In his first term, President Donald Trump moved fast and broke things.  What would he do in a second term?[1]  That is a real guessing game since Trump is not deeply committed to sticking to what he says if he sees either a tactical advantage or a good laugh in changing course.  This doesn’t stop Walter Russell Mead from thinking about the future, and perhaps playing on the fears of both foreigners and Americans. 

            First of all, one has to accept that there are continuities between the first Trump term and the first Biden term.  The human rights and democracy-promotion agendas held no interest to President Trump; it has now gone by the boards with the Biden administration.[2]  It really difficult to get rid of autocrats because they are ruthless people with a strong grip on their security forces.  Of course, a democracy can always invade an autocracy to effect regime change.  The results may not be what the invaders expected.  Similarly, the Biden administration recognizes China as a military and economic rival in a way that Trump’s predecessors were not able to see.  While the Biden administration keeps sending emissaries to China to try to take the rough edges off the conflict, they aren’t willing to just surrender.  Then, a second Trump term would likely see government support for, rather than opposition to, the oil and gas industries.  To this would be added increased spending on weapons procurement and development for defense.  Mead sees this as the mirror image of President Joe Biden’s climate-change industrial policy.  The key point here is that both parties have entered a new era of government intervention in the economy.  Both men seek to create lots of working-class jobs that pay middle-class incomes. 

So, where would Trump differ from the Biden administration?  Mead lists some of the reasonably likely priorities of a second Trump administration.  Chief among them would certainly be a huge effort to stop immigration through the southern border.  Europe’s efforts along these lines have included deals with countries in a position to restrict or even stop such immigration.  Trump could well try to extract the same sort of thing from Central American countries.  This could involve paying people[3] with the power to slow or stop the immigration, or extorting compliance by some means.

Beyond that, things become much more speculative.  Trump could threaten to leave NATO if Germany and other European countries don’t increase their defense spending.  Trump could cut Ukraine adrift.  Trump could seek to strike some kind of “grand bargain” with Xi Jinping. 

            In any case, Trump appears to have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” from his first term.  One effect will be on America’s allies.  They may have seen his first term as like a very ugly traffic accident.  It could be cleaned up, if not forgotten.  His re-election, and the thrall in which he holds so many Republican politicians, would argue that a critical and durable change has taken place in the direction of American foreign policy.  They would have to begin calculating how best to deal with a world of threats in which America is not a reliable partner from, regardless of which party is in charge. 

            Whoever wins in November 2024, the results will be momentous. 

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[1] Walter Russell Mead, “A ‘Trumpier” Second-Term Foreign Policy,” WSJ, 3 October 2023. 

[2] See his reconciliation with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. 

[3] Would those “people” have to be governments or would a drug cartel do?