How Donald Trump could succeed

Or, more likely, fail

Since Election Day, people keep asking me what I think Donald Trump is going to do as president.

The answer is that it’s very hard to say. I think most people are overly confident that they know what’s going to happen in the future — an easy trap to fall into. But Joe Biden’s administration went in directions that I absolutely did not predict a week after Election Day, even though I have much greater familiarity with the relevant people than I do on the Trump side.

History is also a little bit weird. A very large share (arguably a majority) of the deregulation that we associate with the Reagan Revolution actually took place during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Reagan in his second term signed a visionary progressive tax reform. George W. Bush ran against Al Gore as a semi-isolationist who promised to eschew “nation building.” Not only that, his initial cabinet with Colin Powell at the State Department and Ford administration veteran Donald Rumsfeld (plus, of course, Dick Cheney, who worked for his dad and for Ford) was believed to augur a return to realpolitik in contrast to the assertive idealism of the Clinton administration.

We can look at what we know of Trump staffing so far. After touting Tulsi Gabbard on the campaign trail and duping certain credulous leftists into viewing him as a peace candidate, Trump is going to make Marco Rubio Secretary of State, backed by Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador and Rep. Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor. This is an extremely hawkish group that screams “hot war with Iran.”

But does that mean Trump is going to run a super-hawk administration?

Maybe. But maybe not. It turns out that Cheney was kind of a dissenter from the George H.W. Bush administration’s approach, even though he was publicly associated with it, and that Rumsfeld had changed his views since the 1970s. Bush himself was psychologically motivated to distance himself from his father. And, though it sounds trite now, 9/11 changed everything. Trump might be building this team of super-hawks because he wants to be a super-hawk. Or he might hire these guys and then end up getting annoyed with them, like he did with John Bolton. At the start of his prior administration, hiring Steven Mnuchin, an obscure finance guy who produced the Lego Batman movie, seemed like a really bizarre move. But Mnuchin turned out to be a sober-minded and effective leader, and I’m mildly disturbed that Trump’s most effective guy isn’t in the mix for term two.

Weird stuff happens. But I think the story of both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration is that marginal voters put in someone who they perceived as moderate, but who swiftly set about proving themselves to be more ideologically hardcore. Trump has, at times, mastered moderation like no other politician in recent memory, because liberals hate him so much and he’s often able to use that hatred to get conservatives not to think too hard about what’s going on. If you’d gone back in time to 2012 and told Republicans, “In twelve years, we’ll be against cutting Social Security or Medicare, for gay marriage, and swiftly backpedaling on banning abortion,” they’d have been horrified. But they love Trump!

And that’s the successful model for Trump: own the hell out of the libs, but to the greatest extent possible, try not to do too much.