David M. Shribman: The year changes, but many questions remain the same

A new year, the same questions.

The turning of the calendar page doesn't necessarily mean that the country has turned a page. Many of the same mysteries, many of the same challenges, many of the same principal actors remain — though with nuances that could not have been anticipated a year ago, when Joe Biden was in his last month, when Donald Trump was girding for a second term.

Inflation and immigration are still the primary preoccupations. The survival of democratic values remains a vital issue. The policies and personality of Donald Trump continue to dominate the country's conversation. The divisions — between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, whites and minorities, young people and their elders — remain. The country is still debating whether climate change is real, whether minority preferences should persist, whether the nation should withdraw from global engagement or continue to dominate world politics.

And so, as a sense of unease still prevails, these are the topics to watch:

What is the future of MAGA?

The year began with the movement that Trump created on the ascendancy. It was muscular, confident, united, powerful. The year ends with MAGA weakened, less confident, riven with divisions, facing challenges for its future. Trump still leads it, but sometimes — the struggle over the Jeffrey Epstein documents is a prime example — the movement leads the president. Charlie Kirk's murder has left a vacuum that his widow and Vice President JD Vance are trying to fill, but whether TurningPoint USA remains the youthful vanguard of MAGA and retains its vigor now is uncertain.

What is the future of the Republican Party?

It is a commonplace to say that Trump has remade the GOP in his own image. Like Ronald Reagan, who did the same a generation earlier, the president is a convert to his party. His arrival, and the departure of the Republican Old Guard, have shifted the center of gravity of the party, nudging and then ramming it to the right.

But Trump, like Reagan before him, won't be on the American scene forever. George H. W. Bush succeeded the 40th president but spoke of a "kinder, gentler" style, for the presidency and for the country. If Vance ascends to the top of the greasy pole of the Republican Party, he may do the same — or, as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson did as they succeeded high-profile presidents — pledge to continue the work of his predecessor.

What is the future of the Democratic Party?

This is as vital a question for the country as the Republican conundrum. The party could wheel sharply to the left; this is the fond desire of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom. Or it could swing to the center, the hope of Josh Shapiro, JB Pritzker, Ro Khanna and Gretchen Whitmer. This struggle could be a reprise of the 1972 presidential campaign, when moderates such as Edmund Muskie and Henry Jackson sought to stave off the nomination of liberal George McGovern.

Whither the midterm congressional elections?

The struggles within the two parties will help shape these important contests, when the Republicans will seek to buck historical trends and retain control of both houses of Congress at the end of two years of an incumbent president. Right now, the smart money is on a big Democratic surge to take over the House and a smaller Republican defeat to retain GOP Senate control.

What is the prospect for national unity?

Not great if the Democrats move left and the Republicans move right. This would create a chasm between the two at a time when the country itself is in a political deadlock. The split is dramatic; a Pew Research Center poll showed that 46% of the country identifies with or leans toward the GOP, with 45% identifying with or leaning toward the Democrats.

What is the character of Donald Trump?

The man himself has changed little since he emerged a half-century ago as a playboy and tycoon: a charismatic figure with strains of narcissism and an impulse toward bullying. A shallow man with deep resentments, he nonetheless has an instinct for gauging popular sentiment and an irresistible drive toward power.

The president has resisted calls for him to act "presidential," which is to say to adopt a pastoral mien, to curb the bombast and to substitute charity for vulgarity. Most of his predecessors, even the earthy Johnson and the crude Richard Nixon, have succumbed to that tradition. Trump seems to believe his success depends on resisting that imperative.

Whether he resists another presidential custom — spending his last years in the White House cultivating a historical legacy that assures him a place toward the top of the presidential ranks — is another story. It is incontrovertible that Trump is the most consequential president since Franklin Roosevelt. Whether the controversies swirling around him qualify him for presidential greatness is a separate question. Those who do the rankings, and who write history, tend to be academic figures who lean to the left. But if Trump's assault on the country's universities prompts changes in the political profile of the faculty lounges, he could fare far better.

What is the character of the country?

The answer to this question is best answered by posing additional questions. Here are some of them:

Does the United States under Trump continue to assail the international diplomatic and financial superstructures that were largely created by Trump's presidential predecessors — or do NATO, the World Bank, the United Nations and warm relations with Canada, Europe and the Asian democracies survive the Trump years?

Is the United States an internal-oriented, isolationist fortress with high tariffs and little interest in global intervention? The tariffs face significant judicial challenges that the Supreme Court will adjudicate this spring. The military interventions in Iran, Nigeria and off the Caribbean shore of Venezuela suggest that Trump may be drawn to an active world role, in part as a distraction to domestic woes. Late-year meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggest this may be the case.

And the most important question of all: Will the Constitutional provisions of separation of power and restraints on executive overreach change the character of the American government? Americans aren't the only ones who will be observing this. As the youthful demonstrators of an earlier time chanted: The whole world is watching.

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David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.