Our politics have reached an odd period of stasis after a year of grueling change. 

Americans, by and large, seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach to Donald Trump, and for good reason. For one thing, they need a break, as the last year has been exhausting.

It’s hard for most people to work up outrage about a cabinet nomination before it’s sent to Congress, or to get interested in some no-hope liberal gambit to stop Trump in the Electoral College. The public needs a respite from politics and punditry. 

On a deeper level, however, we really have no idea what the next year is going to look like politically.

There are some safe bets, sure: Republicans will try to repeal Obamacare, force through a tax cut, and deregulate business as much as possible. These are the things that would be at the top of the agenda of any Republican president.

But although the GOP is well positioned to force through much of their wish list, we can’t be sure how much of it will happen. And that’s because, overanalyzed as he is, we still have no idea what Trump really wants to do as president.

He wants a booming economy, sure. But given his mercurial temperament and lack of an ideological foundation, it’s totally unclear what he thinks we need to do to achieve that.

Or take foreign policy. Mr. Trump campaigned as something of a noninterventionist, or at least a believer in the cold, hard realities of realpolitik. But he’s also surrounded himself with hawks like John Bolton, who may be in line to be the second most powerful man in the State Department.

The president-elect says he wants a closer relationship with Russia and better trade deals. Beyond that, his feelings on international relations have always been somewhere between hopelessly vague and totally schizophrenic: We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq, but we should have stolen the oil. Our wars in the Middle East are wrongheaded, but ISIS will be bombed into oblivion. He’s bellicose one minute, a dove the next. The only guiding principle Mr. Trump has when it comes to foreign policy seems to be his belief that all strategic decisions should be totally uninformed by any kind of large humanitarian goals.

His domestic priorities are likewise somewhat mysterious. What happens when he can’t get Mexico to pay for a wall? Will he actually go through with mass deportations? Anti-immigration activists like Ann Coulter and Mickey Kaus are already worried that the president-elect’s promises on all that might not amount to much.

Political capital is a fleeting thing; he will only be able to push for so much. Knowing that economic performance is the single most important measure he’ll be judged by, does he really try to go after immigration? Or will he instead prioritize tax cuts in an attempt to rev up growth?

Here’s the thing about cutting taxes for the rich: It kind of undermines your populist credibility. Plus, big tax cuts on high earners is not a popular policy. He’ll sacrifice a lot of capital if he goes for something like that.

So maybe infrastructure investments are where he’ll concentrate his efforts, a move that could easily get him into a fight with Paul Ryan. Meanwhile, Ryan may try very hard to get the president-elect to go along with a profoundly unpopular Medicare privatization scheme. It’s not implausible that, despite effectively controlling all three branches of government, the Republican coalition could fall apart within a matter of months.

In that event, maybe he moves left. For all we know, he’ll be unveiling a universal basic income plan sometime over the next year, perhaps in concert with some moonshot plan to cure Alzheimer’s in an attempt to bend the Medicare cost curve and save entitlements. And with Ivanka whispering in his ear, maybe he appoints some judges who are rather liberal in their outlook. 

Or perhaps he tries to govern as the most right-wing president in American history. The point is, nobody really has any idea what the Trump presidency is going to look like. For Democrats, he’s still a moving target. For Republicans like Ryan, he’s still something of an ally of convenience.

A year and a half after he began his quest for the presidency, we are still remarkably ignorant of what President-elect Trump really wants to do, and what he’s willing to do. But power reveals, and we’re about to find out.