Lower your expectations and be clear-eyed about what a second Trump term would mean.
Lower your expectations and be clear-eyed about what a second Trump term would mean.
D onald Trump may yet win another presidential term. Even those who consider that outcome vastly better than the alternative should go in with their eyes open: A second Trump term is unlikely to go well.
If Trump Wins: Policy
Winning always feels good. But the morning after the election is settled is likely to be the best day of a second Trump presidency.
To start with, consider policy. Personnel is policy, especially within the executive branch, and we still don’t know what kind of people Trump will hire this time around. But we have some clues, and they’re not encouraging. Trump’s first term was, on balance, a good one up until Election Day 2020. But many of the policy highlights of that term were the work of more traditional Republicans in the administration — exactly the sorts of people who have been shut out of the campaign thus far. If Trump follows through on his reported insistence on hiring only people who validate his stolen-election theories from 2020, he will tilt the second-term staff toward people who are less conservative, less principled, and less competent than his first-term staff. That’s of a piece with Trump’s never-ending war on Republican governors such as Brian Kemp, a habit that has continued into the general election.
Replacing Mike Pence with J. D. Vance is both a symptom of that shift and potentially an accelerant of it, given that Vance got the job in large part thanks to lobbying by Don Jr. and Eric, who seem to want him to help weed traditional conservatives out of the hiring process. Vance himself has shown a willingness to continue going after foreign-policy hawks with vitriol even as he wraps himself in tribal loyalty when refusing to distance himself from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tulsi Gabbard is doing the same.
Speaking of personnel, there is Trump himself. At 78, he would be the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, a few months older than Joe Biden in 2021. Trump is visibly more vigorous than Biden was; he hasn’t spent the past year hiding out in his basement. He is blessed with good genes (his father lived to 93, and his mother to 88), and unlike Biden, he has never required surgery on his brain. But time remains undefeated. Trump is more prone to senior moments than he was eight years ago, he has seemed off his game since he was shot in mid July, his dietary habits are famously terrible, and he would be in office until he is 82. The prospect of a Trump administration less controlled by Trump himself might have been reassuring with Pence as second in command, but is much less so when the alternative is Vance, a 40-year-old with no real executive or leadership experience who has been in public office for less than two years.
On judges — Trump’s most unqualified success story the first time around — he has parted ways with the people responsible the first time around, and he has dragged his feet on releasing a promised judges list, for no good reason.
On abortion, Trump ran the most pro-life administration in living memory. But he has been running away from that record, just as his embrace of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushes Trump to run further away from the greatest executive-branch accomplishment of his first term: Operation Warp Speed.
Economic policy is Trump’s stronger suit. His first term reduced taxes and regulations and oversaw the best economic times for American workers in years. Trump remains obsessed with the stock market as a barometer of how well he’s doing, and he still has some serious free-marketers in his circle. But he’s also trumpeted a much more aggressive tariff hike in the second term, as contrasted with the more strategic approach he tried to take to trade fights in the first. True, it will be hard to get Congress to sign off on that, and the theory of the tariff hike is that it would be offset by pie-in-the-sky income-tax relief. The choice of Vance is, again, a bad sign that Trump is leaning more toward economic interventionism, protectionist trade policy, and increased regulation.
Foreign affairs paint a more optimistic picture, but if elected, Trump will inherit a lot of messes, and unlike in his first term, he can’t rely solely on deterrence in dealing with aggressors like Russia. Here, too, the selection of Vance is a bad sign. Consider one area where Trump has generally been strong, if not always consistent: China. His first administration was especially vigorous in cracking down on Chinese espionage in the United States. But Trump has scurried to oppose Congress’s mandate for ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it shut down — a key litmus test of seriousness in confronting Chinese influence and surveillance in the United States. Trump’s stated reason for doing so is his vendetta against Mark Zuckerberg and his belief that harming TikTok would aid Facebook — an example of how Trump’s personal grievances, especially from 2020, not only undermine his better policy instincts but also make him potentially subject to emotional manipulation by hostile foreign actors.
That’s just what Trump will do. There’s a whole separate discussion about the havoc on our system from another round of what Trump’s enemies will attempt against him if he’s back in office.
If Trump Wins: Politics
Then there’s politics, which is both important in itself and important in how it shapes policy. Trump has managed to get this close to the presidency without doing much to improve his baseline unpopularity. Republicans are likely to enter a second Trump term with 51 Senators — maybe 52 or 53 if things really, really go surprisingly well — and probably an almost evenly divided House, too. That would at best create a small window in which to pass budgetary and tax policy and maybe replace some retiring Supreme Court justices. Either way, it is highly likely that even a fairly normal midterm will put Democrats back in the saddle in the House.
The Senate and governors’ maps in 2026 should be relatively favorable to Republicans. Aside from Susan Collins in Maine, the only purplish state with a Republican-held Senate seat is North Carolina (Thom Tillis), although those two states alone could flip the Senate majority if Republicans have just a one-seat margin — plus, there would be a special election in Ohio and elections in Iowa, Texas, Kansas, and a few other red states that are not sure things. Democrats would be defending seats in Georgia, Michigan, Virginia, and New Hampshire. The governorships require Republicans to defend Nevada, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio (as well as possibly New Hampshire and probably Vermont, plus Virginia in 2025), several of which will be newly open, while Democrats will be defending Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota). It’s easy to see how, if Trump is in office and yet again unpopular, Republicans could lose some ground and blow a ton of opportunities.
