Trump Will Return to Power With a More Expansive Agenda

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Trump Will Return to Power With a More Expansive Agenda

The president-elect could reshape government and may dramatically transform foreign and domestic policy in a second term.

Without establishment Republicans and military veterans surrounding him, President-elect Donald J. Trump could find it easier to move ahead with his plans, particularly if his party wins the House.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

By Peter Baker and Charlie Savage

Reporting from Washington

Nov. 6, 2024

As he declared victory, President-elect Donald J. Trump said that his mission now was nothing less than to “save our country.” His version of doing that involves an expansive agenda that would reshape government, foreign policy, national security, economics and domestic affairs as dramatically as any president in modern times.

Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump outlined a set of policies for his second term that would be far more sweeping than what he enacted in his first. Without establishment Republicans and military veterans surrounding him to resist his more drastic ideas, Mr. Trump may find it easier to move ahead, particularly if his party completes its sweep by winning the House.

Many of his policy prescriptions remain vague or change in detail depending on his mood or the day. But if he follows through on his campaign trail talk, he would restructure the government to make it more partisan, further cut taxes while imposing punishing tariffs on foreign goods, expand energy production, pull the United States back from overseas alliances, reverse longstanding health rules, prosecute his adversaries and round up theoretically millions of people living in the country illegally.

“We’re going to do the best job,” Mr. Trump said in his victory speech. “We’re going to turn it around. It’s got to be turned around. It’s got to be turned around fast, and we’re going to turn it around. We’re going to do it in every way with so many ways, but we’re going to do it in every way. This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”

Having promised to devote his next four years in office to “retribution,” Mr. Trump plans to quickly shield himself from legal scrutiny, end criminal investigations against himself, pardon supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and turn the power of federal law enforcement against his adversaries.

He has said he will fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has brought indictments against him for mishandling classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election, and he has threatened to investigate President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and others who have angered him, including Republicans like Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming.

Such a move would end the post-Watergate norm that the White House is not supposed to interfere in prosecutors’ investigation and charging decisions. Should he follow through, Mr. Trump would be bolstered both by a legal blueprint developed by his allies while he was out of office for increasing direct presidential control of the Justice Department, and by the ruling by the Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices last summer that granted presidents substantial immunity from prosecution based on their core official acts.

In a sign of how focused Mr. Trump is on the Justice Department, Vice President-elect JD Vance has called attorney general the most important job in government after the president. And he may fire Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director he appointed in 2017 but proved insufficiently loyal in his mind.

Mr. Trump has also vowed to curb the professional ranks of civil servants in government, what he has called the deep state. At the end of his first term, he issued an executive order to allow as many as 50,000 more senior civil servants to be fired and replaced with political loyalists. Mr. Biden rescinded it before it took effect, so it has never been tested in court.

But Mr. Trump is likely to reissue it in his second administration after first rolling back regulations the Biden administration put in place to slow down such a move, a change that would transform an ostensibly nonpartisan government into a tool of his political will. Once that is accomplished, many other changes would in theory be that much easier to enact.

Domestic policy

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Migrants being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border after being detained by the Border Patrol in New Mexico on Monday.Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times

No single promise electrified Mr. Trump’s crowds more than his vow of “mass deportations” of immigrants, a blitz of expulsions that would be unparalleled in modern times.

Among other things, Mr. Trump wants to expand the use of expedited removal hearings without due process — now used only for people caught shortly after crossing the border — to deport undocumented immigrants from all across the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States longer than two years. His chief immigration policy adviser has said that the government will use military funds to build large detention camps in Texas to hold people as their cases are processed.

Mr. Trump has also promised a return to many of his signature policies aimed at closing America’s borders: deporting unaccompanied migrant children crossing illegally, reviving a program that forced migrants to stay in Mexico for their U.S. asylum cases and limiting migration from several Muslim-majority countries.

At the same time, he intends to rein in other law enforcement agencies. He is likely to reverse almost of all of Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s major initiatives, sidelining the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and scuttling or slow-walking investigations of misconduct, racism and discrimination in local and state police and corrections departments.

