David Bell – What Will Harris or Trump Actually Do As President?
Two weeks to go, and the presidential polls remain as close as they could possibly be. Little has shifted in the past seven days, and there has been little real news. Kamala Harris ventured into the lion’s den of Fox News for an interview which her partisans predictably saw as a triumph, and Trump supporters predictably called a disaster. Trump’s public appearances have gotten, if possible, even stranger than before. He rambles incoherently from subject to subject, sometimes stops altogether to sway to the theme music, uses obscenity with abandon (in comparison, Nicolas Sarkozy’s notorious “casse-toi pauv’ con” sounds positively delicate) and muses openly and at length about the penis size of a famous golfer. While the Democrats charge that an aged, exhausted Trump is succumbing to dementia, the Republicans cheer the weirdness as further proof that their champion refuses to play by the rules of a crooked, “rigged” system. In Pennsylvania, where it has become utterly impossible to escape the onslaught of television ads, billboards, yard signs and door-knocking volunteers, hardly any voters seem to have shifted in their preferences since 2020.
Given this stalemate, it may be worth pausing to ask what the two candidates would actually do as president. Trump, of course, warns that Harris will “destroy the country,” while he himself, if elected, will magically solve all of Americans’ problems within a few months. Harris, while more measured and sane, still predicts doom if she loses, while promising a host of improvements if she wins. Do these promises and predictions bear any relation to reality?
In fact, as election day approaches, it is worth recalling just how little an American president can usually accomplish, at least in some respects.
First, a president only has very limited control over what happens in the economy. It is simply far too large and complicated. A president does have a certain ability to wreck the economy—for instance, by imposing absurdly exaggerated tariffs on foreign goods, or completely exploding the national debt, as Trump threatens to do. But there is much less a president can do to improve the economy. If things go in the right direction presidents get the credit. If things go south, they get the blame. They mostly deserve neither. The recent episode of inflation in the US had very little to do with the policies of the Biden Administration. It was a world-wide phenomenon related to the pandemic. The US did better than most countries in quickly bringing the inflation rate back down, but while Biden gets some of the credit for this, much of it happened for reasons beyond the control of any single individual.
A president cannot simply implement large and ambitious new programs. If the opposition controls any part of Congress, then the president may have trouble passing any legislation at all. The president can achieve a certain number of things through executive order. But even then, there will be lawsuits; a host of federal judges eager to stymie virtually any executive initiative; plus that pesky thing called the Supreme Court.
A president also cannot simply “close the border” and halt illegal immigration. For one thing, a large proportion of the migrants illegally in the United States entered with valid visas and simply failed to leave when their time was up. No border wall, however tall and imposing, would have stopped them. In addition, the borders with Mexico and Canada run for nearly 8,000 miles (admittedly, much of this is in Alaska), and fencing them all off, and patrolling them all, is not easily accomplished. Remember Donald Trump’s famous wall, which Mexico was going to pay for? Hardly any of it was actually built, for the reasons described above.
Finally—and, yes, for Americans this is often a shocking thing to recognize—the American president cannot usually dictate what foreign countries do. Often, foreign countries have their own reasons for their actions. Presidents can bluster and threaten, but even there they face limits. Can presidents simply “cut off aid” to a country they disapprove of? They might want to, but Congress also has a say in the matter. Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba but was utterly unable to lift the now sixty-year-old absurd and cruel embargo on trade with Cuba, because that depended on Congress.
As illustration of all the above, consider the presidency of Donald Trump. As is well known, Trump spent a large part of each day watching cable television. He golfed a great deal. He spent much less time than most presidents in substantive meetings, and almost no time reading briefing materials or in other ways learning anything of substance about the issues he was dealing with. To a very large extent, his actual actions as president consisted of making bombastic public statements and rage-tweeting. He got very few things of substance through Congress except for the massive tax cuts desired by the Republican party and their wealthy backers, and appointments to the Supreme Court and other offices suggested to him by various conservative pressure groups. Those appointments did matter—a great deal. They were his most substantial legacy. He also managed the “Abraham Accords” between Israel and several Arab states—although this was a step that the countries in question were already moving towards. But otherwise, Trump mostly sat back and took credit for the good things that happened, while blaming the bad things on others (which, to be fair, all presidents tend to do). In the great crisis of his administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, he took the obvious step of backing an emergency operation to design and produce vaccines as soon as possible, and otherwise mismanaged things disgracefully, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives.
If Kamala Harris is elected, the unfortunate fact is that she will most likely also accomplish very little. It is possible that the Democrats will either retain control of the Senate or regain control of the House of Representatives, but the likelihood of them doing both is very small. And as long as the Republicans control at least one chamber—in addition, effectively, to the Supreme Court—the chance of Harris passing meaningful legislation is slim to none. More likely, the story of her administration will be the same as Biden’s since 2022: constant stalemate, the repeated threat of government shutdowns, endless congressional investigations of alleged Democratic “scandals,” executive orders blocked in the courts.
