BY MICHAEL SCHERER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NADAV KANDER FOR TIME

Even for Donald Trump, the distance is still fun to think about, up here in his penthouse 600 ft. in the heaven, where information technology'due south hard to brand out the regular people below. The ice skaters swarming Fundamental Park's Wollman Rink look like old-television static, and the Fifth Avenue holiday shoppers could be mites in a gutter. To even see this view, elevator operators, who spend their days standing in place, must button a button marked 66–68, announcing all three floors of Trump's princely pad. Within, staff members habiliment cloth slipcovers on their shoes, and then as not to scuff the shiny marble or stain the costly cream carpets.

This is, in short, non a natural identify to refine the common bear upon. Information technology's aureate and gaudy, a dreamscape of faded tapestry, antique clocks and fresco-fashion ceiling murals of gym-rat Greek gods. The throw pillows carry the Trump shield, and the paper napkins are monogrammed with the family name. His closest neighbors, at to the lowest degree at this altitude, are an international prepare of billionaire moguls who have decided to stash their money at One57 and 432 Park, the two newest skyscrapers to remake midtown Manhattan. There is no tight-knit customs in the sky, no paperboy or postman, no bowling over brews later piece of work.

Photograph by Nadav Kander for TIME
Photo by Nadav Kander for Time President-elect Donald Trump photographed at his penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in New York Metropolis on Nov. 28.

Behind TIME's Person of the Year Cover

And nonetheless here Trump resides, nether dripping crystal, with diamond cuff links, as the President-elect of the Us of America. The Hole-and-corner Service agents milling virtually prove that information technology really happened, this ballot result few saw coming. Hulking and serious, they gingerly try to stay on the marble, avoiding the carpets with their uncovered shoes. On his married woman Melania's desk, adjacent to books of Gianni Versace'southward fashions and Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry, a new volume sits forepart and center: The White House: Its Celebrated Effects and First Families.

For all of Trump'southward public life, tastemakers and intellectuals accept dismissed him as a vulgarian and carnival barker, a showman with big flash and little substance. Merely what those critics never understood was that their disdain gave him forcefulness. For years, he fed off the disrespect and used it to grab more tabloid headlines, to connect to common people. Now he has upended the leadership of both major political parties and effectively shifted the political management of the international order. He will soon command history'due south most lethal military, along with economic levers that can change the lives of billions. And the people he has to thank are those he calls "the forgotten," millions of American voters who become paid by the hour in shoes that volition never touch these carpets—working folk, regular Janes and Joes, the dots in the distance.

Information technology's a topic Trump wants to hash out as he settles down in his dining room, with its two-story ceiling and marble table the length of a horseshoe pitch: the winning margins he achieved in West Virginia coal country, the rally crowds that swelled on Election Day, what he calls that "interesting thing," the contradiction at the core of his appeal. "What amazes a lot of people is that I'm sitting in an apartment the likes of which nobody's ever seen," the next President says, smile. "And yet I stand for the workers of the world."

The late Fidel Castro would probably spit out his cigar if he heard that i—a billionaire who branded excess challenge the slogans of the proletariat. But Trump doesn't care. "I'm representing them, and they love me and I love them," he continues, talking nigh the people of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the struggling Rust Chugalug necklace around the Great Lakes that delivered his victory. "And here we sit, in very different circumstances."

The Last, Greatest Deal
For about 17 months on the entrada trail, Trump did what no American politician had attempted in a generation, with defiant flair. Instead of painting a brilliant vision for a unified time to come, he magnified the divisions of the nowadays, inspiring new levels of anger and fear within his country. Whatever you think of the human, this much is undeniable: he uncovered an opportunity others didn't believe existed, the terminal, greatest deal for a 21st century salesman. The national printing, the late-night comics, the elected leaders, the donors, the corporate chiefs and a sitting President who prematurely dropped his mic—they all believed he was merely taking the country for a ride.

Now it's difficult to count all the ways Trump remade the game: the huckster came off more real than the scripted political pros. The cablevision-news addict fabricated pollsters look like chumps. The fabulist out-shouted journalists fighting to carve up fact from falsehood. The demagogue won more Latino and black votes than the 2012 Republican nominee.