Few agencies face a future quite as uncertain as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is responsible for gun regulations. Under Steven Dettelbach, the director appointed by Mr. Biden, the bureau has cracked down on conversion devices that allow guns to fire more rapidly and deadly homemade firearms known as “ghost guns,” while leveraging existing law to increase the number of background checks conducted on prospective buyers.

All of those efforts are likely to be limited or rolled back entirely, and it is possible that Mr. Trump could refuse to even appoint a permanent successor to Mr. Dettelbach, leaving the bureau without Senate-confirmed leadership.

Mr. Trump’s return to power could lead to significant upheaval for millions of Americans dependent on the Affordable Care Act, after record levels of enrollment under Mr. Biden. Increased subsidies could expire next year without action from congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump, causing premiums to spike.

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A second Trump administration could also deliver major changes to Medicaid and Medicare. Federal health officials could approve controversial work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries, forcing millions of people to work, volunteer or attend school to qualify for health care. Some former Trump advisers have also called for rethinking programs in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, including Medicare’s new power to directly negotiate drug prices.

Mr. Trump has also said he would empower Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to rethink longstanding health care policies. Mr. Kennedy, a lawyer with no medical or public health degrees, has long promoted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has already signaled other ideas to pursue that were once out of the mainstream. Among them would be advising localities to remove fluoride from water despite decades of experience showing it helps protect teeth.

On abortion, Mr. Trump recently said he opposed congressional legislation to restrict access nationwide. But he has broad power to limit abortions through executive power alone. His Food and Drug Administration could restrict or even revoke the approval of medications used in most abortions. And he could advocate aggressive enforcement of a 19th-century anti-vice law to ban the mailing of materials used in abortions.

Mr. Trump has also said he would dismantle the Education Department entirely, a promise Republicans have made since Ronald Reagan without success. Mr. Trump has railed against the department for enforcing rules extending greater protections to transgender students and has seized on college campus protests over the war in Gaza as a sign that liberal voices have overtaken conservative ones in higher education.

The new president could spin off the department’s student aid office, which holds a roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio, into a new entity, as his former secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has proposed. To abolish the department outright, Mr. Trump would need support from Congress, and some Republicans might balk.

Economic policy

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An oil drilling site in Alaska last year.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Mr. Trump has laid out a plan for extraordinary change to the country’s trade and economic policies, starting with imposing a universal tariff, or tax, on most imported goods. The idea is to raise their prices so that domestic manufacturers of rival goods can better compete, protecting factory jobs. Such a policy could ignite a global trade war, damaging American exports if foreign trading partners impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made goods.

Mr. Trump vowed in particular to try to wrench apart the U.S. economic relationship with China — a turbulent change for the world’s two largest economies, which exchange about $750 billion in goods and services each year. He has said he would “enact aggressive new restrictions on Chinese ownership” of assets in the United States, bar Americans from investing in China and eventually ban Chinese-made goods like electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals.

Mr. Trump campaigned on a mix of ambitious tax cuts, often laid out in only a few words, including ending taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits. At several points, he even suggested ending income taxes, the nation’s primary source of revenue. Those ideas face a potentially skeptical Congress, even under Republican control, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers are already looking at ways to scale back the potential cost of his tax agenda.

His most important priority with taxes will be to extend the cuts he signed into law the last time he was in the White House. Many of those provisions, including popular measures like a larger standard deduction, expire at the end of next year. Simply continuing them would be expensive, and some Republican lawmakers have puzzled over how to avoid blowing a huge hole in the budget.

Mr. Trump has also said he would expand domestic drilling for oil and gas, although those are already at record levels under the Biden administration. That could mean expanding drilling permits in the Alaskan wilderness. And he has said he would revive and expand his first-term effort to cut back on federal regulations.

