Trump: Theory vs Practice
Trump's grasp on power is far more tenuous than people realize.
The Republican party won an surprising upset in 2024, securing both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Trump and his hangers-on have attempted to claim a mandate for a maximalist agenda, one that will see Project 2025 implemented down to the tiniest detail, Trump cronies appointed to cabinet positions without resistance, and every whim of the MAGA movement made manifest. In reality, Trump has one of the slimmest majorities of an incoming President in living memory, a dysfunctional House and an often hostile Senate. He's got 18 months to make his agenda a reality before Congressional Republicans have to start running for re-election in the 2026 midterms. Constrained by time, his limited coalition in Congress, and institutional inertia Trump can only make a small fraction of his agenda a reality. Do not take comfort in this, for even a limited version of Trump's Agenda will still be devastating to people at home and abroad.
Congress
Before getting into Trump's actual agenda we need to examine his coalition in Congress. While a few votes are still being tallied, at the moment Republicans appear to have no net gains in the House, and a 53-47 seat majority in the Senate. Trump himself failed to win a majority of the popular vote, beating out Harris by just 1.67%, the 6th narrowest margin of victory in history. The House is set to see an even narrower majority for Republicans after the inauguration, as Trump has taken to naming several House Republicans to Cabinet positions, a strategy that has already cost the party at least one seat with the resignation of Matt Gaetz. Gaetz's seat will almost certainly be filled by another Republican, and a MAGA one at that, but that will require a special election, currently set for April 1, 2025. The same will be the case for any of the other House Republicans who manage to get confirmed by the Senate, meaning that for Trump's first 100 days he faces the prospect of an even narrower House majority than the one that removed Kevin McCarthy from the Speakership a little over a year ago.
As for the Senate, Trump's relationship with that chamber's leadership has only deteriorated since leaving office. Shortly after the election, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell orchestrated a closed-doors leadership election to appoint a successor, resulting in Minority Whip John Thune's election as the next Senate Majority Leader. Make no mistake, Thune will be the Junior King in a McConnell Coregency, but Thune himself is no Trump toady. He openly pushed back on Trump's lies that he won the 2020 election, and Trump tried to push Kristi Noem to primary Thune in 2022. Trump has clearly recognized the hostility of the upper house, demanding an unscheduled recess to appoint his cabinet nominees by decree, and threatening Senate Republicans with primary challenges funded by Elon Musk's super PAC. Thune, McConnell, and other Senate Republicans have all denied Trump's request for a recess, and are by all accounts already pushing back hard against most of his cabinet picks. Even if they didn't the simple fact is that a 53-47 seat majority cannot defeat a filibuster from Democrats or dissenting Republicans, continuing a trend of narrow Senate majorities going back since 2010.
Cabinet
When Trump first took office in 2017, the Republican Party leadership made sure to stack his administration with more establishment cabinet picks and national security officials to moderate Trump's worse impulses. Trump spent the next 4 years gradually purging these people from his administration, and going into 2025 he has committed himself to only staff the White House with sycophants. This strategy is verbatim to what Project 2025 promised, but its facing roadblocks before the first Senate hearing. By all accounts a great many Republicans consider most of Trump's cabinet picks unacceptable, no surprise given how they include a gaggle of some of the most laughably unqualified right wingers in the country. Trump's more palatable options like Rubio, Ratcliffe, and Zeldin won't face much resistance in the Senate as they all have experience with the office they're expected to head, and/or cordial relationships with the party leadership. That said, if the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth actually make it to Senate hearings, Trump faces the prospect of multiple failed confirmation fights, each a body blow to political capital.
