President-elect Donald Trump has a problem. It’s not one unique to him. It’s something every second-term president faces, regardless of when the term takes place.
Although presidents are elected to four-year terms, in reality, they operate in two-year increments. The Republican or Democrat rides to victory in November, often but not always, carrying his party with him to majorities in Congress. The new government has the power to make good on the promises everyone made on the campaign trail. The minority party is left with the unenviable job of trying to thwart the majority.
Trump went about getting to the third and fourth phases of his leadership via a circuitous route, but when he returns on Jan. 20, 2025, the question will be: What exactly does a successful second term look like?
Voters told pollsters they cast their ballots for Trump in response to two primary problems — inflation and immigration. How he responds to those issues will likely be the tipping point for whether he can crow about his success on his way out the door, or if he will be left playing defense — possibly without the safety of majorities in one or both chambers of Congress.
It’s always the economy
Trump wanted to focus on immigration but voters overwhelmingly said their top concern was the economy. Even if it wasn’t his No. 1 priority, he made sure the country knew he was listening.
“I thought the economy was a big factor, especially the real economy, which is the economy of going out and buying groceries or buying a car or buying a house,” Trump said in an interview with Time magazine.
Voters were exhausted with high prices brought on by record-high inflation ushered in under President Joe Biden — even though it has consistently fallen after peaking near 7% for the first time in 40 years.
The problem with inflation is that it resets the benchmark for how people view and experience prices. While inflation continued to abate, it was still rising from the mark set in July of last year, just at a slower rate.
It is likely that inflation would have been a problem for Trump if he had won reelection in 2020. The massive stimulus spending that dulled the worst effects of COVID-19 and helped speed the recovery were also prime factors in the runaway inflation that came on the other side of the crisis.
Biden was punished with inflation rates that were going to go up but were exacerbated by his insistence on spending trillions of dollars on the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act, despite that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
With a global pandemic shuffling everyone’s memories of what their financial situations were like under Trump, he campaigned on a promise to make the economy strong again and not only extend the 2017 tax cuts that put more money in people’s wallets but expand them.
Matt Gerken, chief strategist for BCA Research, said those tax cuts will be a key tool for gauging Trump’s success because they are not only the key to delivering on a concrete promise, but they could also backfire and blow up his promises of making everyone feel wealthy again.
“Republicans believe they have to extend those tax cuts, but just extending the tax cuts won’t really accelerate the economy,” Gerken said. “That’s just keeping things the way they already are, and Trump would have to abandon his campaign promises if he didn’t cut additional taxes.”
Trump is focused on those tax cuts, too. As much as he believes securing the border is the prime objective of his administration, he told Time that extending the tax cuts would be one item he pushes for in his first year in office.
More tax cuts will mean he needs to find ways to cut government spending, something he did not show any fondness for during his first term.
Operations such as his Department of Government Efficiency or sweeping tariffs might play a role, though it is unlikely Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can find $2 trillion in government waste and abuse to eliminate to make up for the tax cuts Trump has promised.
Tariffs are already proving to be an effective negotiation tactic, even if they are not capable of offsetting additional tax cuts enough to prevent blowing up the budget deficit even more and reigniting an inflation problem.
Cleaning house
For all the hand-wringing about Trump’s immigration rhetoric, he has consistently grown in popularity with Latino voters.
The mass migration of Latino voters, an umbrella term that does a poor job of describing a disparate voter bloc that lumps voters from Belize to Venezuela, might have as much to do with Democrats failing to understand what voters want as it does with Trump’s political talent.
Writing in the Atlantic, Rogé Karma made the case that Democrats relying on progressive organizations to run their outreach to Latino voters meant they wound up “conflating the views of the highly educated, progressive Latinos who run and staff these organizations, and who care passionately about immigration-policy reform, with the views of Latino voters, who overwhelmingly do not.”
