Donald Trump will arrive at the 2024 Republican convention — his Republican convention, finally and completely, without the dissent of 2016 or the pandemic that overshadowed 2020 — closer than ever to a second term. But the likelihood of a Trump restoration has not yet brought clarity about what it would actually usher in.
With Trump there is always the whipsaw, the forays toward normalcy and the reversion to a darker mean. Asked on the debate stage whether he would spend a second term seeking revenge on his political enemies, he promised that “my retribution is going to be success. We’re going to make this country successful again.” A few days later, he was on Truth Social, amplifying a post demanding a military tribunal for Liz Cheney.
With Trump, too, there is always the question of how his policy impulses interact with his personal laziness. He recently made a big show of repudiating Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation blueprint stuffed with severely conservative proposals, and then he produced a Republican Party platform stripped of some gun-rights and pro-life language and pledging to protect Medicare and Social Security from any kind of cuts. Are these signs that Trump knows he can just roll over conservative activist groups in pursuit of popularity? Or are they meaningless gestures, because personnel is policy and he’s going to hire all the guys who worked on Project 2025?
There’s no singular Trumpism whose workings we can confidently predict. Instead there are Trumpist scenarios and Trumpian personae — whose interactions, if he wins, will give his second term its shape.
First, there is Trump the moderate. This has always been an underestimated aspect of his brand, because his moderation is united to excess and demagoguery. But Trump is not a movement conservative, not an ideologue outside of core obsessions like trade and immigration, and he no longer has to fear revolts from his right the way he did in the days when he felt the need to pick a religious-conservative Reaganite as his vice president.
Glance over the G.O.P. platform, focus on the substance rather than the capital letters and the Trumpian flourishes, and you can see outlines of the pitch the moderate version of Trump wants to make to swing voters. I’ll be right-wing on crime and immigration, but I won’t touch your retirement programs. I’ll be anti-woke and pro-patriotism, but I won’t be Mike Pence on social issues. I’ll keep the tax cuts I passed last time, but I won’t necessarily pile on more tax cuts for the rich. I’ll keep America out of unnecessary wars.
The moderate Trump could be a politically formidable president. He could inherit an improving economic picture and just tinker around the edges with tax policy, pick cultural fights mostly on issues where a majority is on his side and do a limited version of his more sweeping ideas — meaning a border wall and stepped-up deportations but not huge detention camps, or new protectionist measures but not an across-the-board 10 percent tariff. Like Bill Clinton, he could triangulate occasionally against his own activists, secure in the loyalty of his voting base.
Something similar could have been said about Trump in his first term, but he never seized the opportunity. Instead his moderate side was often muted in favor of persona No. 2, Trump the doctrinaire right-winger.
Again, apart from a few issues, it’s not necessarily that Trump has core right-wing beliefs; it’s more that he likes conservative Republicans, he vibes with them, he appreciates their pugilism and their loyalty.
That’s how he ended up with so many House Freedom Caucus allies in his first term, even though he was officially out of tune with their limited-government priorities. And that’s how something like Project 2025 could be especially relevant to his second term. It’s not the blueprint for dictatorship or theocracy portrayed by liberal hype artists, and a number of the claims circulating about its contents are simply false. Instead, it’s a populist-inflected restatement of movement-conservative priorities that the right has been trying and failing to implement for decades — plus a long list of résumés of potential footsoldiers for a guerrilla war inside the administrative state.
An effective second Trump administration could sift those ideas and résumés for plausibility and competence and pick some intelligent bureaucratic battles. But it could also let itself become an ideological echo chamber that always pushes the harshest version of Trump’s favored policies (as happened with family separation in the first term), while being drawn into an array of policy skirmishes on terrain that’s generally friendly to Democrats, handing the liberal opposition constant variations on the same kind of headline: “Trump orders right-wing ideologues to destroy the Department of Education/cut disaster relief/gut environmental protection/etc.”
That’s why a Project 2025 presidency could be a best-case scenario for Trump’s opponents, even if they would portray it in apocalyptic terms — the swiftest path to his unpopularity and their political recovery.
But that also depends, in part, on how much the president leans into persona No. 3 — Trump the imperial president. This persona was a long way from reality in the first term: Trump postured as an authoritarian, but couldn’t even control his own White House. But after the endgame of his first term showcased his willingness to push all the way to a constitutional crisis, it’s understandable to fear that in a second go-round he would be more effective at using the powers of the presidency, less hemmed in by his own party, eager to test the limits of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, less flailing and more overtly Caesarist.
The Trump-unbound scenario could involve everything from attempts to use the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies to attacks on Congress’s spending power (claiming that the power of “impoundment” allows him to simply cancel programs he dislikes, for instance) to open defiance of the judiciary. And such brinkmanship need not usher in an actual dictatorship to profoundly destabilize the country.
On the other hand, Caesarist excess also could be an even greater gift to Trump’s opponents than an unpopular right-wing policy agenda — collapsing his popularity, alienating the moderate allies he still needs and ending with him neutered, even if he cannot be removed.
If you fear an empowered Trump, then, what you should fear most is a combination of the first and third personae — a president who builds up his popularity with policy moderation and then leverages that moderation to get away with constitutional brinkmanship and persecutions of his rivals.
A combination of further-right ideology and attempted Caesarism, on the other hand, seems more likely to bring back the fourth Trump: Trump the great mobilizer of opposition, whose primary effect on American politics is to forge a broad anti-conservative coalition, isolate his own supporters and empower the cultural left.
This was the most important Trumpian persona, arguably, of 2017-20 — the Trump that handed Democrats the House in the 2018 midterms, the Trump that stirred up mass protest movements and created a unity of ideological purpose between the centrist establishment and the progressive left, and the Trump who then watched impotently as wokeness seized the commanding heights of American culture in the summer of 2020.
Today progressivism is weakened and fractured, the anti-Trump coalition likewise. But there might be no greater gift to these forces than a second Trump presidency that tries to be hyper-imperial and hyper-ideological at once. And it’s that kind of interaction between Trump and his mobilized enemies that I personally pray that any second term avoids: a return to the dynamics of 2020, the mutual enmity that gave us the left’s cultural revolution and then Jan. 6, not either side’s victory but just the widening gyre.
The scenario I tend to hope for is a second term that proceeds like other second terms before it, and gradually ushers in the post-Trump era through a persona we haven’t seen before: Trump the lame duck.
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