If Trump wins, the opportunities for consequential—possibly disastrous—action are greater, especially if the Republicans take full control of Congress (which is more likely than the Democrats doing so). We can expect another round of massive tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, which will increase the federal deficit yet further. The Republicans will then most likely call for significant cuts to American social programs, but they have had very little luck making such cuts in the past, because too many of their own voters depend on Social Security and Medicare. Trump can impose punishing tariffs on foreign imports without Congressional authorization, but would he risk the considerable rise in prices that would almost certainly follow? Given that Trump cares about his popularity more deeply than almost anything else, I have my doubts.
Against the more dire predictions for a new Trump presidency—everything from the slow erosion of American democracy à la Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to full-blow fascist dictatorship—we have to counterpose the lazy and lackluster reality of Trump’s first presidency. True, this time around Trump is far more vindictive than last time, he has advisors committed to radical action, and he is less likely to surround himself with mainstream Republicans who will try to rein him in. Even so, there are reasons to think that Trump will have trouble implementing genuinely radical change—assuming he even makes the effort. He is also older, and frequently looks and sounds exhausted and confused.
Trump’s promise to use the Alien Act, passed under President John Adams, to facilitate the mass deportation of millions of migrants – including even legal migrants deemed a threat to national security – is frightening. But an operation of this scale would be tremendously difficult and expensive to organize and would certainly face serious challenges in the courts. Important to remember that Trump’s far more limited attempt to ban the entry of visitors from five Muslim countries in 2017 was ultimately blocked by the courts. Trump’s deportation camps will most likely remain in the same realm of his crazed imagination as the never-built border wall that Mexico did not pay for.
The so-called “Project 2025” plan, designed by Trump supporters at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which calls, among other things, for a purging of the federal government, with career civil servants replaced by Trumpian apparatchiks, is also frightening. And the authors have put a great deal more thought than Trump’s advisors did during his first administration into how to defeat possible legal challenges. But those legal challenges would come anyway, in ultra-litigious Washington, DC. Trump’s impact on the federal government is more likely to be chaos than outright destruction. Of course, chaos itself is bad enough, to say nothing of the reversal of Biden’s policies on climate change.
Trump might well try, in retaliation for the multiple prosecutions directed against him, to investigate and prosecute his political enemies. Of course, he promised the same thing in 2016 (“lock her up!”), and never followed through on the threat. Even if he makes the effort in 2025, he will have difficulty, for the reasons just discussed, in bending the Justice Department to his will, no matter how obsequiously loyal his Attorney General. And even if he does manage to instigate prosecutions of Harris, Biden, and other leading Democrats, the intent to prosecute does not guarantee indictments, to say nothing of convictions. Despite repeatedly claiming to have discovered “smoking guns” proving immense corruption on the part of the “Biden crime family,” and despite their party’s control of the House of Representatives, Republicans signally failed to bring an impeachment resolution against Joe Biden to the floor of the House, let alone pass it.
Trump would certainly try to pass measures disenfranchising Democratic voters, most likely by requiring stringent proofs of eligibility to vote that would unequally target poor minority voters. He will try to put pressure on traditional media and social media to give disproportionate space to his propaganda, in the name of “free speech.” His fervent supporter Elon Musk will help. But these measures will, again, face serious challenges in the courts.
Foreign policy is a much more worrisome area. After what will have been almost three years of grinding warfare, most Americans have ceased to pay attention to the Russia-Ukraine war, and Trump could most likely cut US support to Ukraine without a serious political cost. He might well force Ukraine into accepting a disastrous peace settlement with Russia that would deprive it of considerable territory, move it back towards the Russian sphere of influence, and encourage Vladimir Putin to take further expansionist steps. Trump will also undoubtedly return to his old theme that until the NATO allies “pay their share,” he will not consider the US bound by treaty to defend them. If the complete collapse of NATO still looks like a relatively distant possibility, its significant weakening is not. As Trump demonstrated all too conclusively in his first presidency, he cares not at all for human rights and regards international affairs as a pure contest of strength, although he himself remains all too susceptible to flattery from foreign dictators.
Most worrisome of all, however, is the renewed prospect of having an ignorant, narcissistic, unhinged, and possibly senile old man in charge of the most powerful country on earth. This is a man whose own first Secretary of State called a “moron,” whose own White House chief of staff called him an “idiot” and “unhinged,” whose own Secretary of Defense said he had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” whose own National Security advisor deemed him “unfit,” and whose own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now labels him a “fascist.” Not a man you want in charge of a garbage truck, to say nothing of a massive nuclear arsenal during an emergency.