheney, the war in Gaza, and much more as factors in Trump’s resounding victory. Democrats will surely continue to dissect why voters moved to the right in almost every county, as one early analysis showed. Meanwhile, many Democrats are already sharing their vision for where the party should go next. Some are vowing to fight Trump at the state level, and others are pledging to find common ground with his administration. Those on the party’s left, including Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seem to be using this moment to push the party to embrace more progressive policies that serve the working class.

And the soul-searching about how to change a party overrun by elitism has begun. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, in a long thread on X yesterday, outlined what he saw as the party’s major problems, which included fealty to a higher-income voter base and how the party “skips past the way people are feeling … and straight to uninspiring solutions … that do little to actually upset the status quo of who has power and who doesn’t.” Murphy’s prescriptions included: “Embrace populism. Build a big tent. Be less judgmental.” Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a car-repair-shop owner who won a very tight race against a MAGA Republican in Washington State, said, “We need people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches to run for office.” It’s not that lawyers should not be in Congress, she added, but “we need to change our idea of who is credentialed and capable of holding elected office.”

Other Democrats have blamed ultraprogressive messaging for playing a role in the Democrats’ loss, and suggested that the party needs to move on from that approach. Representative Tom Suozzi, who recently won the seat formerly occupied by George Santos on Long Island, told The New York Times that “the Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left.” Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx, told my colleague Michael Powell that “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” which, Torres argued, “alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’” To move forward, he suggested that Democrats can’t assume they “can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

Messaging isn’t everything, but given the Democrats’ current position in Washington, it will be key in the years ahead: Facing a probable Republican trifecta—the GOP has won back control of the Senate, and is just four winnable districts shy of a majority in the House—that will stymie their ability to effect legislation, much of what Democrats can do in the years to come boils down to their messaging (and may rely on a new generation of messengers). As Representative Dean Phillips—the only elected Democrat who mounted a primary bid to unseat President Biden this year—put it when asked by a Washington Post reporter what the party must do to reinvent itself, “We have good product and terrible packaging and distribution.”

As the Democratic Party starts to identify which lessons to take from last week’s outcome, they’ll be reckoning with the gaps between presidential and downballot results: Many Democratic Senate candidates did well in swing states where Trump won the presidential race, which has prompted questions about whether the Democrats’ problem is more of a top-of-the-ticket one. And, for all the discussion coming from high-profile party members, reform for the Democrats may actually happen in a way that’s more “organic” rather than centrally directed, Michael told me—including momentum originating in local campaigns. “I suspect if there’s a change, it will come bottom-up and in fits and starts,” he added. For example: “Bernie Sanders in 2016 was dismissed by all serious or self-serious political writers and politicians, and nearly changed the face of the party. I suspect in smaller form that’s how change—if it comes about—will emerge.”

Related:

Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity The cumulative toll of Democrats’ delusions

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning. The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity, Helen Lewis argues. Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now.

Today’s News

Trump is expected to announce that Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser and former aide, will serve as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Trump said that Tom Homan, his former acting ICE director and a former Border Patrol agent, will be appointed as his “border czar,” with a focus on maintaining the country’s borders and deporting undocumented immigrants. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York is Trump’s selection to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Her nomination is likely to be confirmed by the incoming Republican-led Senate.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The Democrats never truly addressed the cost-of-living crisis, Annie Lowrey writes. The Wonder Reader: Sleep is a universal human need, but there’s no universal solution to struggling with it, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Lucy Murray Willis / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

To Find Alien Intelligence, Start With the Mountains

By Adam Frank

The Cambrian explosion [is] the most rapid, creative period of evolution in the history of our planet. In the blink of a geologic eye (hundreds of millions of years), all the basic biology needed to sustain complex organisms was worked out, and the paths to all modern life, ranging from periwinkles to people, branched off. Mega sharks hunted in the oceans, pterodactyls took to the skies, and velociraptors terrorized our mouselike mammalian ancestors on land.

What drove this instantaneous, epic change in evolution has been one of the great unsolved problems of evolutionary theory for decades.

Read the full article.

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There really is a deep state. Why did Latinos vote for Trump? The Trump-whim economy is here. Trump is handing China a golden opportunity on climate.