Trump plant a style to woo white evangelicals by historic margins, even winning those who attend religious services every calendar week. Despite boasting on video of sexually assaulting women, he still plant a style to win white females by 9 points. As a champion of federal entitlements for the poor, tariffs on China and wellness intendance "for everybody," he dominated among cocky-described conservatives. In a land that seemed to be bending toward its demographic time to come, with many straining to finally stride outside the darker cycles of history, he proved that tribal instincts never die, that in times of economical strife and breakneck social change, a charismatic leader could yet discover the enemy inside and rally the masses to his side. In the weeks subsequently his victory, hundreds of incidents of harassment, many using his name—against women, Muslims, immigrants and racial minorities—were reported beyond the state.

The starting bespeak for his success, which can be measured with but tens of thousands of votes, was the most obvious recipe in politics. He identified the central outcome motivating the American electorate and and then convinced a plurality of the voters in the states that mattered that he was the best person to bring modify. "The greatest jobs theft in the history of the world" was his cause, "I lonely tin fix it" his unlikely selling betoken, "slap-up once more" his rallying weep.

Since the bungled Iraq War faded into the rearview mirror, at that place has been only 1 defining upshot in American presidential politics, spanning party and credo. It's the reason Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren thunders that "the system is rigged" by the banks, and Vermont's Bernie Sanders got then much traction denouncing the greed of "millionaires and billionaires." It'southward what Marco Rubio meant when he said, "We are losing the American Dream," and why Jeb Bush claimed everyone has a "right to rising."

Nadav Kander for TIME
Nadav Kander for TIME President-elect Trump in the living room of his three-story penthouse on the 66th flooring of Trump Tower in New York City on Nov. 28

President Barack Obama identified information technology early, back in 2005, as a newly elected Senator delivering a commencement speech at tiny Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Obama's hymn to "the forgotten" was his ticket to the White House. "Yous know what this new claiming is. You've seen it," he said. "The fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no 1 walks out anymore … It's equally if someone changed the rules in the center of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks."

Every bit Obama explained it, the American promise was being put up on cinder blocks, buttressed by massive economic forces. His vow, repeated in his final 30-minute-long television advert in 2008, was change for the struggling, help for those who needed information technology, security for the ones who felt themselves slipping. Four years later on, he would return to the aforementioned playbook to defeat Mitt Romney, casting the Republican nominee as an obtuse private-equity moneybags aiming to bankrupt Detroit. A quote pulled from a focus group—"I'thousand working harder and falling behind"—became the watchwords of Obama's 2012 re-elect, hung on walls and placed atop PowerPoints. He had identified the upshot, and as long as his name was on the ballot, no i could vanquish him.

But Obama never fully delivered the prosperity he promised. In that location was certainly help on the margins, slowing cost growth for health care and providing insurance to millions, for case. He started some airplane pilot projects for manufacturing hubs, increased incomes marginally in the past couple of years and led the nation to recover from a vicious recession, with the federal government directly creating or saving millions of jobs. An unemployment charge per unit that peaked at 10% in October 2009 has been halved to 4.6% now, at the stop of his term. Simply the dandy weather systems of global alter continued under his lookout man. Ultimately, he grew resigned to the fact that at that place was simply and so much he could do in office.

The most recently available information tells the remarkable story: between 2001 and 2012, the median incomes of households headed by people without higher degrees—nearly 2-thirds of all homes—roughshod as they aged, according to research past Robert Shapiro, an economist who advised Neb Clinton'due south 1992 entrada. As American productivity and gross domestic production grew in the first decade of the new century, median wages for all Americans bankrupt away, effectively flatlining. Most Americans making less than the median income, but not so niggling as to authorize for poverty benefits, suffered income losses of almost v% between 2007 and 2013, according to research by Branko Milanovic, a onetime Globe Bank economist.

If yous lived in the nation'southward corking cities or held a college degree, you probably didn't feel the full fury of these forces. Average income declines for top earners were closer to 1% during the postrecession years. Global change is catchy that way. It enriches those in the developed globe who can handle $.25 and bytes, create something new or sell their piece of work at a distance. And it elevates the fortunes of the global poor, largely in Asia, pushing near a billion people from poverty into the beginnings of a new China-led centre class.

Just for the working men and women of developed countries, many of whom had made good livings in the 20th century, the price of others' success could exist seen all effectually, in peeling house pigment and airtight storefronts, in towns that went belly-upwardly when i of the two big employers closed store. The pressures pushed beyond the Atlantic Ocean. The size of the middle classes, every bit measured by those who earn 25% above or below the median income, dropped in the U.S. from the 1980s to 2013. Information technology besides dropped in Spain and Germany, holland and the U.K. It is no accident that all those countries at present observe themselves in the midst of political upheaval also.

