Trump doesn’t need Congress in order to cut benefits. As president, he controls federal agencies. Three proposed rule changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture may ultimately take food stamps away from 3.7 million people. And SNAP isn’t the only welfare program on the line. Through the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, the White House has already approved changes to state Medicaid programs that cost thousands of people their health care. That’s why West Virginia teacher Sam Yurick is disturbed by the prospect of Trump’s reelection. Many of Yurick’s students live in poverty and often miss school because of their living conditions. “When they do make it in, they have headaches from not eating or aren’t completely recovered,” he said. Trump boasts of his support in West Virginia, but if he gets four more years to slash welfare, Yurick’s students might get sicker. “The amount and quality of instruction will get eaten into more and more,” he said, “as we put more and more of our energies into making up for ways the world outside our classrooms has failed the kids we serve.”

—Sarah Jones

If social media seems particularly vitriolic, deceptive, and stupid in 2020, wait until 2024. The top executives at platforms like Facebook and Twitter have already demonstrated a willingness to bend backward to satisfy baseless Republican accusations of suppression; just as the news media found itself bullied into false equivalencies by charges of bias at the end of the 20th century, social media will feel obligated to give conservatives more leeway in what they post. One particular beneficiary of this will be Donald Trump Jr., who already has an Instagram account with 2.4 million followers and a Twitter account with 4.4 million followers — both larger than any current Democratic presidential candidate besides Bernie Sanders — to which he posts unbelievably popular jokes, memes, and complaints. Newly empowered by his father’s victory in 2020, Don Jr.’s online presence will only get louder.

But Don Jr. isn’t just shitposting on Instagram. He’s building a political base for himself. President Trump will not run for a third term in 2024, less for any particular legal reasons (by then, his party would have an inescapable Supreme Court majority), than because he’ll be turning 78 and will be exhausted from another four years of security briefings and Cabinet meetings that take him away from his true vocation: watching and tweeting about cable news programs. What reason would he have to continue in a job he hates, especially if he could garner nearly all the benefits of the presidency — the graft, the platform, the attention — by handing the job off to someone tied closely to him? Like, say, his son?

Don Jr., among his father’s most energetic and devoted surrogates, is already highly popular in the Republican Party. He has openly speculated about running for governor of New York, but more recently he’s said to be considering a run in a more Trump-friendly state in the Mountain West. (Some allies have reportedly pushed Don Jr. for chairmanship of the RNC.) An Axios–Survey Monkey poll from December found that 29 percent of Republicans already would consider voting for Donald Trump Jr. in the 2024 election. That’s nearly double the support for his more polished sister, Ivanka, and behind only Vice-President Pence. Assuming enough of Trumpism’s senior-citizen base is still alive, Don Jr. could sail to the presidency or at least face off in a fiery run against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump Senior, meanwhile, could keep tweeting about politics to his heart’s content.

—Max Read