What does Trump truly believe and what will he do as a result?
Earlier this week, I identified five propositions that I think represent Donald Trump’s core beliefs. They are:
He won the 2020 presidential election.
The federal bureaucracy is out to undermine him (or worse).
Illegal immigration is out of control and should be halted.
Our European allies and China have played the U.S. for suckers.
There should be a very strong presumption against the U.S. going to war.
In this post, I want to examine each proposition and how it might (and how it should) affect Trump’s presidency.
The first proposition — that Trump won the 2020 election — is false, I think. I don’t doubt that there was fraud in that election. However, I very much doubt that it was of a magnitude that cost him the election.
Trump lost in the electoral college by 306-232. Had he won Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, the electoral vote would have been tied, and Trump very likely would have won when the House, voting by state delegation, broke the tie.
Trump lost Georgia and Arizona by about 11,000 votes and Wisconsin by about 20,000. I’ve never seen good evidence that all three margins, or even one of them, were the result of voter fraud.
Trump, though, seems determined to have the Justice Department investigate the 2020 election. Voter fraud, even of an insufficient magnitude to determine the outcome of a presidential election, may be a problem worth investigating. But the relevant issue is voter fraud now, not in the past.
Thus, a good faith investigation of voter fraud would focus on 2024, the most recent election, not 2020. Trump’s focus on 2020 suggests that the investigation would be intended to feed his ego, not to find out whether, or to what extent, voter fraud is a current problem. That’s a waste of resources.
Trump’s second core belief — that the federal bureaucracy is out to undermine him — is true, in my opinion. I base this view, first, on my experience in government under presidents less hated in Washington than Trump.
While I was in school, for example, I spent one summer conducting research intended to show that the HMO policy Nixon wanted to implement wouldn’t work. I’d be surprised if any federal agency ever conducted research intended to show that the preferred policy of a liberal Democrat president wouldn’t work.
I also base my view on what happened during Trump’s administration. In the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, for example, some career employees resisted the dictates of the political appointees. And when the DOJ filed a lawsuit against Yale over its race discrimination in undergraduate admissions, the Civil Rights Division had to bring in lawyers from other units to staff the case because career lawyers within the Division wouldn’t participate.
Trump plans aggressively to tackle the problem of bureaucratic resistance to, and downright undermining of, his second administration. He should. But how?
The best approach, I think, is to make it easy to fire federal employees who resist or drag their feet. It’s my understanding that Trump intends to make the changes needed to effectuate this. I hope he succeeds. Every employer should be able to fire insubordinate employees.
There is also talk about large scale reductions in the workforce. Although there might be merit to this idea in certain agencies for other reasons, I don’t think indiscriminate firings will effectively address the problem of resistance. That problem isn’t the number of bureaucrats; it’s their ideology and unwillingness to set it aside when necessary to comply with the decisions of leadership.
Moving departments to Red States might help, although the pool of people qualified to work in these states for, say, the Department of Justice is likely to lean left even in states Trump carried by large margins. In any case, transferring various departments out of the Washington, DC orbit would likely take a good chunk of Trump’s four-year term to accomplish.
Finally, I want to emphasize that transforming a federal bureaucracy requires more than leaders who hate it and/or who have criticized it on television. Transforming a department requires a good administrator, preferably one with experience in government or at least experience dealing with the department in question. Career employees are likely to run circles around political appointees who don’t understand the myriad ways in which bureaucrats can undermine leadership.
Trump’s third core belief — that illegal immigration is out of control — is true, and was an important factor in Trump’s victory. It’s estimated that during Joe Biden’s time in office there were 10 million encounters with illegal immigrants at U.S. borders and nearly 2 million known “gotaways” who evaded the U.S. Border Patrol altogether.
Trump promises to secure the border and to deport illegal immigrants on a massive scale. Securing the border is imperative. Deportation, to the maximum extent possible, of illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in the U.S. (on top of the crime of being here illegally) is also an important goal.
Deportation beyond that raises concerns. To be sure, no one who is in this country illegally, no matter for how long, can justly complain about being deported. However, such deportations will widely, and not irrationally, be viewed as inhumane.
Even if one doesn’t view it that way, the optics of deporting illegal immigrant families who have been here for many years and have been productive and law abiding, coupled with the likely effect of mass deportations on the economy, counsel against mass deportation.
The Trump administration will have enough difficulty securing the border and deporting large numbers of criminals and recent arrivals. In my view, it shouldn’t try to do more.
Trump’s fourth core belief — that our European allies and China have played the U.S. for suckers — is also true. For example, the tariff on cars imported into the U.S. is around 2.5 percent. Meanwhile, the EU charges a 10 percent tariff on new U.S.-manufactured cars. Similar imbalances exist with regard to China. And although the contribution by our NATO allies to the defense of Europe has increased, thanks in part to Trump, for many nations it still falls short of a fair share.
Trump will likely use the threat of slapping huge tariffs — say 20 percent — on European imports to force Europe to lower significantly its tariffs on imports of our goods. In addition, he likely will use threats to induce European nations to spend more on defense, as he did in his first term.
In the best case scenario, European tariffs come down and defense spending goes up. In the worst case scenario, Trump raises our tariffs above the current European levels on our goods, Europe responds by raising tariffs, and both economies suffer. In addition, Europe resists increased defense spending and Trump pulls out of, or significantly reduces, his commitment to helping Europe defend itself.
There are, of course, intermediate scenarios. It’s impossible to say with confidence which scenario will prevail.
Trump’s final core belief — that there should be a very strong presumption against the U.S. going to war — is valid, I think. How the presumption should be applied depends on the interest we’re protecting, the probability of U.S. success, and the likely cost in lives and treasure of success. The latter two factors — probability of success and cost — are difficult reliably to calculate in advance, which is why the presumption against fighting should always be strong.
It’s impossible to say with confidence how Trump will apply his strong presumption against war to various hot spots around the world. In the case of Iran, it seems more likely that he will green-light an Israeli strike against that regime’s nuclear facilities than that he will have the U.S. participate in such a strike. But who knows?
In the end, I think Trump should act in accordance with the core beliefs I’ve identified, other than his belief that he won the election of 2020. If he and his appointees act wisely, America will benefit greatly. If he (and they) don’t, the consequences could be disastrous.
This looks like a presidency with an usually high ceiling and an unusually low floor.
The conclusion in your final sentence summarizes both my hopes and my fears. But since I am an optimist both by temperament and as an observer of his first term I believe it likely that a lot more good than bad will result from Trump’s second term. And as importantly, I would have found it extremely difficult to find any reasons for optimism if the Harris - Walz ticket had been elected.