While some of the more extreme cabinet nominees will slip through, simply because the Republicans do agree with Trump at many policy positions, the final makeup of Trump's initial cabinet will include more than a fair share of compromise candidates. Trump will do what he did in his first term, and fire Cabinet secretaries he dislikes until he has a suitable stooge that managed to make it through confirmation. But the thing is, none of this might actually matter, because Trump doesn't really use cabinet secretaries to drive policy, he uses them to be servile instruments of his ever changing mood. If you want to know who Trump will listen to in his second term, it will be the same as his first term: the last person who flattered him. On the flip side, Trump's has a tendency to allow personality conflicts to derail his agenda, and this will not be limited to the cabinet. We're already seeing the beginnings of the typical Trumpian "Allies to Sworn Enemies" cycle with Elon Musk. The reasons are trivial, as it always boils down to ego, and with these two particular men a battle of egos is a certainty. I figure within a year Musk will be out of Trump's inner circle and cooperating with the next round of investigations into the administration. The same could be true of JD Vance, who is prone to embarrassing the Trump campaign and by all accounts dislikes Trump personally. Vance can't be removed from the Vice Presidency without resigning of is own volition, but can be sidelined, and we've already seen what Trump is willing to do to a non-compliant VP.
Military
Trump's conflicts with his own government will extend to the military, where Trump has explicitly stated his intent to reshape to serve him without question. We now know from biographies published over the last 4 years that Trump's relationship with military leadership was far more contentious than previously reported. Continuing to follow the outline of Project 2025, Trump has sought to extend his purge of the government to the military, and has drafted plans for a "warrior board" of retired senior officials that can weed out "woke generals" somehow involved in the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan (read: non-yes men). Given his desire to use the military to carry out mass deportations, and frequent statements supporting the use of political violence against political opponents, its difficult to not slip into a catastrophizing spiral or reject the threat outright, but I tend to come at this from a different direction.
Firstly, the President's power to relieve military officers is more limited than you'd think. Essentially for the President to dismiss an officer of the armed forces during peacetime said officer has to either be found guilty in a general court martial, or a replacement must already be confirmed by the Senate. While Senate Republicans will be happy to promote gay bashing, woman hating, transphobic bible thumpers, its unlikely to promote unqualified officers. Alternatively, The President can simply ask for an officer to resign, and under any other President it would be nearly impossible to imagine a scenario where said officer would refuse to resign when requested by their Commander in-Chief. With Trump's history of antagonism toward to the military and the Constitution, its entirely plausible that if his Warrior Board/Kangaroo Court recommends an officer for dismissal, said officer might actually refuse. If it comes down to a court martial, the Uniformed Code of Military Justice has a track record of being rather inflexible to the whims of the civilian leadership. Trump's final option would be to get Congress to declare war, presumably on Mexican drug cartels, and while I don't discount this as a possibility, he'd need a genuine casus belli to avoid defections.
Trump's military purge, to whatever degree he is able to achieve it, is fundamentally limited by this one inescapable fact: there simply aren't enough potential lackies in the armed forces who are also qualified to be promoted to high ranking positions. General officers, particularly candidates to be Chiefs or Deputy Chiefs of Staff of the uniformed services are some of the most well educated people in the United States. There hasn't been a Chief of Staff of any branch in decades who didn't at least have a masters degree from one Ivy League university. The armed forces are led by liberal arts majors with an extreme sense of esprit de corps and loyalty to the Constitution. Finally, even if none of that were true, Article 92 of the UCMJ prohibits service members from following unlawful orders, to the point where they themselves could be charged and court-martialed, regardless of how high up the chain of command the order came. The threat of a military purge is not the creation of a death squad loyal to Trump, but rather the sewing of chaos and distrust from within the ranks to the civilian leadership and degrading military readiness.
Domestic Agenda
With the current makeup of Congress, and the Federal bench being full of hundreds of judges confirmed during the Biden administration, Trump's domestic agenda faces serious impediments. So what can Trump actually do once he takes office? Legislatively, tax cuts, and at least some cuts to government spending will more than likely pass without much fuss if Trump allows Congressional Republicans to write the legislation for him, which he was happy to do in his first term. But the rest of Project 2025 like the proposed bans on pornography, the repeal of Obamacare, or a national abortion ban would at best become dramatic bits of political theater that would ultimately fail to clear the Senate. I'm not going to cover EVERYTHING in Project 2025, but suffice to say that even with a Republican Trifecta, its unlikely to be realized in his first 100 days. Moreover, any spending programs will in all probability be undone by the end of the year once Congress comes to another debt ceiling fight. Speaker Mike Johnson will have to make the same choice every Republican leader has had to make since 2010: bend to the extreme right of the party and crash the economy, or compromise with House Democrats and Senate Republicans so he can remain employable after leaving Congress. Johnson will almost certainly chose the latter, which Trump will publicly hate, privately be thankful for, and the House will once again be embroiled in a leadership battle.