While lower energy costs and fewer regulations could cut back on production costs, other elements of his agenda — raising tariffs, mass deportations of low-wage laborers and cutting taxes in an economy that is already at full employment — would create upward pressure on prices. If inflation rises again, that would in turn put pressure on the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates, making it harder for people to borrow and afford mortgages.

That would conflict with Mr. Trump’s vow to bring down interest rates. He has said that he will not fire Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, but he could exert pressure on the central bank in other ways over the coming years. He will have a chance to replace at least a few officials on the Fed’s seven-member board in Washington.

One adviser has publicly suggested that Mr. Trump should announce whom he would nominate to replace Mr. Powell much earlier than the end of his term in 2026. As long as Wall Street believed that the “shadow” Fed chair would in fact eventually be confirmed, investors might begin to anticipate lower interest rates — and the mere expectation would bring mortgage rates and business borrowing rates down, or so the theory goes.

National security

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Damage from Russian strikes in Vuhledar, Ukraine, earlier this year. Credit...Tyler Hicks

All of those initiatives, at least, will wait until Mr. Trump takes office. He set a far more ambitious, and problematic, goal for himself during the campaign when he repeatedly claimed that he would broker a deal to end the war in Ukraine even before Inauguration Day. Such a negotiation, he said again and again, would be completed within 24 hours.

What he never said was how he would accomplish such a goal, and few if any with experience in national security outside his circle see that as even remotely possible. The only way to swiftly end the war, specialists said, would be to force the Ukrainians into a bad deal by cutting off their military support and allowing Russia to keep the roughly 20 percent of the country it has seized through force.

Not only would Ukraine presumably refuse to go along with such a deal, so would America’s European allies, which are heavily invested in the war and have their own interest in not rewarding Russia for naked aggression. But even if the conflict is not ended by Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump will have tremendous leverage to try to impose his own resolution once he is in office. And that resolution is expected to favor Russia, whose president, Vladimir V. Putin, he has praised as a “genius.”

What Mr. Trump plans to do about the other major war consuming Washington is even less clear. While he has blamed Mr. Biden’s supposed weakness for the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7 on Israel, Mr. Trump has said little about what Israel should now do about its yearlong war in Gaza, its recent escalation in Lebanon and its exchange of airstrikes with Iran.

His extensive support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in his first term has led many to expect him to be an unqualified supporter of Israel’s approach, and he has criticized Mr. Biden for not sufficiently standing by the Jewish state. But Mr. Trump has also publicly called on Israel to end the war because it has been a public relations problem.

And his once-strong personal relationship with Mr. Netanyahu soured in 2020, particularly after the Israeli prime minister congratulated Mr. Biden on his election victory. So it is not a given that Mr. Trump will give Mr. Netanyahu carte blanche. Mr. Trump is expected to take a harder line on Iran than Mr. Biden has, and resume closer relations with Arab allies, seeking to reach the deal that eluded his predecessor to establish normal diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

At home, Mr. Trump is expected to go after what he has complained is a “woke” Pentagon — one that has pushed through initiatives aimed at inclusivity, like restoring the names of military bases that were previously named after Confederate generals. Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, could be return to being called Fort Bragg, for instance.

The new president could reinstate a ban on transgender people serving in the military and might also aim to get rid of policies aimed at helping troops get access to abortion. He has also made clear that he does not like training programs in the military that target racial or sexual discrimination.

Mr. Trump wanted to move American troops out of Germany, Syria and South Korea during his first term, only to be thwarted by advisers, so he may try that again. Some Trump allies have suggested that he may seek to move American troops in Germany to Poland or bring them home from Europe altogether.

He also wanted to use the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty American troops into the streets to subdue protesters after the police killing of George Floyd, only to back down after resistance by military leaders. During the campaign, Mr. Trump suggested that in a second term he would be more aggressive about following through in the event of other protests that he does not like.

Reporting was contributed by Devlin Barrett, Helene Cooper, Adam Goldman, Zach Montague, Margot Sanger-Katz, Jeanna Smialek, Ana Swanson, Glenn Thrush and Hamed Aleaziz.

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage