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A perennial feature of Trumpism is that Trump is constantly launching threats and shiny objects of all sorts. Some of those he’ll follow through on; most he won’t. They all put opponents back on their heels. And that is, of course, the point. Trump lets it all ride and acts on what seems to serve his interests in the moment. Or maybe he doesn’t. That’s also the point. He’s the actor; his opponents are the reactors.
That spurs a knock-on feature of Trumpism. His opponents are among the biggest proponents of the seriousness of his threats. We’ll come back to that.
Polls have come out in the days since the election showing clear majorities favoring Trump’s “mass deportation” plans. Or at least they seem to. One I saw over the weekend asked if respondents supported Trump’s plan start “a national program to find and deport all immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.” 57% of respondents to a CBS/YouGov poll said they supported that. But let’s note that this is already U.S. government policy. There is a question of what’s prioritized, just what lengths the government goes to to find people. But the question in the poll described what is actually current policy. When asked how he plans to start “mass deportation,” incoming “Border Czar” Tom Homan says they’ll focus first on criminals and terrorist undocumented immigrants. Well, that is especially current U.S. policy.
It’s reasonable to wonder how much of this is even going to happen. During his first term, Trump couldn’t get Mexico to pay for his wall. He was then unable to get congressional funding for it. Eventually, he ended up pulling money from other programs to fund what was largely a continuation of the border fence which was being built under President Obama, as well as replacing earlier barriers erected during during previous administrations. I don’t want to dig too far into old debate. The point is that Democrats agreed that there was a wall and that it was super bad. Republicans agreed that there was a wall and that it was awesome. But there kind of wasn’t a wall. Everyone just agreed to pretend otherwise.
When I say this, I know many people will say I’m being naive or burying my head in the sand. I disagree. First of all, I’m not saying there won’t be a mass deportation program. And I’m certainly not saying there won’t be lots of abuses, willfully predatory uses of government power to punish the people Trump and his supporters view as enemies. What I’m saying is that we don’t know what forms those will take. We think we do, based on Trump’s boasts and threats. But we don’t. We hear aphorisms like “when they tell you who they are, believe them.” But again, it’s not so simple. Many of these things are like “infrastructure week,” or the always-in-receding distance replacement for Obamacare.
Tariffs might easily be the same.
Trump’s Treasury designee now says that he believes that at heart Trump is a free-trader and that those 10% tariffs are just a starting point for negotiations. Almost everywhere else people greatly overstate presidential power. Tariffs are the one case where the law gives Presidents a remarkably free hand. As Paul Krugman notes, the across-the-board tariffs are as likely as not to be less wholesale protectionism than a massive engine of corruption. Tariffs covering your industry or company’s imports — unless you’re nice to Trump, in which case you’re in the clear.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published this fascinating article about how Apple CEO Tim Cook managed to develop an almost entirely private and personal channel and relationship to and with Donald Trump that served Apple extremely well. Apple will likely do well in any tariff scheme. I suspect Elon Musk’s DOGE’s entity, about which there’s currently so much hype, will end up being mostly just that. Will this panel(?), board (?), entity (?) actually be part of the government? Will the government fund it? Will it come under all the onerous public disclosure requirements that entails? With all those high-flying VCs now saying they’re going to be involved? I’ll believe it when I see it. Those laws and requirements don’t exist anymore? Well, maybe. But once you get into court it can become more complicated.
Above all else, Donald Trump’s superpower is his willingness to ignore anything he said yesterday or at any other point before now in the interests of what feels right today. That gives him an almost unimaginable flexibility. It goes all the way back to those last months of 2015 when he was dispatching one normie Republican candidate after another. He’d send up one flare and by the time the others figured out what he was saying, held a meeting and figured out how to react, he was already off to the next thing.
There’s no magic remedy or strategy for contending with how Trump operates. In some respects, simply a recognition of this fact is key to having the stamina to contend with him. But it probably means needing to be ready for different threats without running after them until they fully materialize. It also means opportunities to jump on as much as it means threats to guard against. Above all else, Donald Trump is someone who wants to be loved and in charge. For all the talk about a new and improved, more focused and practiced Trump, that’s still who he is.