I Have No Idea What’s About to Happen.
And neither do you.
When I was a child, I played youth soccer as a goal keeper and, given my position, I spent most of any given game watching rather than playing. I observed passes from teammate to teammate to interception to dribble to pass to pass to missed shot to goal kick and round and round it went, broken up by the occasional drop kick. During these hours spent by a goal post, waiting for the ball, watching each player, I came to develop a consequentialist philosophy. After seeing the best laid plays collapse and the worst laid plays succeed by obnoxious means, I came to appreciate that what matters is the result of an effort, not the effort itself. An impressive drive that failed to bring the ball to the goal would be fast forgotten. An unimpressive drive that yielded a goal could be the pride of a whole team, the smile on a little boy’s face for a whole week.
I say this all because, last week, I began writing an article on three good things that could happen under the newly inaugurated Trump administration. In an early draft, I speculated on the possibility of a closer relationship with Canada, the abolition of tax on tips, and the revocation of China’s strangely favorable trade status. At the time, I felt that these three things were at least probable and would be broadly popular among the American people. However, as I’ve performed more research on each of these subjects and the political ground has moved beneath our feet, I’ve lost my confidence that I can make any reasonable predictions about what the new Presidential administration might be. There are enough people across America who deal in speculation. Accordingly, I will not deal in dice, but in analysis of the game. On the occasion of the inauguration, I will not judge something that does not yet exist.
Trump is the figure around which many of the greatest minds of a generation have oriented their efforts, either in subverting him or supporting him. He has fundamentally changed the political coalitions in this country, heralding a new era of politics. The Republican Party, once the electoral wing of a conservative movement that touted its rabid opposition to populism and the politics of celebrity, has succumbed to a populist movement led by a celebrity. A scion of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, an ardent critic of the Reagan administration’s record, and a Playboy who flouted his sexual prowess at the sunset of the Moral Majority era, Donald Trump has now twice taken the oath of office as a Republican who rejects abortion bans and touts support for LGBT rights. In 2016, he promised to turn the Republican Party into a worker’s party. In 2024, he narrowly won the support of those Americans making under $50,000 a year on an abandonment of many of the GOP’s traditional, fiscally conservative arguments.1 When was the last time you heard Trump really lambast federal debt?
All this to say that Mr. Trump, regardless of what one may think about him, is a slippery figure. He is a man who threatens nuclear war one day, and then proves the theory of nuclear peace the next. He threatens “hell to pay” on the whole middle east, and then plays a pivotal role in brokering the end to a brutal war. Throughout his first term, Trump threatened to pull out of NATO. The consequence? NATO became stronger than ever, with European nations bolstering their defense spending significantly in the pivotal years prior to the Ukrainian war. Trump presents a dilemma because it is impossible to tell whether he’s a liar, a lunatic, or a lord. He either lies in order to extract certain concessions, acts out because he is incapable of acting rationally, or has a consistent moral compass in every conceivable situation that permits his position on every issues to vary with the leverage he's afforded. I somehow doubt all of these theses.
After all the bristling and showmanship of the last campaign, a decade in the political spotlight, and decades on the public stage, I still have no idea who Trump is or what Trump 2.0 will mean for America. His initial declarations this evening have ranged from personal obsessions, to improbable legal theory, to quaint conservative red meat. You can read the whole list here. At a glance, I find certain orders objectionable, but importantly, nothing has happened yet.
Trump has declared birthright citizenship null. And? Now, it will fall to the courts to decide whether this declaration means anything. Trump has made promises to crack open America and “drill, baby, drill” while rolling back federal rules surrounding emissions. And? Norway built its green economy by exporting oil to its less green counterparts. I also doubt that the owner of the world’s second largest EV company is going to permit his business to get pushed to the shoulder on a highway that he built. Trump has declared the restoration of Schedule F federal employees, a key tenet of the Project 2025 plan to restructure federal bureaucracy. And? Trump’s intentions at any moment are nebulous at best, and they may be good here. Trump is hardly wrong to lament the inefficient firing processes in the federal bureaucracy— and that’s coming from an MPA student! In the worst case scenario for any of these orders, all it would take is one measly act of Congress, one federal judge, or one ill-conceived plan to send them kaput.
So here’s my advice: don’t cheer the dribble, the pass, or even the shot. Cheer (or jeer) the goal. Nothing has happened until it has happened. Soccer balls bounce off the post more often than you would think. As in November, I am entering this administration in good faith as a member of the loyal opposition for a government that has narrowly won the popular mandate. As before, I invite Americans to join me in this grand democratic experiment and to judge, critique, protest, and debate the merits of this new administration.
However, let us not engage with it based on what we think will happen, but on what happens. The odds are slim that every single one of Trump’s ideas are terrible and every one of his plans will entail disaster. If he's as cataclysmic as some of his opponents claim, then catalysm will begin to manifest itself in due time. As for now, I choose not to cry wolf. For the next four years, if the economy continues to grow, if democracy continues to function, and if the states and the people continue to attempt to address the ills that afflict our society, then we will all benefit somewhere down the line. As baffling a trilemma as he is, let’s hope that Trump has comparable ideals and fine ideas, constrained, as all presidents ought to be, by the heavy weight of the constitutional order.