The reasons for the shifts are more complex than the uncomplicated offshoring of manufacturing plants to United mexican states or China. Global trade and new applied science also pressure wages on jobs beyond the assembly line. When combined with rising health-insurance costs and incessant shareholder demands, companies constitute themselves unable or unwilling to give raises. Automation also accelerated as factories turned to robots, checkout lines retooled with self-operated terminals, and engineers developed cocky-driving trucks and taxis. Political gridlock in Washington, and the mild thrift it created, weighed everything down.

'I hoped for modify and never saw it'
But properly diagnosing the problem doesn't help much if you live in a place that has taken it on the mentum. In Shiawassee County, Michigan, which sits like a pit stop between Flint and Lansing, Obama won comfortably in 2008 and by a narrow margin in 2012. Then Trump tromped to victory this twelvemonth with a xx-point margin. Rick Mengel, a 69-year-sometime retired pipe fitter, was 1 of the matrimony members who voted for the young Illinois Senator in 2008, afterwards seeing him promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Obama once called "devastating" and a "big mistake."

"I hoped for change and never saw it," Mengel says of the Obama years. "I watched jobs go away, and any jobs that came in were at McDonald's. I'g not knocking McDonald's, only it's a starter job. Information technology doesn't brand the car or business firm payments." When a friend bought him a Brand AMERICA GREAT Again hat this year, Mengel took to wearing it everywhere he went. He never believed the polls that said Hillary Clinton would comport Michigan, because he can't remember ever sitting downwardly with a group of five or six people and finding more than than i for her. "Hillary came forth and she merely never said what she was going to practice," Mengel explains. "She but talked bad about Trump."

Offset he needed to define the bad guys. then he needed to knock them over.

Such voices were easy to find in cardinal Michigan, northeast Pennsylvania and western Wisconsin in the days after the election. Hither were historically Democratic counties that Obama had won twice, merely to see Trump then win comfortably. They are by and large white parts of the state, with struggling Principal Streets and low college-graduation rates, where the local dazzler salons do better business than the car dealers. They are places where people start their life stories past recounting the good-paying jobs their grandparents held, or the long-gone second homes upwardly on the lake where they used to play equally kids. In the 1970s, the bumper stickers on trucks in Prairie du Chien, Wis., would read Live BETTER. Piece of work UNION. Now the sign in the local Walmart says, SAVE MONEY. Live Ameliorate.

Joseph Dougherty, a former Democratic mayor of Nanticoke, Pa. who manages an automotive paint store, switched his voter registration this year for Trump. He was one of many in Luzerne County, a gorgeous river valley of rolling hills and former coal mines, who had lost patience. Trump cleared 78,000 votes in these hills, 20,000 more than Romney. "The Democratic Party forgot nigh its base. It's all less for us and more for someone else," Dougherty said, explaining how he could betray the party he was born into. "People are tired of surviving. People want to go along holiday, ameliorate their home, become a better machine, invest in their children's hereafter."

Economists looking at the voting patterns since Election Day have been able to draw clear correlations between the local effects of international trade and voter angst. In counties where Chinese imports grew betwixt 2002 and 2014, the vote for Trump increased over the vote George Westward. Bush won in 2000. For every percentage-point increase in imports, the economists institute an boilerplate 2-indicate increment for the Republican nominee.

In some places, the shift was even steeper. In Branch County, Michigan, near the Indiana border, near halfway between Detroit and Chicago, a iii% increment in Chinese imports coincided with an eleven% crash-land for Trump over Bush-league. The message of renewed protectionism, new tariffs and scrapped merchandise agreements broke through. "His arroyo was much more visceral," says David Autor, a Massachusetts Establish of Applied science economist, who co-authored the study. "He seemed to say, 'We don't accept to adjust to globalization. We can reverse it.'"

Information technology's hard to find any trained economist who believes that'southward possible, at least in the terms Trump uses. The supply chains are too broadly dispersed, the pricing efficiencies likewise embedded in our lives, the robots likewise price-effective. Then there are the dangers of massive disruption, the unquantifiable costs of trade wars, or the actual wars that could follow.

Merely Trump'south comeback on Obama's sales pitch was never nigh the details. He communicated on a deeper level, something he has washed all his life. His was not a campaign about the effects of tariffs on the price of batteries or basketball shoes. He spoke only of winning and losing, the states and them, the potent and the weak. Trump is a student of the tabloids, a principal of television receiver. He had moonlighted as a professional wrestler. He knew how to win the crowd. First he needed to define the bad guys. Then he needed to knock them over.

The Presidency as Improv
On December. 1, but weeks after his victory, Trump traveled to Indiana to announce that United Technologies, the 45th largest visitor in the land, had agreed to his demands and would retain 800 Carrier manufacturing jobs in Indianapolis. This by and large fulfilled a campaign promise he had made after the manufacturing plant became national news when video shot inside showed the despair of workers discovering their work was headed to Mexico. "Companies are not going to leave the Usa anymore without consequences," he declared at the plant.

3 days earlier, Trump met with Time in his towering dining room. The Carrier deal was basically done, cheers to a mixture of $vii 1000000 in land tax breaks, presidential threats and promises of taxation and regulatory reform. Only it was all the same a secret. His running mate, former Indiana governor Mike Pence, declined to talk over the bargain when a reporter ran into him in Trump's high-rise kitchen. But Trump could non end himself. "I'm going to requite you this off the record," he said. "Yous tin can utilize information technology if they announce."

For both bourgeois and liberal ideologues, including Sarah Palin and Bernie Sanders, the deal Trump struck with Carrier was an abomination, an example of government using taxpayer money to pick winners and losers. But every bit Trump told the story in his tower, ideology had goose egg to do with it. This was only another tale of a piddling guy getting his voice heard.

"So the other dark, I'1000 watching the news," Trump began. NBC'southward Lester Holt had introduced a segment on the Carrier plant featuring a union representative and a plant worker talking in a bar. The human looked at the camera and spoke to Trump, saying, "We want you to practise what yous said yous were going to practice." Trump claimed this shocked him: "I said, I never said they weren't going to move, to myself."

But of form he had, equally the news segment demonstrated. So Trump says he had no choice. He had to listen to his people. "He energized me, that human," the President-elect explained. "And I chosen up the head of United Technologies."

Shortly after he spoke those words, Reince Priebus, the next White Firm principal of staff, walked into the room. With the record recorders rolling, Trump began to issue new instructions. "Hey, Reince, I want to get a list of companies that have appear they're leaving," he chosen out. "I tin can call them myself. V minutes apiece. They won't be leaving. O.K.?"

He was talking as if he had merely realized—at that moment, in the middle of an interview—that he had the ability to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail. But it was simply a show. At that point, Trump had already had a similar talk with Neb Ford of Ford Motor Co., and he boasted of putting out iii other calls out to corporations with outsourcing plans.

This is the presidency equally improv, as performance art, with practiced guys, bad guys and suspense. It's a new thing for the Us of America. The reporters in the room, the voters who will read this article, the nation, the world—we are the audience. A quick written report who grew up in Kenosha, Wis., Priebus is far besides Midwestern to be mistaken for a showman. But he got what Trump was trying to practise, and smiled. "It worked for you final fourth dimension," he told the boss.

Missing the Message
History will record that Clinton foresaw the economic forces that allowed Trump to win. What she and her team never fully understood was the depth of the populism Trump was peddling, the idea that the elites were arrayed confronting regular people, and that he, the bang-up human being, the strong man, the offensive man, the disruptive man, the entertaining homo, could remake the physics of an ballot.

"You cannot underestimate the role of the backlash confronting political correctness—the united states vs. the elite," explains Kellyanne Conway, who worked as Trump's last campaign director. His previous campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, put information technology somewhat more delicately: "Nosotros always felt comfy that when people were criticizing him for being then outspoken, the American voters were hearing him besides."

In June 2015, Clinton's pollster Joel Benenson laid out the land of the state in a private memo to senior staff that was after released to the public by WikiLeaks. The picture of voters was much the same as the ane he had described to Obama in 2008 and 2012. "When they expect to the futurity, they encounter growing obstacles, simply nobody having their back," Benenson wrote. "They can't go on upwards; they work hard but can't motion ahead." The top priority he listed for voters was "protecting American jobs hither at domicile."

That message anchored the launch of Clinton's campaign, and it was woven through her iii debate performances. But in the closing weeks, she shifted to something else. No presidential candidate in American history had done or said and then many outlandish and offensive things every bit Trump. He cheered when protesters got hit at his rallies, used sexist insults for members of the printing, argued that an American judge should be disqualified from a instance because of his Mexican heritage. He would tell an allegory nearly Muslim refugees entering the U.S. that cast those families fleeing violence as venomous snakes, waiting to sink their fangs into "tenderhearted" women. And he would match those stories with encarmine tales of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who murdered Americans in common cold blood. "His condone for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous," Clinton argued.

