What are the top priorities of the incoming Trump administration? While it is perhaps too early to offer a definitive assessment, recent briefings and announcements suggest that his team has a long list of policies they would like to implement. The first, and most widely publicized, is a mass deportation programme with the stated aim of removing millions of people from the country. This would involve a number of top-down federal initiatives: channelling funds to immigration enforcement agencies and the National Guard, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to rapidly expel alleged ‘gang members’, collaborating with Republican authorities on state-level crackdowns and putting maximal pressure on so-called sanctuary cities. Meanwhile, the hope is to reduce routine border crossings through tighter visa restrictions, a revived ‘Remain in Mexico’ protocol, travel bans and ‘ideological screening’, as well as an end to birthright citizenship.

The second priority is to introduce high, across-the-board tariffs – between 10% and 20% on goods from other countries, and 60% or more on imports from China – and ensure that exporters cannot circumvent them by renegotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Some of Trump’s cadre are equally keen to rewrite US labour laws to fully defang trade unions and dismantle any legal protection for collective action outside captive union structures. The Project 2025 document outlines such policies as allowing companies to fire workers for organizing and set up sham unions with hand-picked committees. The most effective means to advance this agenda would be to eliminate administrative obstacles at the National Labor Relations Board while using the courts to set new precedents vis-à-vis workers’ rights.

We may also see the 47th president adopt some of the more folkish and bio-mystical policies championed by RFK Jr: legalizing raw milk, eliminating vaccine requirements, ending water fluoridation and liberalizing pet regulations. Trump will pander to his religious base by removing restrictions on private or home schooling while waging an ill-defined ‘war on wokeness’ in public education. An ‘efficiency’ drive will try to reduce the size of the civil service, as well as repealing various social and environmental regulations. On the legislative front, Biden’s climate measures will be in the crosshairs – particularly tax credits for electric vehicles – and incentives could be offered for investment in fossil fuels and nuclear power.

As with any US president, Trump’s greatest room for manoeuvre will be foreign policy, but it is doubtful whether his approach will differ substantially from that of the Democrats. He seems more inclined to wind down military operations in Ukraine – although, given Russia’s recent advances on the battlefield and the patent impossibility of Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’, it is far from certain that Harris would have been able to prolong the proxy war indefinitely. The policy of containing China through economic strangulation and military encirclement, while pulling back from direct confrontation, will continue. Ultra-Zionism will animate the approach to the Middle East, with Israel given US cover to ‘finish the job’ in Gaza and perhaps to bomb Iran, using the nuclear threat as a pretext – but again, this will hardly constitute a material shift. Under Rubio, the sanctions toolkit handed down from Bush to Obama, and honed under Biden, will be deployed more aggressively against states like Cuba and Venezuela.

It would not be feasible for even the most organized and steadfast White House to succeed in pushing through all of these policies, however, in part because of the elite resistance they will encounter. Immigration is a case in point. An overzealous crackdown is sure to elicit a backlash among corporate interests that rely on undocumented labour. This could cause some Republican staffers and politicians to break ranks, jeopardizing Trump’s key campaign pledge and alienating parts of his electoral constituency. The obvious way to square that circle is to launch various high-profile raids in major cities, provoking the local Democratic administrations to push back, and allowing the government to blame their obstructionism when relatively ‘few’ migrants – still probably thousands to tens of thousands – are deported.

Likewise, Trump’s plan to gut the state bureaucracy will not set specific dollar or headcount targets, because this would be too disruptive for important parts of the Republican coalition: creating an unstable regulatory environment for businesses, while damaging the public services on which working-class Americans depend. Instead, the government’s tactic will be to take superficially bold actions – staging confrontations with the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior – that will be challenged by recalcitrant state officials, who can then be blamed for undermining the popular will.

We can probably expect a harsher tariff regime under Trump, though with a raft of exemptions for large companies plus possible concessions to avert a negative reaction from the markets. Yet his hopes of extending his 2017 tax handouts to the super-rich, while abolishing a number of other state levies including taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, has already raised hackles among House Republicans demanding greater fiscal discipline. It is unlikely that he will be able to repeal the bulk of Biden’s green subsidies, since they are bound up with bipartisan-supported infrastructure and manufacturing investments. Nor can he hope to significantly ramp up fossil fuel production, which is already at a historic peak.

Perhaps the biggest uncertainty when it comes to Trump’s domestic agenda is the extent to which he and the far-right judiciary are willing to persecute their opponents. The Department of Justice will no doubt receive a full Trumpian makeover. But will it actually come for Democratic politicians? This is improbable in the short term. However, if the government senses that its support is starting to slip because of a worsening economy, then we may see a sudden turn towards lawfare – targeting Democrats on the pretexts of collaborating with China, voter fraud and so on.

It is similarly unclear, at this stage, how Trump will relate to organized labour. He may simply endorse the agenda of the Right to Work Foundation and Project 2025, backed by anti-union ideologues like Musk and Bezos. But he also has a track-record of cultivating relationships with sympathetic labour leaders like Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters, as long as it doesn’t cost him or employers too much. Within the administration, Vance will likely be an effective advocate of integrating certain unions under highly restrictive conditions. The question then becomes: can Trump broker some sort of deal between a reactionary labour leadership, willing to sell out on every substantive issue, and big bosses? The former would certainly be willing, but coordinating the latter will probably require more finesse than Trump’s team can muster. Even if the new administration fails to strike a neo-corporatist bargain, though, its approach to the labour movement may be more complex – or, at least, more confused and ambiguous – than Musk’s anti-union rhetoric would suggest.

In general, Trump’s second term looks set to replay a familiar pattern, in which his grandest promises come up against the practical difficulties of mediating between rival interest groups and their political representatives, both inside and outside the administration. During his first stint in office, this dynamic forced him into a series of retreats and compromises which he attributed to ‘deep state’ sabotage, deflecting the blame onto this shadowy enemy. The next four years will be characterized by a similar attempt at displacement. It remains to be seen whether it will succeed in maintaining his populist appeal, allowing him to anoint his chosen successor in 2028, or whether his supporters will stop buying it.

Read on: JoAnn Wypijewski, ‘Politics of Insecurity’, NLR 103.