Even if you’re Never Trump and see the incoming president as an angry toddler with the attention span of an overcaffeinated ferret, there are a number of things a conservative can look forward to seeing from Donald Trump’s second term. In fact, there are nine.

1. The border and immigration. Potential secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem may moonlight as a dressmaker for Cruella de Vil, but Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan is a serious operator. He worked his way up from border patrolman to acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and along the way was given a Presidential Rank Award for achieving “sustained extraordinary results” by . . . President Barack Obama. The fact that he was one of Trump’s first announced staffers is a sign of the incoming administration’s priorities. In a postelection interview, Homan said authorities have identified more than 700,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions and final deportation orders who remain in the United States. The “Remain in Mexico” program is coming back. Let’s hope Biden’s example and also the fiasco of family separation in Trump’s first term have taught him what not to do.

One reason to believe that Trump and his team will be better at securing the border and deporting those who are in the country illegally is that they actually want to accomplish those tasks, which was not always the case with the Biden administration. In February 2024, Axios reported: “Many administration leaders treated the issue like a hot potato because it was politically thankless, several sources in and out of government told Axios. The idea that no one wanted to ‘own it’ came up repeatedly in interviews about the border crisis.”

The Biden team belatedly realized they “owned” the border issue whether they liked it or not, and in the final months of Biden’s presidency, repatriations ranged between 100,000 and 150,000 per month. The Trump team will match or surpass that easily.

2. The Trump tax cuts will be extended. Trump and Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, and to do so, they agreed to let the tax cuts for individuals — but not businesses — expire at the end of 2025. Trump wants them made permanent. The lower tax brackets, the doubled standard deduction, the $2,000 child tax credit, the raised threshold for the estate tax — none of them are going away for the foreseeable future.

3. The American re-embrace of nuclear power will continue and likely accelerate. Conservatives won the argument about nuclear power, but no one noticed. In the past few months, some of America’s biggest tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, concluded they need a lot more energy to run their data centers in the decades to come, and they decided that restarting decommissioned nuclear plants was the best, cheapest, and most reliable option. And seemingly with the snap of their fingers, a slew of those closed plants are now scheduled to start operating again in the coming years. Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 — not the one that suffered a partial meltdown in 1979! — will go back into operation, with Microsoft purchasing all the power generated. Deals and projects for restarted and new nuclear reactors are getting the enthusiastic support of Democrats including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Washington governor Jay Inslee, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Virginia senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. The future of America’s nuclear energy is glowing — er, looks brighter.

4. Drill, baby, drill. Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, is expected to repeal Biden administration rules that imposed new and increasing fees and regulatory burdens on American energy producers on federal lands, and he’s also expected to end the Biden administration’s indefinite pause on new oil and natural-gas leasing on federal lands and waters.

5. Taiwan will be getting more U.S.-made weapons systems. Taiwan greeted Trump’s victory with talk of a spending spree on U.S. defense systems — Northrop Grumman’s E-2D Advanced Hawkeye radar systems, Patriot missiles, and F-35 jets, as well as Aegis-equipped destroyers and retired Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Perry-class frigates.

6. NATO allies will spend more on defense. Talk of withdrawing from NATO is self-destructive nonsense, but even NATO military committee chief Admiral Rob Bauer, of the Netherlands, conceded to Newsweek that some countries had for too long failed to invest in their own armed forces and that these nations “probably thought that if they were attacked, they would be rescued by the United States,” adding, “I think that critique was fair.” Out of the 32 NATO allies, 23 now meet the 2 percent target, up from just six countries when Trump left office. That number will rise in the years to come.

7. No limits on arms for Israel. In May, when the anti-Israeli fervor on the left flank of the Democratic Party was at its peak, President Biden withheld a planned shipment of eighteen hundred 2,000-pound bombs and seventeen hundred 500-pound bombs that he feared could be dropped on Rafah, in southern Gaza. These were unguided munitions, and not decisive in Israel’s ongoing military operations, but Biden’s sop to anti-Israeli progressives fed into the notion that Israel’s self-defense was morally faulty. Trump has pledged that on the first day of his term, he will cancel all restrictions and delays on the transfer of armaments and combat equipment.

8. Curtains for Hamas. The U.S. had been urging the Qatari government to expel Hamas officials from their country since the end of August, when the terrorist group executed American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Qatar finally did so in early November, and while the country insists it didn’t and the Biden administration wants credit for the change, “sources close to the group’s leaders concede that with a new American president, they may not be able to keep their political headquarters there much longer,” The Economist reported.

9. Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Samuel Alito, 74, can retire from the Supreme Court at their leisure. No one expects either justice to retire anytime soon, and it’s quite possible that Republicans will keep control of the Senate after the 2026 midterms. But if Thomas or Alito wants to retire in the coming years, he can rest assured that he will not be giving up his seat to a “living constitution” judge, appointed by a Democratic president and confirmed by a Democratic Senate, on the hunt for emanating penumbras. In his first term, Trump appointed more than 200 judges to the federal bench. The progressive agenda will be facing a federal judiciary with strict-constructionist views of government power for a long time to come.

As Trump’s selections of Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services make clear, he’s still the same erratic, temperamental, narcissistic jerk he always was — and on Inauguration Day, Trump will be five months older than Biden was when he was sworn in back in 2021. But even presidents you don’t like can make the right decision every now and then. The job of conservatives for the next four years is to steer, nudge, cajole, and pressure Trump toward as many good decisions — and away from bad ones — as possible.