On the whole, immigration makes for a difficult platform to run on and govern. Biden was punished for abandoning border security, resulting in a crisis that forced him to ignore his left flank and put some immigration restrictions back in place.
Former President Barack Obama left office with the “deporter-in-chief” title hung around his neck. Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to escape her 2019 vow to decriminalize illegal border crossings.
The downsides of cracking down on immigration are dangerous, and the bar for success is incredibly high.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why nothing’s been done on immigration for so long is that you can get punished for having too much immigration,” Gerken said. “You don’t really get rewarded when you’re just sort of silently deporting criminals.”
Even the reported growth in support for mass deportations often comes down to how pollsters ask voters the question.
Trump might be able to keep voters happy if he focuses on sending illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes back home and reinstitutes border controls such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, more commonly referred to as Remain in Mexico.
Otherwise, he could wind up facing another public relations nightmare for separating families or fighting legal battles as he tries to deport citizens along with their parents who are in the country illegally.
Trump has tried to soften his image on immigration restriction, if not his hard-nosed approach to policy.
He told Time he would prefer not to separate families, though he is open to sending entire families out of the country.
Trump was quick to emphasize the detention cells that held children and parents separated from each other were built and used by Obama and his administration. Many of the photographs that circulated online when he was under fire for carrying out family separations were taken when Obama’s Department of Homeland Security was executing the same laws.
“This was a policy of the country,” Trump said. “I don’t believe we’ll have to, because we will send the whole family back to the country. I would much rather deport them together, yes, than separate.”
About the mandate
Gerken told the Washington Examiner that despite Trump’s convincing electoral win last month, it would be a mistake to view his margin of victory as constituting a sweeping mandate.
“It was a convincing victory, but I think, in general, it’s probably been overrated in the coverage,” Gerken said.
He ran a successful campaign. He clearly beat Harris, if not quite in the landslide fashion some claimed. He made a range of promises on the trail that appealed to a broad swath of voters, resulting in him becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years and assembling the most diverse coalition the GOP has seen in a generation.
That big switch did not mean a big win, however. Trump didn’t break the 50-50 line in the popular vote — he won 49.9% compared to Harris’s 48.4%. Republicans have a three-seat majority in the House that is going to shrink once various members resign their seats to join the Trump administration.
There is a decent 53-47 majority in the Senate, enough to force through reconciliation bills but not enough to pass legislation via regular order.
Even on the things voters say they trusted Trump more than Harris to accomplish, it is not clear they are interested in the unvarnished version of economic and immigration policy he is offering.
The GOP base, Gerken said, is incredibly supportive of a strict immigration policy including mass deportations. However, most voters would prefer to see stronger border controls that stop well short of rounding up entire families and forcing them on planes back to their parents’ countries of origin.
So Trump has a fine needle to thread. He needs to make good on his campaign promises to restore the economic conditions voters enjoyed during his first term and secure the country’s borders without making centrists queasy.
Total victory
To claim success then, Trump is going to have to temper his own desires to execute mass deportations, slash taxes, launch trade wars with global partners, and withdraw the United States from foreign entanglements.
A limited form of each of those plans, however, could be executed in a “wildly successful” way that might even prevent a midterm blowout by Democrats, Gerken said.
Targeted tax cuts and deportation plans will show voters he took their concerns about bleeding bank accounts and national security fears seriously.
Tariff threats against Mexico and Canada can help renegotiate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement by July 2026, giving Republicans a feather in their cap as they scrap for votes.
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And negotiating ends to wars in Ukraine and Israel, as well as possibly defanging Iran’s nuclear program are live possibilities that would cement Trump’s legacy as a deal-maker on the global stage and tamp down concerns about his questionable relationships with strongmen such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
It is not a list of things that are easy to accomplish. Trump will have to fight his own instincts to reel himself in and battle Democrats bent on keeping him from racking up any more wins. But Trump just pulled off the greatest political comeback in U.S. history — it’s not out of the question he could find a way to do something as simple as usher his party to a midterm victory.