Culture Break

Rosalind O'Connor / NBC / Getty

Watch. Saturday Night Live isn’t bothering with civility anymore, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Read (or skip). Lili Anolik’s new book compares the authors and frenemies Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, but its fixation on their rivalry obscures the complicated truth, Lynn Steger Strong writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When the 1997 comedy Austin Powers needed a song to send up the swinging ’60s in its joyfully absurd opening sequence, the movie could have opted for obvious touchstones, such as British-invasion rock or sitar-drenched psychedelia. Instead, it used an offbeat bit of samba-jazz by Quincy Jones. This was an inspired choice. Jones’s 1962 song “Soul Bossa Nova” was certainly an artifact of its decade, reflecting a then-emerging international craze for Brazilian rhythms. But the track was more than just a time capsule; its hooting percussion and saucy flutes exploded from the speakers in a way that still sounds original, even alien, decades later.

Jones, the legendary polymath who died at age 91 on Sunday, spent a lifetime making music like this—music that defined its era by transcending it. He’s best associated with the gleaming, lush sound of jazz and pop in the ’70s and ’80s, as most famously heard on Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. But his impact was bigger than any one sound or epoch, as Jones used his talent and expertise to design a future we’re still catching up to.

Jones was born into wretched conditions in Depression-era Chicago: His mother was sent to a mental hospital when he was 7, leaving him to be temporarily raised by a grandmother who was so poor that she cooked rats to eat. When Jones was 11, after his family moved to Washington State, he and his brother broke into a building looking for food and came across a piano; playing around with the instrument lit a fire in the young Jones. He’d spend his teenage years hanging out with Ray Charles and playing trumpet with the Count Basie Orchestra; at age 20, he started touring the world as a member of Lionel Hampton’s big band. After producing Dinah Washington’s 1955 album, For Those in Love, he went to Paris to study under the famed classical-music teacher Nadia Boulanger, who’d also tutored Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

These early brushes with genius—and global travels that exposed him to far-flung musical traditions—gave him the skills he’d draw on for the rest of his life. Boulanger, Jones would often later say, drilled into him an appreciation for the endless possibilities contained within the confines of music theory. Mastery, she told him, lay in understanding how previous greats had creatively used the same 12 notes available to everyone else. Jones took this idea to heart. His work was marked by a blend of compositional rigor and freedom; knowing what had come before allowed him to arrange familiar sounds in ways that were, in one way or another, fresh.

Take, for example, Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party,” which Jones produced. The song is a key text of mid-century girl-group pop—Phil Spector tried to take the song for the Crystals—but what made it soar were the Jonesian touches: harmonic decisions that feel ever so off, Latin syncopation pulsing throughout. You can hear similarly eclectic, colorful elements in another American standard that Jones arranged: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s 1964 version of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which Buzz Aldrin listened to before stepping onto the lunar surface in 1969).  

Though schooled by classical academics and jazz insiders, Jones seemed to have a pop soul: He used precise technique not to impress aficionados but to convey emotion in an accessible, bold way. “The Streetbeater,” the theme song for Sanford & Sons, used prickly, interlaced percussion to conjure sizzling excitement; a tempo change in “Killer Joe,” from Jones’s 1969 album, Walking in Space, opened up an oasis of cooling flute. The 1985 African-famine-relief anthem “We Are the World” was a particularly gracious use of talent. Not just any producer could have brought 46 vocalists—including such distinctive voices as Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner—into one coherent, catchy whole.

Jones’s signature collaborator was Michael Jackson. It was a kinship that made sense: The two men shared a knack for rhythm, a sense of history, and perfectionism. “He had a perspective on details that was unmatched,” Jones said of Jackson in a 2018 GQ interview. “His idols are Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, all of that. And he paid attention, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.” For all of Jackson’s scandals and eccentricities, the music he made with Jones has never been overshadowed. The songs are just too intricately lovely, delighting hips and hearts and heads all at once, to be denied.

[Read: AI can’t make music]

As Jones settled into living-icon status, he tried to pass his wisdom to new generations. In 1992, he founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe; in 2017, he launched Qwest TV, a streaming service for videos of jazz performances. He kept working with young talents, such as Amy Winehouse in 2010 and the avant-pop composer Jacob Collier much more recently. Even so, later in life, Jones liked to gripe about the state of pop music. In his view, modern artists weren’t educated or broad-minded enough to break new ground. “Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain,” he told New York magazine in 2018. “Music is emotion and science.” He added, “Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?”

Yet clearly, he still has disciples today—though perhaps some of them are misunderstanding his lessons, trying nostalgically to imitate his work rather than studying his techniques to create something different. I feel, for example, conflicted about the Weeknd, a pastiche-y pop star who’s obsessed with recapturing the magic of Jones and Jackson’s hot streak. Jones himself appeared on an interlude on the Weeknd’s 2022 release, Dawn FM. He relayed a story about childhood trauma rippling throughout his adult life, and concluded by saying, “Looking back is a bitch, isn’t it?” The point, he seemed to say, was to use the past to keep moving forward.