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Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A new Congress was sworn in a week ago.

Despite the battle over the passing of a budget and a threatened revolt from the fiscal hardliners, the usual chaos.

Mike Johnson was quickly chosen as speaker. When Donald Trump takes the oath of office, Washington

will be under a conservative trifecta.

Yet despite the landslide that Trump describes, the GOP's margin in Congress is actually one of the smallest ever.

They can barely afford to lose a vote if they're going to pass any legislation.

Democrats, needless to say, are still licking their wounds over the election.

Progressives and liberals and centrists are engaged in a process you could call soul-searching,

or less charitably, a blame game over which faction turned voters toward Donald Trump.

Representative Roe-Connor of California is firmly in the progressive camp, and he thinks that

the Democrats have got to regain the trust of economically struggling voters.

Kana's district is in the heart of Silicon Valley, and he once worked as a lawyer for tech

companies. So he knows these tech billionaires. He talks to them and he thinks they're forming a dangerous

oligarchy from Elon Musk on down, all to the detriment of everyone else. I spoke with

Rokana last week. So we are talking on the day that the election of Donald Trump has been ratified without incident in Congress.

And unlike the last time around, there's very little talk of opposition.

We've seen, for many people, media leaders included a kind of bending at the knee, some of them

trying to anticipate where the advantage of cooperation and even collaboration will be. So it seems

to be an entirely different mood at all levels of society preparing for a second Trump presidency.

Trump's whole thing is intimidation.

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