The pithiest summary of Donald Trump’s last presidency was by the comedian John Mulaney. He compared it to a horse being set loose in a hospital. “No one knows what the horse is gonna do next,” Mulaney said, “least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before!”
The prevailing theory about Trump’s second term is that the horse now knows its way around the hospital. I have my doubts. Whatever practical knowledge Trump picked up in the first term is outweighed by the accelerating cognitive decline he displayed over the past year. He was a weak president before, and he may be an even weaker one this time.
In saying this, I don’t dispute that Trump’s instincts are dangerously authoritarian. Nor would I argue that a bumbling maximum leader is harmless—quite the opposite, in fact. Trump’s last presidency did serious damage. He redistributed income upward to the rich; he separated children from their parents at the border; he secured an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court; and he reduced the proportion of the population covered by health insurance just as a deadly pandemic arrived to kill 40 percent more people than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
But as the latter two examples demonstrate, not all these ghastly outcomes were deliberate, and indeed Trump’s mismanagement of Covid probably cost him reelection. In memoirs, participants in Trump’s first term don’t describe Trump as an evil mastermind. They describe him as vain, foolish, petty, mercurial, and easy prey for con artists and crackpots of every stripe. The result was bedlam. He was a horse loose in a hospital.
In a 2020 journal article, “Immature Leadership: Donald Trump and the American Presidency,” the Tufts political scientist Daniel Drezner argued, persuasively, that Trump’s presidency was hampered by “his temper tantrums, his short attention span and his poor impulse control.” Trump’s tantrums “led to poor decision-making and pathological staff strategies for coping with it.” Trump’s short attention span resulted in “a series of policy announcements that generate[d] poor follow-through and implementation.” Trump’s poor impulse control persuaded many foreign diplomats “to discount many of his threats.” What this added up to, Drezner concluded, was a weak presidency.
A strong president imposes discipline on his team. Infighting is kept to a minimum and stays out of the newspapers. That doesn’t come close to describing Trump’s first term, during which rival White House power centers leaked like a sieve to an ever-grateful Washington press corps. One Trump aide titled his administration memoir Team of Vipers.
Trump’s second presidency hasn’t even started, and already the members of his inner circle are at one another’s throats. The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Scherer describe “shouting matches, expulsions from meetings and name-calling.… As during Trump’s first term, competing factions have begun to run roughshod over each other.” The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Schwartz and Andrew Restuccia quoted an unnamed Trump adviser using the term “knife fight” to describe the competition for treasury secretary between Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnik. (Bessent got the nod, and Trump nominated Lutnik for commerce secretary.)
Weak impulse control prompted Trump to make four seriously outrageous Cabinet nominations. These all face serious resistance from Senate Republicans, and one of them (Matt Gaetz) withdrew less than three weeks after Election Day. Some see Gaetz’s nomination as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the other three—Tulsi Gabbard (director of National Intelligence), Pete Hegseth (Defense), and Robert Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services)—or as a stalking horse for Pam Bondi, the Trump apparatchik nominated for attorney general after Gaetz withdrew. If that was the strategy (and I don’t believe it was), Gaetz’s rise and fall occurred too quickly to do the others any good. It’s seldom wise to ascribe shrewdness to anything that Trump does.
That said, Trump’s second term won’t be short on terrible political appointments, and Trump’s inherent weakness as president will create a power vacuum for many of these miscreants to exploit. That’s where the danger of his presidency lies.
For example, no president in his right mind—not even a very conservative one—would ever hand power to Stephen Miller. But Miller enjoyed quite a lot of influence in Trump’s first term, and he’ll have even more in his second. Trump is anti-immigrant because it plays well politically. Miller is anti-immigrant because he’s an angry fanatic.
During Trump’s first term, Miller, acting in concert with his former boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that deliberately separated migrating parents and children at the border to deter others from coming. This was a humanitarian catastrophe that caused lasting damage; of the nearly 5,000 families that were separated, about one thousand remain so. After the manifest cruelty of “zero tolerance” drew terrible publicity, Trump responded initially by stating meekly that he was powerless to change it, and then, when that didn’t fly, Trump signed an executive order ending the policy. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” said the president who’d approved it. Under a settlement reached last December in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the federal government is barred from reimposing zero tolerance until 2031.
Miller’s ambitions for Trump’s second term are more sweeping. He’s the mastermind behind the mass deportation plan that will (among other things) damage the economy if enacted on the scale he hopes. Once again, Miller is likely to be given free rein, this time acting in concert with incoming border czar Tom Homan and, if she’s confirmed, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Miller will also try to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, try to eliminate Temporary Protected Status for immigrants fleeing war or natural disasters, and try to eliminate birthright citizenship, even though this last is guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As with child separation, Trump will give these and other anti-immigration policies carte blanche and then reverse course on any components that generate more adverse publicity than he can tolerate.
What’s true of Stephen Miller (and Tom Homan and Kristi Noem) is also true of Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget (which Vought also ran last time). Vought is another out-of-control extremist who in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson preached dismantlement of independent federal agencies and the civil service by applying a “radical constitutional perspective.” Trump will let Vought do whatever he wants up to and until Vought generates too much unfavorable publicity with one policy or other, at which point Trump will back down.
One might argue that the chaos Trump’s appointees generate is very much the point; that creating havoc within the federal government serves Trump’s larger purpose of tearing down the administrative state. But that’s Steve Bannon’s life mission, not Trump’s. Like every other rich fathead, Trump wants to cut taxes and halt regulations; beyond that his policies are entirely transactional. He’ll do something if it helps him or enriches him or gratifies his bottomless need to be cheered at political rallies. He’ll avoid anything that doesn’t do those things. That’s his compass.
It’s been noted that Trump possesses a disquieting affinity for people accused of committing, or tolerating, sexual misconduct; for proto-fascists; and for various other seedy types that normal people would cross the street to avoid. Where does he find them? The attraction isn’t ideological. Before he encountered Robert Kennedy Jr., for instance, I doubt Trump had strong views about fluoridation. Trump just enjoys people who are transgressive like his own vulgar self—especially when they suck up to him. That these people are usually frauds of one type or another, or flat-out evil or crazy, is something he’s either slow to notice or doesn’t care about. He just likes that they’re vivid and shameless and that they encourage him to follow his own worst instincts. He’s like a child who wants to run away with the circus.
Trump is dangerous, but he isn’t dangerous because, in returning to the White House, he’s finally achieved mastery at working the levers of power. He’s dangerous because, like last time, he won’t have a clue. Once again, his weakness will liberate the spectacularly bad actors with which he staffs his administration. No wonder every scoundrel in the country is desperate to get on board. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.