His rhetoric had in fact opened up a new public square, where racists and misogynists could avowal of their views and claim themselves validated. And to further enrage many Americans, Trump regularly peddled falsehoods, without offering any evidence, and then refused to back down from his claims. He promised to sue the dozen women who came forward to say they had been sexually mistreated by him over the years. He said he might non accept the outcome of the election if it did not go his way. He described a criminal offence moving ridge gripping the country based on a selective reading of statistics.

For a Clinton campaign aiming to copy Obama's winning coalitions, all of this proved too large a target to turn down. Clinton had proved to be a subpar campaigner, and so with the FBI restarting and reclosing a criminal investigation into her email habits, her closing bulletin focused on a moral argument most Trump's grapheme. "Our core values are beingness tested in this election," she said in Philadelphia, the night before the election. "We know plenty about my opponent. We know who he is. The real question for united states is what kind of state we desire to be."

The strategy worked, in a way. Clinton got near 2.5 meg more votes than Trump, and on Election Day, more than six in ten voters told get out pollsters that Trump lacked the temperament for the job of President. But the strategy also placed Clinton too far abroad from the central effect in the nation: the steady decline of the American standard of living. She lost the places that mattered about. "There's a difference for voters between what offends y'all and what affects you," Conway helpfully explained after it was over.

Stanley Greenberg, the opinion-inquiry guru for Bill Clinton in 1992, put out a poll around Ballot Day and institute clear evidence that Clinton's conclusion to divert her bulletin from the economy in the final weeks cost her the decisive vote in the Rust Chugalug. "The data does not back up the idea that the white working class was inevitably lost," Greenberg wrote, "until the Clinton campaign stopped talking about economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and experience, and to keep on President Obama's progress." Interestingly, Greenberg said turnout among young, minority and unmarried female voters also decreased when the economic message Obama had used fell abroad.

Anecdote, Not Assay
The irony of this conclusion is profound. By seeking to condemn the nighttime side of politics, Clinton's campaign may have accidently validated information technology. By believing in the myth that Obama'due south election represented a permanent shift for the nation, they proved information technology was imperceptible. In the cease, Trump reveled in these denunciations, which helped him market to his core supporters his conclusion to nail the existing aristocracy. After the election, Trump's entrada CEO Stephen Bannon—the sometime head of a website known for stirring racial counterinsurgency and provoking liberal outrage—explained it simply. "Darkness is skillful," he told the Hollywood Reporter.

Nadav Kander for TIME
Nadav Kander for TIME The Rabble-Rouser: The former head of Breitbart, Stephen Bannon has pushed for a darker, more divisive populism, publishing articles that stirred racial counterinsurgency. He will be a senior adviser at the White House.

This is the method of a demagogue. The more the elites denounced his transgressions, the more his growing movement felt validated. Shortly after the campaign, Trump tweeted that 3 million votes had been cast illegally on November. 8, a false claim for which he has offered no hard evidence. Just when asked about it in his penthouse, he seems eager to talk well-nigh the controversy he stirred. "I've seen many, many complaints," he says. "Tremendous numbers of complaints."

In the dining room, a TIME reporter reads to Trump one of Obama'southward oft-stated quotes nigh trying to appeal to the country's improve angels and to fight its tribal instincts. Trump promptly stops the interview in its tracks. The human brain is wired for chestnut, not analysis, and Trump's whole career is a testament to this insight. Even when his business failures mounted, he could always boast well-nigh the ratings of his hit reality show, The Apprentice, or that time he finished structure on the Wollman ice rink exterior his window. "And so let me go upstairs for one 2nd and get y'all one newspaper commodity," he says. "Practice yous mind if I accept a one-second break?" And then he disappears into his living quarters higher up.

He returns a few minutes later with that morning'south copy of Newsday, the Long Island tabloid. The forepart-page headline reads, "EXTREMELY VIOLENT" GANG FACTION, with an article about a surge of local crime past foreign-born assailants. His point, it seems, is that the world is zip-sum, full of the irredeemable killers that Obama's idealism fails to see. The details are more compelling than any big picture. "They come from Central America. They're tougher than whatever people you've ever met," Trump says. "They're killing and raping everybody out there. They're illegal. And they are finished."