But then, even if there is no massively destabilizing foreign crisis, think of the business cycle. We are probably overdue for a recession sometime in the next four years. If there is one, it is not hard to imagine Trump reaching the levels of unpopularity that George W. Bush hit in his second term. Given the tools at their disposal, presidents can cause recessions, and they can exacerbate or alleviate them, but the one thing they cannot do is stop them from happening.
Temperamentally, it is one thing for Trump to handle good times, or to handle crises that entail conflict, enemies, and tests of nerve. It is another for him to face adversity that is essentially impersonal. That requires not only resiliency but the capacity to inspire and empathize with the voters. As we saw during the pandemic, this is the worst sort of crisis for Trump’s style of leadership.
Not Playing to Lose
Cautioning that another Trump term will go poorly is not necessarily an argument that Republicans and conservatives should want to lose this election, and still less that they should try to do so. It’s one thing to recognize in retrospect that there were some elections you were better off losing, but a political party in particular will forfeit the faith of its voters if it doesn’t play to win every time.
Worse than that, every election that turns into a blowout can have disastrous consequences. Presidential turnout historically has a large impact on Senate races and House races. Republican Senate candidates ran ahead of Trump in a number of places in 2016 and in 2020, but — in part due to Trump’s influence and endorsements yielding a comparatively weak and MAGA-heavy field of Senate candidates — most Republican candidates for the Senate have spent most of the year running behind Trump. The party thus has no realistic choice but to get every available voter out if it wants to win those seats, and getting them behind the presidential nominee is the only option on offer.
Republican governors can, and do, still accomplish separation from Trump. But at least so long as Trump retains a stranglehold on who gets nominated and who runs, it has gotten a lot harder for Republicans in Senate and House races to do so.
Jonathan Martin made the case in Politico that Republicans could rebuild in the Senate faster with Harris in the White House. At some level, that’s true any time a party is out of power — and, as we saw in 2022, it’s less true so long as Democrats can run against Trump as if he’s still an incumbent, but with none of the advantages of holding power. What Martin didn’t offer is any realistic reason to believe that Trump’s influence can be made to go away quietly if only he loses an election, other than perhaps the implicit hope that Trump can be jailed for a significant period of time under a Harris presidency.
Arguments that Republicans would wake up and learn their lessons if Trump loses might be right — but he might also yet again succeed in blaming the defeat on the pro-life cause. Indeed, given how hard the Democrats are leaning into abortion in the first presidential election post-Dobbs, it is almost a certainty that a victory for Kamala Harris will be interpreted by both parties as a reason why Republicans should retreat further on life, and Democrats should not moderate on the issue at all.
There are also long-term consequences to losing badly. One is that weak candidates allow their opponents to move, at least rhetorically, to the center rather than focus on base turnout — that’s what Barack Obama did in a blowout Senate race in 2004, and Josh Shapiro did the same in a blowout gubernatorial race in 2022. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are trying to repeat the feat this time around, even though her rhetorical moderation is plainly just cover for gaining power to move hard to the left in office.
Another consequence is that Democrats, in particular, do things with power that can never be undone. Lopsided Republican losses in 1932, 1936, 1964, and 2008 all yielded large, permanent expansions of the entitlement state.
Playing Not to Lose
There are many respectable reasons to want Harris and Walz to lose, even to Trump. They’d be bad on economic policy, bad on foreign policy, and bad on social policy. Both of them, and Harris in particular, are bad systemically as well, elevating an authoritarian leader bent on attacking our independent system of courts and the Constitution. And a defeat for this campaign would be a repudiation of all manner of things that richly deserve repudiation, including: the lawfare tactics deployed against Trump, the persistent Democratic strategy of trying to elevate Trump and MAGA within the GOP, the pro-abortion zealotry of the post-Dobbs Democratic campaigns, the Court-packing proposal, the conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden’s condition, the ongoing effort to run a fraudulent campaign that misrepresents who Harris and Walz are while avoiding all engagement with questions about their records, and the connivance of the political press in all of the above.
Of course, some of the arguments for wanting Trump to win — rather than just wanting Harris to lose — are positively perverse. One is that a Trump victory will finally ensure, thanks to the 22nd Amendment, that he can’t run again. Another is that we won’t get a repeat of the Stop the Steal movement and January 6 (at least on the Republican side) if Trump wins, because he’ll have no incentive to challenge the outcome if he wins. Nor is he likely to promote such a thing in 2028, because when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot, he doesn’t care. Those may not be morally good arguments, but they are practical realities.
All of the above explains why Republican voters are still flocking to Trump, why the party as a whole is acting rationally in trying to get him elected, and why even many Trump-skeptical conservatives still prefer to see him defeat Harris. But what follows, if Trump wins, is likely to be mostly disappointment.