President-elect Donald Trump is rapidly turning out names of potential nominees for his incoming administration. Most are strong supporters not only of Trump himself, but also his agenda. It is highly likely that they will be more than happy to help the incoming president implement his wishes.
Trump may also be emboldened by what he perceives to be an electoral mandate (although his final tally came up a bit short of one). Supporters and opponents alike wonder which campaign promises he will keep and which policies he will prioritize. So, what did the voters who supported him want him to do? Data collected for the GW Politics Poll, which I direct with colleagues at George Washington University, provides some insights.
Presidents like to hit the ground running before the opposition can organize and their political capital erodes (which is why the first 100 days is emphasized). What can be helpful is for presidents to build momentum by getting some “easy wins” that don’t generate widespread opposition. Members of Congress, as well as governors and other actors, are likely to defer to the president on issues that are particularly popular. Some of Trump’s more popular campaign promises involve taxes, tariffs and immigration. However, there are some legal, logistical and funding challenges that may make quick implementation of some of these policies difficult.
Probably the easiest policies for Trump to quickly enact relate to taxes. Although Trump has challenged Republican policy orthodoxy in many ways, tax cuts remain the key unifier of the party. Considering that Republicans will control both chambers of Congress, tax reform could be an easy win. And while the details of tax policy can get exceptionally complex and might cause some defections in a very tight House majority, some of the broader tax promises Trump has made enjoy strong support among his voters. In addition to reinstating personal income tax cuts from his first term, Trump has made corporate tax cuts and eliminating taxes on tipped wages and Social Security benefits part of his campaign pledges.
Reducing the corporate tax rate was an issue of disagreement within the electorate. Among Trump voters, 83 percent said they strongly or somewhat support lowering the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the United States, compared to only 38 percent of those who voted for other candidates. The issue of eliminating taxes on tipped wages has broad bipartisan support (and Vice President Kamala Harris even adopted the position during her campaign), with 81 percent support of Trump voters for eliminating these taxes, and 62 percent of those who voted for other candidates also in support.
Eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits was even more popular (89 percent of Trump voters and 77 percent of those who voted for other candidates). Considering the popularity of these proposals, any resistance would solely be based on concern over lost revenue, but budget hawks are notoriously rare in an incumbent president’s party and Democrats are ill-positioned to resist, especially since changes in the tax code can be easily added to budget reconciliation bills (thereby bypassing a cloture vote). Tax cuts should be a relatively easy accomplishment for a new Trump administration.
Tariffs no longer face strong bipartisan opposition. Among Trump voters, 73 percent said they strongly or somewhat support increasing tariffs on most imports, compared to only a quarter of those who voted for other candidates. Considering the administrative lag in implementation due to an investigation necessary to assert presidential authority on the grounds of national security, there may be some delay in implementation. Instead, the threat of tariffs might be used by Trump as a bargaining chip if he wishes to conduct new trade negotiations.
Trump has famously declared that he would begin mass deportations of illegal immigrants on day one of his administration. While this plan is popular among Trump’s voters (90 percent in support), there is a good deal of opposition (only 18 percent of those who voted for other candidates supported the plan). The feasibility and cost of deportations could make full implementation unlikely. Concern regarding the inflationary repercussions of deporting the labor supply responsible for picking and processing the nation’s food may also curtail the program. Likely legal challenges could also stall the program, resulting in the same partial implementation as Trump’s border wall.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s voters showed little support for allowing individuals in the country illegally to find a way to stay. Only 23 percent favored a legal way for illegal immigrants to gain citizenship. Similarly, Trump voters had little sympathy for “dreamers” — with only 36 percent of his voters favoring a policy allowing young adults who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay and work in the U.S. legally. Stepping up immigration enforcement and capping asylum claims were popular among Trump’s voters. A large majority (92 percent) of his voters favored an increase in funding border security along the U.S.-Mexico border. Similarly, 86 percent of Trump voters support limiting the number of immigrants who can claim asylum.
Trump’s voters also supported drastic, if not cruel measures to deter illegal immigration. Among Trump voters, 39 percent said they strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that it is appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally. Attitudes regarding immigration among Trump voters also spilled over into the legal immigration process. A majority of Trump voters (58 percent) said it should be much or slightly harder than it is currently to immigrate to the U.S. legally.
Given the support of his voters and the potential obstacles for various policies, it is likely tax cuts are one promise that Trump is able to fulfil completely. Although popular, tariffs will be more difficult given the national security requirement and inevitable legal challenges. Changes to immigration policy are also likely to come through the legislative process, but mass deportations will probably get stalled due to the logistical and funding difficulties and inevitable legal challenges. Much like the Muslim ban effort, it is likely Trump will try to move quickly on this issue, but will have to recraft and significantly scale it back. Of course, a lot of what Trump decides to do will depend upon those who advise him, so it will be important to continue to watch for these signals to decipher which policies may be prioritized as the ex-president re-assumes office.
Belt is a professor and the director of the Political Management Master’s Program at the George Washington University. He is the co-author of four books, including “ The Presidency and Domestic Policy ” with Michael Genovese and the late William Lammers.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.