Keith Duggan: Trump is changing America in ways that will reverberate long after he is dead

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

80% : This was an acquisition that delighted Trump and, sometimes when they were together on stage, you could catch Trump staring at Bobby's ageing kid, almost smitten.
71% : On November 13th, Trump returned to the White House for the first time since 2021.
69% : But Trump won!
58% : But CNN had Trump on every night.
58% : Long before midnight on November 5th, it was clear that Trump would return for a second term in the White House.
52% : [ 'Hillbilly' memoir analyses root causes of Trump phenomenonOpens in new window ]
52% : The victory places Trump among those rare political figures to have loomed over the American political landscape and society for a dozen-plus years.
51% : Biden and Trump.
49% : That Philadelphia debate might have been Harris's finest hour - and might also have been the moment when Trump decided to trust his instinct rather than his advisers.
46% : The televised town-hall event was underwhelming: the ballroom was like an airport hangar and lacked the crowd energy on which Trump thrives.
46% : "Politics is tough and in many cases it's not a very nice world," Trump offered.
44% : The US president is a once-in-a-lifetime master manipulator of the unseen energies that sway the electorateA magnificent, treacherous blast of true winter arrived in Iowa on the same week as Donald Trump did.
43% : Trump, meanwhile, had acquired a disparate collection of celebrity toys as he went.
43% : Almost half of Latino voters and a quarter of black men who voted did so for Trump.
40% : In Iowa, Trump had offered a retort to his adversary which he would repeat at rallies through the year.
40% : Even his harshest critics acknowledged that Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime master manipulator of the unseen energies that sway the electorate.
39% : By mid-April, Trump was setting out on a daily trudge to an unglamorous courtroom in Centre Street in lower Manhattan for his "hush money" trial.
39% : If it's fair, Donald Trump gets acquitted.
39% : And by late summer, Trump had Elon Musk galumphing around the stage with him.
39% : It is no great thing to have grace in victory, but Trump seemed a little humbled by Biden's old-fashioned show of largesse.
31% : One Iowan, Rebekah Hayney, had driven an hour from Ogden (population 1,659) because she wanted to see, in person, what Trump had to say about the issue that mattered most to her: pro-life.
29% : Trump had declined to participate in the Republican primary debates.
29% : Two nights later, Trump made a messianic entrance at the first night of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.
26% : A reluctant media performer, Harris passed her first vital test by completely outshining and outsmarting Trump in their head-to-head debate in Philadelphia.
26% : The attacks on Harris bordered on the unhinged: in September alone, Trump referred to her as "retarded", "mentally impaired" and a "dummy."[ Joe Humphreys: Why 'they're eating the dogs' was a stroke of political genius by TrumpOpens in new window ]The Maga-Republican supporters may have revelled in this stuff, but tens of millions other Republican voters just gritted their teeth and put up with it in the belief that for all his violent rhetoric, Trump would divert America from the disastrous path of deregulation and open borders and put them first again.
25% : "Trump was in dark, brooding form on his winter campaign in the Midwest.
24% : This is where Donald Trump became Donald Trump.
23% : Although Trump would repeatedly describe the moment when the bullet fizzed past his ear, he has seldom if ever mentioned his assailant by name.
20% : Trump dominated the news and sucked up extraordinary volumes of oxygen.
18% : Seven weeks later, Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts.
13% : First came Biden's implosion in his televised debate against Trump in Atlanta on June 28th.
2% : Arch Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was there, chanting through a loudspeaker and warning: "We are going to be here every single day talking to you fake news media freaks and letting you know that Donald Trump did nothing wrong."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.