Trump Voters Are in for a Rude Awakening

Throughout 2024, the irreconcilable contradictions of Trump’s proposals and promises were wrinkles that could be smoothed over with rhetoric; as president, he’ll have to face them head-on. As William A. Galston wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month, while Trump is an untraditional president, “voters will judge him on a traditional measure—his ability to deliver on the promises that propelled him to a second term. Tensions among these promises will complicate his task.”

Then there was the phenomenon Paul Krugman, the retiring Times columnist, dubbed “Trump-stalgia,” which could just as well have been called “Trump-nesia.” Most Americans are undoubtedly better off than they were four years ago, he wrote in May. “But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.” This sentiment held true through the election. As TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on November 9, citing internal Democratic polling, “It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.”

These diverse allies found common cause on the campaign trail in opposition to the left, but “when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos.” In other words, Trump will have to pick sides. In some ways, he’s already doing so based on the balance of his nominees: His Cabinet is shaping up to be rather interventionist and plutocratic.

And Trump’s hyperbolic promises as a candidate could also undermine his presidency. Take his improbable vow to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, which he recently walked back in a Time interview, acknowledging that “this is trickier than he let on.” In the same interview, he also managed expectations about lowering the cost of groceries, saying doing so will be “hard” and, if he fails, he would not consider his presidency a failure. It’s a stark pivot from his September pledge: “Vote Trump, and your … grocery prices will come tumbling down.”

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.

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.

Recall how the barbarity of Trump’s first-term immigration agenda elicited widespread outcry. Now imagine if his 2025 plans for mass deportations are enacted. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake writes that, while recent polls show Americans divided evenly on—or sometimes leaning in favor of—deporting most or all undocumented immigrants, respondents who approve of deportations often also support the (much more popular) solution of providing them a path to citizenship. Additionally, Blake writes, support for mass deportations tends to thin as people are given the details of what they’d entail.

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