In his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump let readers in on a promotional strategy of his. “I play to people’s fantasies,” the real estate developer wrote, by insisting that a project “is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” It’s a tactic Trump has also employed in his political career—most effectively this election cycle, when many voters were drawn to him based on perceptions of his second-term plans that had little to no basis in reality.
Consider these archetypal dispatches from the 2024 campaign trail. “A lot of people are happy to vote for [Trump] because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will,” an October New York Times “campaign notebook” entry observed. The following week, The Washington Post noted of prospective Trump voters: “Some read between Trump’s lines about how he would govern, while others disregard parts of his past or present platform.”
Then there was the phenomenon Paul Krugman, the retiring Times columnist, dubbed “Trump-stalgia,” which could just as well have been called “Trump-nesia.” Most Americans are undoubtedly better off than they were four years ago, he wrote in May. “But for reasons that still remain unclear, many seem disinclined to believe it.” This sentiment held true through the election. As TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on November 9, citing internal Democratic polling, “It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.”
In other words, for many, Trump was whoever they wanted him to be—a choose-your-own-candidate. Voters projected their wishes onto his candidacy, regardless of his stated policy program. They remembered positive aspects of his presidency and either memory-holed the negative parts (his deadly mishandling of the pandemic, say, or his nomination of Supreme Court justices who eliminated abortion rights) or simply didn’t blame him for them. But Trump’s rhetorical slipperiness made this possible. His relentless lying, flip-flopping, and vagueness about his plans made it difficult to pin him down, thereby attracting voters from both sides of certain issues.
But the chimerical allure that helped propel Trump to the White House has an expiration date. He sold myriad, and often conflicting, fantasies to voters. In three weeks’ time, he’ll face reality. And many Trump voters will undoubtedly start to realize that he is not at all the person they thought they were voting for.
Already, there are two major contradictions emerging in the nascent Trump administration, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued in November. “The first centers on economic policy—or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself,” he wrote, noting that some Trump picks are proponents of unfettered capitalism while others are economic nationalists who want to “transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations.” The second contradiction, meanwhile, “centers on foreign policy—or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world.” The advocates of hard power versus the isolationists, essentially.
These diverse allies found common cause on the campaign trail in opposition to the left, but “when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos.” In other words, Trump will have to pick sides. In some ways, he’s already doing so based on the balance of his nominees: His Cabinet is shaping up to be rather interventionist and plutocratic.
Once he enters the realm of concrete policy, Trump will very likely face some degree of backlash. This happens with any new administration; according to the well-demonstrated theory of thermostatic politics, public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of policy. But if Trump grossly overestimates his electoral mandate and tries to implement his most extreme ideas, the backlash could be historically fierce.
Recall how the barbarity of Trump’s first-term immigration agenda elicited widespread outcry. Now imagine if his 2025 plans for mass deportations are enacted. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake writes that, while recent polls show Americans divided evenly on—or sometimes leaning in favor of—deporting most or all undocumented immigrants, respondents who approve of deportations often also support the (much more popular) solution of providing them a path to citizenship. Additionally, Blake writes, support for mass deportations tends to thin as people are given the details of what they’d entail.
If Trump brings his ghastly immigration policies to bear (and follows through on his more unpopular stances, such as prosecuting his political foes and pardoning January 6ers), it’s not unreasonable to expect that his crowing about his “powerful mandate” will be exposed as arrant hyperbole.
And Trump’s hyperbolic promises as a candidate could also undermine his presidency. Take his improbable vow to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, which he recently walked back in a Time interview, acknowledging that “this is trickier than he let on.” In the same interview, he also managed expectations about lowering the cost of groceries, saying doing so will be “hard” and, if he fails, he would not consider his presidency a failure. It’s a stark pivot from his September pledge: “Vote Trump, and your … grocery prices will come tumbling down.”
On those issues and more, Trump has, as a recent Times headline put it, promised the moon with “no word on the rocket.” On many issues, though, not only is there no rocket, but there are instead blueprints for a deep-sea submersible: Trump’s core policy proposals are poised to do the opposite of what he says, exacerbating the economic discontent he tapped into. Between his proposed tariffs, deportations, and tax cuts, Time reports that if Trump “enacts many of the policies he proposed on the campaign trail, voters may see prices continue to rise.”
Throughout 2024, the irreconcilable contradictions of Trump’s proposals and promises were wrinkles that could be smoothed over with rhetoric; as president, he’ll have to face them head-on. As William A. Galston wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month, while Trump is an untraditional president, “voters will judge him on a traditional measure—his ability to deliver on the promises that propelled him to a second term. Tensions among these promises will complicate his task.”
Or, to return to Trump’s words in The Art of the Deal: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.” Trump has proven, in business and politics, that in fact he can con people for a very long time. But, come 2025, when he’s confronted with the reality of governing—and, one can hope, a reinvigorated opposition—Trump may finally be exposed to his newfound supporters as the huckster we’ve long known him to be.