Trump's biggest domestic agenda items, a universal tariff and mass deportations, can at least begin without involving Congress. The tariff is a fait accompli; in fact you could argue Trump is merely building on a program initiated in his first term, and that Biden never reversed. The proposal calls for a 60% tariff on goods from China and a 20% tariff on everything else coming into the United States. The effects will be devastating, particularly to the tech sector which relies on a highly distributed global supply chain, however there will be exceptions for goods in the USMCA trade zone, along with some of the other bilateral trade agreements signed in Trump's first term. As for Trump's mass deportations, that's where things get a bit trickier. Trump has appointed anti-immigrant hardliner Tom Holden as border czar, who is already calling for immigrants to "self-deport," which a lot of recent arrivals to the Untied States will do to avoid fines, imprisonment, or general persecution. But for the bulk of the country's 11.7 million immigrants who are undocumented, leaving voluntarily is not an option. In addition, 16.7 million people share a home with family members who are undocumented, 6 million of which are children under the age of 18. While the United States has expelled immigrants before, including actual US citizens as they did during the Great Depression nothing on this scale has ever been attempted. The closest thing Holden has to a plan beyond "self deportation" is nation-wide cooperation with law enforcement agencies at every level of the government to carry out mass arrests. While Holden can organize this in theory, in practice the cost of identifying and arresting that many people would be astronomical. Trump has already stated he intends to declare a "National Emergency" so he can use military funds and personnel to carry out mass deportations, because a spending bill would assuredly fail in Congress. This piece of Trump's agenda will begin as a messy rollout that relies heavily on the limited staff of ICE and the Border Patrol, along with state and local law enforcement. That said Blue States and Cities are already refusing to enforce, and they will drown the White House with legal challenges that will stall the deportations.
Eventually the legal challenges to Trump's National Emergency will come before the Supreme Court, which will probably make a ruling staying implementation while litigation proceeds, passing the ruling back down to lower courts. However, deportations within existing law can ramp up as they did under Obama. Trump can strip 1.5+ million people of temporary status visas and end refugee resettlement with relative ease. Bans on new visas and an asylum seekers would contribute to an overall slowdown of legal immigration, while Trump can also issue executive orders denying the children of immigrants social security cards and other basic services in an attempt to undo birthright citizenship. In addition to all of these efforts, proposals to denaturalize legal immigrants will face major hurdles in the courts, but the financial burden to naturalized citizens will be devastating. And all of this will only serve to make the Labor Shortage in the US far worse than it was already going to be, contributing to rising inflation on top of what will come from Trump's tariffs. But even with this reduced deportation scheme, Trump would still be targeting around 4x the number of people deported in both of Obama's terms. Families will be torn apart, and people by the tens of thousands will be forced into prisons and camps while awaiting processing. Scores of people will go broke trying to defend themselves and their families with legal challenges, and many more will fail and be ejected from their adopted country with little to no resources.
With his legislative agenda stalled or at least heavily curtailed by Congress, Trump will seek to use the power of the executive to carry out his agenda without the need of Congress... except that his plans to gut the administrative state will mean that there won't be enough people who actually know how to implement anything. We're already seeing this with his "Department of Government Efficiency" (I'm not using the stupid acronym). Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can execute some version of Trump's desire for large-scale firings of the federal workforce, but they are wildly ill equipped to navigate the federal bureaucracy. And if personality conflicts drive a wedge between the President and one or both of these men, the effort itself could be stalled. That said, there will be many human casualties of even an incompetent rollout of any of Trump's plans. LGBT people, recent immigrants, and anyone Trump sees as a political dissident will be fired early in the term, and countless people will lose job related benefits they rely on for themselves and loved ones.