A reporter mentions that what Trump is saying echoes the rhetoric of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users in recent months. The President-elect offers no objection to the comparison. "Well, hey, expect, this is bad stuff," he says. "They slice them upward, they cleave their initials in the daughter's forehead, O.K. What are nosotros supposed to do? Be squeamish well-nigh it?"

Days later, Trump will have a phone call with the Philippine President, who called President Obama the "son of a whore" a few months ago. A readout from the Philippine regime subsequently announces that during the call, Trump praised Duterte's deadly drug crackdown equally "the right way."

Populism Takes Center Stage
A year from now, when Trump travels to the U.Northward. to address the world'southward leaders, he is likely to discover far more sympathy for this hard-edged populism than whatever thought possible in 2008. Trump is all simply rooting for information technology. "People are proud of their countries, and I retrieve y'all will see nationalism," he says, before describing the growing backlash against Muslim migration in France, Belgium and Germany. "A lot of people reject some of the ideas that are being forced on them. And that's certainly one of the reasons you had this vote, having to practice not with the European Marriage but the aforementioned thing."

In this view, Trump volition find common crusade with Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian President of Russia who, like Trump, seeks to challenge diplomatic and democratic norms. For reasons that remain unclear, Trump still refuses to admit the U.S. intelligence community's determination that Putin's agencies were responsible for stealing the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails released on WikiLeaks. "I don't believe it. I don't believe they interfered," Trump says. Asked if he idea the conclusion of America'southward spies was politically driven, Trump says, "I remember and then." Since the election, Trump has called not to consistently make himself available for intelligence briefings, say aides.

He has also and so far refused to acknowledge established diplomatic boundaries. When the Pakistani regime gave a long, manifestly verbatim readout of its President'south telephone call with Trump, Bharat's leaders reacted with strained fretfulness. And then Trump accepted a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, intentionally discarding a policy enforced since Jimmy Carter, which prompted an official complaint from Mainland china. In response, he sent out a tweet suggesting that such formalities, a bow to Chinese sensibilities, were ridiculous. "Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of war machine equipment but I should non accept a congratulatory call," it read.

As he proved in the campaign, at that place are sometimes few negative consequences in politics for offending or painting a fake picture of reality. History suggests the same is less true in international relations, where the stakes are not only votes at the ballot box only also the movement of armies and the lives of citizens. Among the tight circle that has formed around Trump, one can sense some unease as they endeavour to navigate a mercurial dominate to a successful first term. There is talk of strategies for steering him when he is wrong, for appealing to his own intention to succeed. And Trump himself, true to his reality-show persona, has a history of allowing his staff to fight among themselves for his attending. "If I had to describe his deliberating style, I would say that it'due south very similar to Socratic method, simply like in law schoolhouse," explains Priebus. "He asks a lot of questions, he wants answers to those questions to exist thorough and quick, and he relies on the people giving him the answers to be accurate."

Merely a day before, Conway had gone on television to suggest that picking Romney, an old Trump foe, for Secretary of State was a terrible idea. Some Trump aides told reporters that this amounted to a betrayal of the boss, who had not nevertheless made up his mind. Trump seemed to relish the spectacle. "I might not similar it, simply I idea it was fine," he says at the dining-room table. "Otherwise I would have called her upwards."

Nadav Kander for TIME
Nadav Kander for Fourth dimension The Reconciler: After serving as Republican chair during the chaotic campaign, Reince Priebus volition get Trump's starting time White House chief of staff, interim equally a bridge to the Washington establishment. The Trump Whisperer: A former resident of 1 of Trump's buildings, pollster Kellyanne Conway became his campaign director in August. She is known for her blunt advice, sometimes through Television receiver appearances.

At the same time, Trump has tried to curtail some of his own bravado since the campaign. The mean solar day after the ballot, Priebus says, Trump told his aides in his apartment, "Guys, I'chiliad for everybody in this country." Last year, Trump boasted about the bang-up instincts that led him to support forced displacement for all undocumented immigrants and a ban on Muslims from entering the country. He has since backed off both positions. "I mean, I've had some bad moments in the campaign," he says. But and so he notes that his poll numbers seemed to ascension after several of them, including his insults of Arizona Senator John McCain's war service.

