Consider these archetypal dispatches from the 2024 campaign trail. “A lot of people are happy to vote for [Trump] because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will,” an October New York Times “campaign notebook” entry observed. The following week, The Washington Post noted of prospective Trump voters: “Some read between Trump’s lines about how he would govern, while others disregard parts of his past or present platform.”
In other words, for many, Trump was whoever they wanted him to be—a choose-your-own-candidate. Voters projected their wishes onto his candidacy, regardless of his stated policy program. They remembered positive aspects of his presidency and either memory-holed the negative parts (his deadly mishandling of the pandemic, say, or his nomination of Supreme Court justices who eliminated abortion rights) or simply didn’t blame him for them. But Trump’s rhetorical slipperiness made this possible. His relentless lying, flip-flopping, and vagueness about his plans made it difficult to pin him down, thereby attracting voters from both sides of certain issues.
Already, there are two major contradictions emerging in the nascent Trump administration, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued in November. “The first centers on economic policy—or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself,” he wrote, noting that some Trump picks are proponents of unfettered capitalism while others are economic nationalists who want to “transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations.” The second contradiction, meanwhile, “centers on foreign policy—or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world.” The advocates of hard power versus the isolationists, essentially.
Once he enters the realm of concrete policy, Trump will very likely face some degree of backlash. This happens with any new administration; according to the well-demonstrated theory of thermostatic politics, public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of policy. But if Trump grossly overestimates his electoral mandate and tries to implement his most extreme ideas, the backlash could be historically fierce.
If Trump brings his ghastly immigration policies to bear (and follows through on his more unpopular stances, such as prosecuting his political foes and pardoning January 6ers), it’s not unreasonable to expect that his crowing about his “powerful mandate” will be exposed as arrant hyperbole.
On those issues and more, Trump has, as a recent Times headline put it, promised the moon with “no word on the rocket.” On many issues, though, not only is there no rocket, but there are instead blueprints for a deep-sea submersible: Trump’s core policy proposals are poised to do the opposite of what he says, exacerbating the economic discontent he tapped into. Between his proposed tariffs, deportations, and tax cuts, Time reports that if Trump “enacts many of the policies he proposed on the campaign trail, voters may see prices continue to rise.”
Or, to return to Trump’s words in The Art of the Deal: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.” Trump has proven, in business and politics, that in fact he can con people for a very long time. But, come 2025, when he’s confronted with the reality of governing—and, one can hope, a reinvigorated opposition—Trump may finally be exposed to his newfound supporters as the huckster we’ve long known him to be.
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