As the liberals begin to investigation THE vast wreck of another electoral defeat against former President Donald Trump and his Republican Party, they will end up leaving recriminations to the preparations. It might actually happen faster than you think, as Trump is doing. move aggressively on personnel and policy and will, unlike in 2017, be able to hit the ground running as soon as he is sworn in. The unanswered question at the moment is to what extent does he intend to pursue his expansive, repugnant and often grandiose political vision? The only comfort for Democrats and their allies on this front is that Trump will soon discover that the political interest of the Republican Party lies in doing as little as possible of what he has promised.

It would perhaps be useful to recall that when annus horribilis of 2020, Trump was ready to be re-electedmuch to the dismay of the left-liberal forces who spent three years opposing him and trying to deal with the consequences of the exhausting daily chaos of the White House. Most people had simply ignored it because it didn’t affect them, a formula that wore out for Trump when his circus handling of the COVID-19 pandemic ultimately cost him some support from people otherwise inclined to look away. This is clear from the fact that (brace yourself) many more people now say They approve of Trump’s performance during the first term more than they did when he left office.

Trump was poised to vindicate himself in 2020 for the very simple reason that he failed to implement many of his most disruptive campaign ideas in 2016. The specter of his most potentially incendiary plans was, after everything, the reason why global markets briefly collapsed following the 2016 elections. So rather than pulling the United States outside NATOhe intimidated America’s allies but left the alliance and its institutions intact. Instead of walking away from NAFTA, he renegotiated a very modest revision of its underlying structure, borrowing heavily from the careful work carried out by the Obama administration had undertaken as part of his ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership. When Trump’s allies in Congress failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the summer of 2017, he seemed all too happy to let this issue go once and for all. And for all his bluster, Trump’s trade war with China was more limited than the one he now promises. Although it did effect a turnaround on US trade policy, much of which Biden continued or even deepened, it has yet to really touch the lives of most ordinary people.

That’s not to say that Trump hasn’t done extraordinary damage during his first term. Its far-right transformation of an already conservative SCOTUS led directly to Dobbs and the subsequent nationwide right-wing attack on reproductive rights, up to the weakening of executive and administrative power by overturn the Chevron doctrine last summer, and to the ultimately successful effort to escape responsibility for attempting to overthrow the American system of democratic government after the 2020 election. His cruel efforts to bar nationals from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States became official policy it is likely to be restored the first day. The mainstreaming of his hateful rhetoric and the institutional Republican Party’s capitulation to him will pose significant challenges to the American political system in the years to come. And some of his most destructive works, like accelerate Iran’s nuclear program by withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018, or by imposing economic sanctions on Venezuela so severe that they catalyzed a massive migration in the United States, which he blamed on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, amounted to planting bombs that explode long after you leave the room.

But for the most part, Trump was popular enough to be on track to win in 2020 because he did pretty standard Republican things like cutting taxes, gutting regulations, and appointing originalist judges. Then he sat back and reaped the political gains by enjoying one of the longest peacetime economic expansions in history and not wasting it. And today, very fortunately for him, he inherits an almost identical situation. The nation’s most painful sacrifices were absorbed by his Democratic predecessors: in Obama’s case, it was the agonizingly slow recovery from the Great Recession that began under George W. Bush, and in the case of Biden, it was the pandemic-era inflation wave that hit everyone. countries on the planet. Trump will now inherit a growth, healthy economy with low unemployment, inflation returning to historical norms and markets reaching unprecedented highs one after the other.

The question Republicans should be asking themselves is: Do we really want to play with this to please our die-hard MAGA fanatics? Unlike last time, Trump’s message on immigration is not about building a wall (which would cause at least little direct economic damage), but rather about mass deportations. All of his hiring decisions so far, including Monday’s news that former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan will be Trump’s border czar, then his pick of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem—a promoter of Trump’s mass deportation – as Homeland Security secretary – signals that he actually intends to move forward with the crazy idea of ​​deporting every one of at least 11 million immigrants undocumented in the United States. This may seem cool at a Trump rally, but Republicans are prepared for neither the gruesomeness of such an operation nor its pernicious economic effects.

The logistical operation of expelling all of these human beings from the United States alone would cost at least $315 billion, according to the American Immigration Council. And that would be ugly and divisive in ways that Americans clearly cannot imagine right now. Nearly 80 percent of undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States for 10 years or more. People are going to have to watch their neighbors, their coworkers, their children’s friends, and their fellow parents get put on planes and deported, and they won’t like it one bit when they realize that a once again, cruelty is the pointand that all this unnecessary suffering will not bring back 2019 prices.

Quite the contrary. Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimate that if Trump succeeds in deporting 8 million people, U.S. GDP would contract by more than 7% by 2028. It would also increase unemployment, as most undocumented immigrants generate excess demand for additional services that will disappear with them, because that’s what happens when you reduce the population of people you can sell things to. Mass evictions would also likely trigger a new wave of inflation – the Peterson report estimates it could reach 3% above the baseline level. Add this to the Yale Budget Lab estimate inflation of more than 5% compared to the most extreme versions of Trump’s tariff scenarios, and you have the recipe for an inflationary spiral that would make post-pandemic price increases look like a gentle hill that we happily climbed together on a languorous summer afternoon.

Are they going to do this stuff anyway? Of course they could, and then they would pay a very high political price for it. This goes not only for immigration and tariffs, but also for less discussed but equally disruptive ideas, like abolishing the Department of Education, whose immediate impacts— including the loss of federal funding for high-poverty school districts and support for students with disabilities — people would not benefit. But this is where the interests of the new Trump regime align with those of us who surely would not want to endure another round of price increases for the sole purpose of implementing the most morally-minded domestic domestic policy unacceptable since the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. Second War.

I’m not going to lie to you: not everyone who is here now will be here at the end of Trump’s first year. But Trump has a very strong incentive to do what he always does: claim victory even if he doesn’t really come close to achieving his goals, as he did after his term. failed summit with Kim Jong-un in 2018. After rolling back protections for groups like Venezuelans and Haitians (most likely a no-brainer, I think) and then staging a few coordinated ICE raids, Trump could declare “the largest deportation ever of the history of our great country” without plowing its way toward unnecessary economic collapse.

As we saw in 2020, when he probably could have saved his re-election by taking COVID a little more seriously and ignoring the epidemiological advice of cranks and Fox News personalities, Trump does not recognize not always in his best political interests nor does he act in accordance with his best political interests. In this case, given that we are all flying aboard the plane that Trump will soon pilot, there is little we can do except hope that he sees the genius inherent in restraint.