Trump claims that his unpredictability will be his strength in office. It certainly has left the political world guessing. He has and then far refused to describe how he will separate himself from the conflict of owning a company and employing his children who do regular business organisation with foreigners. On the ane hand, he supports a broad policy platform shared by conservatives in Congress: a reduction in regulations, lower taxes, a pull back from the fight confronting global warming, and a cabinet filled with free-market ideologues. On the other hand, he has signaled that he is willing to break from Republican doctrine. His designated Treasury Secretarial assistant, the old Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has said Trump would back off his campaign proffer that he would give big cyberspace tax windfalls to the wealthiest. "Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions," Mnuchin said.

While Trump offered public words of support for the Iraq War at the time, he sees George W. Bush's corking adventure as a disaster at present. He rejects wholesale the social conservative campaign to continue transgender people out of the bathrooms they choose, simply promises to reward conservative ideologues with a Supreme Court Justice of their liking. And he has little patience for the organizing principle of the Tea Party: the thought that the federal authorities must alive inside its means and lower its debts. Instead, he seems to favor expensive new infrastructure spending and taxation cuts as economic stimulus, much similar Obama did in 2009. "Well, sometimes you have to prime the pump," he says. "So sometimes in order to get jobs going and the land going, because, look, nosotros're at one% growth." The next mean solar day, the 3rd-quarter gross-domestic-production estimates would be released, showing an increase of iii.2%, upwardly from i.four% before in the twelvemonth.

He also suggests that some stock analysts may have misread his intentions. The value of biotechnology stocks, for case, which enjoy large turn a profit margins under current law, rose 9% in the day after Trump's election, a rally of relief that the toll controls Clinton had proposed would not happen. But Trump says his goal has not wavered. "I'm going to bring downwards drug prices," he says. "I don't like what has happened with drug prices."

As for the people who were brought to the U.S. illegally equally youths and now have piece of work visas under Obama, Trump did non dorsum off his pledge to end Obama's executive orders. But he made clear he would like to find some future accommodation for them. "We're going to work something out that'south going to brand people happy and proud," he says, showing a sympathy for young migrants that was often absent during the campaign. "They got brought hither at a very young age, they've worked here, they've gone to schoolhouse hither. Some were adept students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they're in never-never country considering they don't know what's going to happen."

Nadav Kander for TIME
Nadav Kander for TIME The True Laic: A devout evangelical Christian and a erstwhile leader in the U.Due south. House, Vice President–elect Mike Pence will help Trump navigate the agendas of conservative lawmakers and activists.

Trump'southward America, for Improve and Worse
The truth is no i really knows what is going to happen, up to and including the occupants of Trump Tower. "It's a very exciting time. It's really been an astonishing time," Trump says, as the country however tries to come to terms with what he accomplished. "Hopefully we tin can accept some of the drama out."

That'southward not likely to happen anytime soon. Post-obit a President who prided himself on sifting drama through the sieve of careful consideration, Trump's methods, for better and worse, tend to exist closer to the reverse. And this is at present Trump's America to run, a victory made possible either because of historical inevitability or individual brilliance, or some combination of the two.

It'due south an America with ascension stock markets despite the tremors of a trade state of war. A country where a few jobs saved makes upward, in the moment, for the thousands however parting. This is a land where a man will stand up in a aeroplane headed to Allentown, Pa., to demand allegiance to the new leader—"We got some Hillary bitches on here? Come up on man, Trump! He's your President, every goddamn one of you!"—and so become banned by the airline from always traveling again. It's where a hijab-wearing college student in New York reports existence attacked and jeered at in the adjacent President's name, where American-born children ask their denizen parents if Trump will bear them, where white supremacists throw out Nazi salutes in Washington meeting halls for their President-elect.

It'southward a country where many who felt powerless accept a new champion, where much frustration has given fashion to excitement and where politics has get the greatest show on earth. Here men in combat helmets and military assault rifles now patrol the streets exterior a golden residential tower in midtown Manhattan. And most every day at about the same time they let pass a street performer who wears no pants, tight white underwear and cowboy boots, then he tin sing a song in the lobby for the tv cameras with Trump'southward name written in red and blue on his butt. It'southward an America of renewed hope and paralyzing fear, a state few expected less than a year ago. Because of Donald John Trump, whatever happens side by side, information technology will never be like information technology was before.

With reporting by Zeke J. Miller/New York; Elizabeth Dias/Saginaw, Mich.; Haley Sweetland Edwards/Nanticoke, Pa.; and Karl Vick/Lancaster, Wis.