The inauguration on January 20 ushered in one of the most tumultuous periods in recent U.S. political history.

If President Trump completes his term, the nation faces three more years under the MAGA banner.

His staunch supporters eagerly anticipate this continuation, while critics seem more reserved following the whirlwind events of 2025.

What might the upcoming year bring?

President Trump kicked off 2026 with a bold move by orchestrating the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, deploying American forces into Caracas.

He has since radically ramped up his demand for US control of Greenland for so-called “security” reasons, despite the fact that a decades-old treaty allows the US military widespread access to the island.

And he’s floated suggestions of cancelling the mid-term elections and securing a possible – if unconstitutional – third term in office.

Trump thrives on being perceived as unpredictable, but in these cases, one expert says, we should take him at his word.

“I think Trump has told us what is on his agenda,” The Australia Institute’s international and security affairs program director Dr Emma Shortis told 9news.com.au.

She said on the Greenland issue, Trump by now had “talked himself into a position where he almost can’t not act”.

Meanwhile, European leaders were “scrambling” to respond, but Shortis said they had options available that could hurt the US, including their anti-coercion responses.

But Shortis doubted that would be enough to sway the White House, which has imposed its own tariffs on European allies, a year after Trump made them the centrepiece of his return to power.

“As our prime minister has said, tariffs are ‘an act of self-harm’, but Trump doesn’t care about that,” she said.

Domestically, she said, Trump was almost certainly serious about invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops against protesters in Minneapolis and other cities where citizens are battling ICE.

But the possibility of that actually taking place was “very unpredictable” depending on the public response.

The key to understanding the breakneck audacity of the second Trump administration, Shortis said, lies in the composition of the president’s inner circle.

The fabled “adults in the room” are almost entirely absent this time around.

“I don’t want to give them too much credit, but they did curb (Trump’s) worst impulses,” Shortis said.

Added to that, Trump himself and the people around him, such as senior advisor Stephen Miller, had a much keener understanding of the possibilities of presidential power – and no interest in keeping to traditional norms.

“This was a generational election victory for the Republican Party,” Shortis said.

That was also why people should take seriously Trump’s suggestion that the mid-term elections this year be cancelled.

“He will joke, he will fly kites, he will normalise it,” she said.

“People will write their cute explainers about the law and the Constitution and that will normalise the idea further.

“They want to hold onto power.”

Typically, the US mid-terms see the president’s party lose seats in the House, where Republicans hold a wafer-thin majority.

But as relatively unpopular as Trump appears to be, Shortis said he was “so good” at controlling the narrative, and with such a loyal base, that the results this time were less predictable.

Additionally, the Democrats are wallowing in historic levels of unpopularity as well, widely perceived as “weak and indecisive” and more focused on internal disputes between party factions.

Meanwhile, the potentially galvanising issue of the Epstein files has been silenced by Trump’s recent moves in Venezuela and his rhetoric on Iran and Greenland, as well as the ordered release being smothered and delayed by the US Department of Justice.

But Shortis said it was unlikely all of the White House’s recent actions were motivated to keep the files out of the headlines.

“I’m not totally convinced Trump is just distracting,” she said.

“They are committed to this radical reshaping of American society, and of the world.”

Shortis laughed at the idea of trying to predict the next moves of the Trump presidency beyond the next few months – particularly to the end of Trump’s term in 2028.

But she fully expected the administration in some form to attempt to keep him in power past his term limit, even as potential successors like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance weigh their chances.

“(Trump) is convinced, probably rightly, that he created this movement and only he can lead it, direct it,” Shortis said.

“There isn’t a clear successor to Trump.”

Trump’s legacy, in part, she said, was the final destruction of trust in many American institutions, including DOGE-gutted government agencies – but she said that was not a problem he had created.

“Trust was already eroded by the time Trump came along, it’s what allowed him to succeed,” Shortis said.

The “political will and capital” needed for a new administration to rebuild that trust and create a “new America” would be huge, she said.

“Then again, the United States is quite remarkably good at rebuilding itself,” she said.

“The America we thought we knew before Trump is not coming back.”