Yglesias offers his predictions - of a sort - as to what Trump 2.0 could look like. I was worried it was going to be some version of "This is the day Trump truly became president" to some form of sanewashing.
There is at least some evidence from 2017-2021 what we might expect from Trump with the huge caveat that his loss in the 2020 election seems to have unhinged him even further.
He notes that Trump actually did moderate some 2012 GOP positions. He's not a zealot on abortion, but he appointed the judges that were. He didn't want to touch old age entitlements like Paul Ryan wanted. This is narrowly true, but I think it's simply a matter of what Trump actually cares about right now. I simply don't think he's going to expend a lot of political capital on a nationwide abortion ban, but he will appoint people who will make mail-order birth control much harder to come by. Will he starting enforcing the Comstock Laws against distributing birth control? I have no idea, but I could see him not caring and it happening anyway.
It's clear that his priorities are coming into focus and they are
- Persecuting his enemies
- Driving any dissenters from the Executive Branch
- Tariffs
- Deportations
The first two are really bad, but it is unclear what that will mean to the average low-information voter that elected him. The orgy of corruption that is headed our way is not likely to land with these yokels, because "all politicians are corrupt" is a reflexive, if uninformed, position that they hold.
The latter two are the really known unknowns of the Restoration. The expert consensus as to the economic effects of these two programs - combined with a stimulative tax cut - would be highly inflationary. The questions are A) How far will he go? and B) What will he do when the pain starts?
If he's dead set on trade wars - which he promised but largely avoided the first time - then maybe he digs his heels in and tanks the economy. Same with deportations. At what point does he respond to real world feedback in the form of inflation and economic contraction?
Then there's the whole menu of conservative jihads that he can take or leave. Getting rid of the Department of Education is a pretty freaking awful idea, but will he actually do it or simply use the threat of it to gut any form of DEI or even SEL learning? As Yglesias notes, there are a lot of weirdos on the far right who don't believe in public education at all. How much leeway will they have?
Of course, there's another aspect of all this that is beyond our ability to predict. Trump is showing signs of age related mental decline, and he was not a smart man to begin with. Is there a point where he gets the 25th Amendment invoked, especially if he tanks the economy in the short term and Republicans somehow think Vance is the answer? Or does he simply have a massive stroke? We know Vance seems to have very few principles of his own. If Trump were to die or become incapacitated, does he become Paul Ryan? Does he remain Trumpist?
Trump's volatility as a person and as a chief executive makes all of this really hard to predict.
There is a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is seeing a bear running towards you. Anxiety is hearing something in the dark woods, but not knowing what it is. Right now are anxious times, because he's manifestly temperamentally unfit to be president and yet he's likely going to be even less constrained by norms and personnel than last time.
The new Age of Anxiety.
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