Foreign Policy
The one thing I'm not too concerned about is Trump's ability to change US foreign policy, and the reason is simple: Trump is a coward and lazy. In his first term whenever he was put in a position to act in such a way that risked nuclear war, or even conventional war he always backed down. Again partly due to cowardice, partly due to the fact that wars are extremely complex operations and he has a habit of losing interest in something if he has to actually make a lot of decisions. That's not to say there won't be escalation, Trump likes random acts of escalation, but by in large the world is not at serious risk of a new global conflict under Trump anymore than they would have been under Harris. What Trump can do, and what I think he will do is launch limited military incursions into Northern Mexico, in part to combat the Cartels, and in part to justify positioning troops along points of entry across the US-Mexico border. MAGA is particularly enamored with the idea of invading Mexico, but Trump will chose the path of least resistance like he always does and at most launch drone strikes, special forces operations, and maybe some occupations of border towns on Mexico's side of the border. Mexico can't really stop this, and I doubt they'll do anything more than raise hell at the UN. Will Trump succeed with this operation? Probably, mostly because Trump tends to set very low bars for success.
Outside of starting a new war, most observers' greatest worry about Trump is that he will enable the actions of America's adversaries, but geopolitics is seldom that simple. Take the Russo-Ukraine War where the Russian war economy is finally losing steam, Trump and Putin are apparently at odds on how to end the conflict, while the rest of NATO is letting Ukraine take long range weapons off the chain. Short of Trump just switching sides and sending US troops to Ukraine, there's not much he can actually do at this point to reverse Russia's fortunes. All he can do is make victory for Ukraine and Europe more costly by withholding commitments to NATO or possibly even withdrawing US assets from Europe (he can't break the treaty itself, only Congress can do that). Then there's Israel-Gaza, where the situation is a more grim, but not apocalyptically so. Trump will have no problem using US Air Power to assist Israel in its latest grab for territory, and we should be prepared to see some truly horrific scenes of human misery in the Levant. As for a hypothetical war with Iran, that is a very real possibility, but US involvement would be limited for the aforementioned Coward/Lazy reasons. Trump might even try to pull Israel back from the brink, and if Israel proceeds unilaterally, the US would probably only commit air and naval power to assist an Israeli air war. Oh, and don't worry about nukes, the Iranians have no reliable delivery system and I doubt they have the technical acumen to build a bomb. Given the worst kept secret in the middle east is Israel's possession of a nuclear deterrent, I think if Iran could build a bomb, they would have tested one by now.
The last subject on foreign policy I'd like to cover is Trump's most hated nemesis: China. The 60% tariff that the incoming administration intends to levy on all Chinese goods will string in the US, but they'll be devastating within China itself, especially now. China's economic downturn is now impossible to deny, and even the Chinese government's official figures can't sugarcoat the situation. Trump and Biden were largely united in their policy toward China, and both men have worked to constrain Chinese supply chains and access to global trade wherever possible. The worry is that China will retaliate with an attack on Taiwan, believing that Trump will abandon the island should it risk a wider war with the PRC. Trump is stacking his administration with China hawks like Alex Wong and Marco Rubio, and any generals he nominates to replace those he intends to remove will assuredly be China hawks as well, if for no other reason than that the US military has treated China as a near-peer adversary for the last 20 years. For Taiwan, the worst thing Trump has implied about a second term relationship with the island is the prospect of Taiwan somehow paying the US to come to their aid, because Trump essentially believes the US should be running a global protection racket. Regardless of what Trump wants, the simple fact is that the national security infrastructure of the United States is moving in lock step to cripple the PRC and avoid direct confrontation. China knows they can't take the US in a fight, but since all wars begin with a failure of intelligence, there remains the risk that China strikes out against Taiwan if they believe that a quick war is their only chance to survive. Its an improbable scenario, but one we should be prepared to face.
I've done my best to cover most of the bigger issues at play for Trump's second term, but I freely admit I have not been able to cover all of them. With a President as mercurial as Trump, facing a legislature this dysfunctional, its all but impossible to get a full picture of what we're in for. My goal with this piece was to merely to describe the scope of what Trump and the 119th Congress will be able to achieve. Next, we'll get into the consequences of those actions.
Click here to read Part I. and here to read Part II