Ron Elving

There are tremendous divisions among some of his supporters who are not office holders, especially among the cultural activists and people in the media, the podcasters and online influencers, the ones who have provided so much of the heat around Trump.

They're at odds with each other over Israel, over Epstein, over Venezuela, and they're battling over who gets the MAGA megaphone when Trump begins to fade.

This term has featured serious policy shifts like the Trump tariffs and the deportation drive and the military strikes without congressional approval.

We also see a lot of personal retribution against Trump's political enemies and provocative displays of will, such as the partial demolition of the White House and the Trump rebranding of the Kennedy Cultural Arts Center and the Institute of Peace.

In all of this, we see a willingness to test the boundaries, try the locks on the doors, see what's open, see what happens, and ultimately to see who will step up to enforce the law.

In the year to come, we can expect these confrontations to continue and quite possibly escalate.

What will you be looking at especially closely next year?

Once again, this year, the focus will be on Trump, not just what he does and what he says and what he spreads online.

The focus will also be on how he looks and acts and behaves in highly personal ways.

We've already seen a lot of this attention, especially in the visual and social media.

The president turns 80 on June 14th.

He's planning a lot of high profile events around his birthday, but he would not need those events to bring attention to his age.

Are people going to be asking, is this the same Trump?

Does he still have his famous mojo?

And when the midterms have passed, the spotlight must inevitably shift to the question of succession.

Should those babies automatically become citizens even if their parents aren't?

The longstanding answer has been yes, but there has also been a body of opinion opposed to that.

We had anti-immigration surges in the mid-1800s and in the 1920s, and Trump's broad-scale assault on immigration has in effect closed the southern border and unleashed aggressive deportation efforts.

But this birthright citizenship case, seeking to change the way we have long understood the Constitution, would be his biggest trophy yet.

It's called the U.S.