What would a second Trump term look like, in the event that Donald Trump pulled out a surprise, come-from-behind victory in November? That’s really a few different, but related, questions: policy agendas, personnel, the shape of the Republican party, and the size of Trump’s support in Congress. Based on his public interviews, Trump himself seems to have no idea of what policies he wants to pursue, just as he seems to think that the most important parts of his first-term record are the ways in which people were unfair to him rather than anything he actually accomplished.
Of course, Trump entered his first term with only a few really fixed ideas, such as walling off the border, moving aggressively to reduce various classes of immigration (illegal immigrants, immigrants from war-torn Muslim countries), renegotiating trade deals and trade relationships, and avoiding major new U.S. troop commitments abroad. What that meant was that an enormous amount of the policy initiative devolved on executive-branch personnel and the Republican majority in Congress. With the loss of the House in 2018, new legislation dried up, and that left people inside the executive branch setting most of the direction.
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