The Potential Backlash to Trump Unbound

Donald Trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party.

There’s less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump’s marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But there will also be fewer obstacles to the kind of polarizing ideas that got stopped during Trump’s first term. On numerous occasions, his own aides intervened to prevent the president from, for example, deploying the military to shoot racial-justice protesters, firing missiles into Mexico against drug-cartel facilities without authorization from the Mexican government, or potentially quitting NATO. Republicans in Congress thwarted parts of his agenda, as when senators blocked his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The courts ruled against some policies, such as separating the children of undocumented migrants from their parents at the southern border.

This time, Trump’s fate will be much more in his own hands. If he can deliver greater economic stability for working families, while avoiding too many firefights on militant MAGA priorities, strategists in both parties agree that he will be in a strong position to consolidate the gains he’s made among traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as Black, Latino, and younger white men.

But if an unbound Trump veers in directions that too many voters don’t want to follow—including vaccine skepticism, politicizing the criminal-justice system against his opponents, and the separation of undocumented parents from their U.S.-citizen children—he could quickly shrink his coalition again. And if his economic agenda rekindles inflation, as many independent analysts forecast, that effect will only be stronger.

Even in our highly polarized age, the fundamental hydraulics of America’s two-party system still govern elections: When one party falls in the public’s esteem, the other inevitably rises. That remained true even when the alternative for voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction was a candidate with as many vulnerabilities as Trump. Swing voters who soured on President Joe Biden’s performance turned to the other party. The same is likely to happen again, if voters sour on an unbound Trump.

[Charles Sykes: The GOP is treating Musk like he’s in charge]

Just how much more running room Trump has now than in 2017 is hard to overstate. Back then, the Republican leaders of the Senate (Mitch McConnell) and House (Paul Ryan) were both skeptical of Trump, especially in private, as were many rank-and-file members and major party donors. Upon taking office, Trump engineered “a hostile takeover” of the Republican infrastructure in Congress and beyond, Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Virginia and former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me. “Trump had the energy level of the party at the grass roots, but the contributors and everyone else was very leery.”

Now all of the GOP leaders in both chambers of Congress are visibly reluctant to challenge, or even question, Trump. With a 53–47 Senate majority, the GOP holds one more seat than it did when Trump took office in 2017; that may sound like a minuscule difference, but the edge it provides Trump could be enormous. Consider, for instance, that his first-term effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act was doomed by just three “no” votes from GOP senators.

The most significant institutional constraint on Trump may be the GOP’s achingly slim majority in the House of Representatives: The party will begin 2025 with just 217 seats, compared with 241 when Trump took office in 2017. That diminished advantage may limit some of the party’s legislative goals. Still, the House GOP caucus, though smaller than in his first term, is more unconditionally loyal to him. This week’s fractious GOP fight over funding to prevent a government shutdown (and potentially extend the debt limit) shows that when House Republicans do break from Trump, they are most likely to do so from the right. That dynamic means that if any sustained pressure comes to bear on Trump from the GOP-controlled Congress, it is likely to push him toward more, not less, extreme actions.

The consolidation of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party has given him more freedom in his appointments as well. In his first term, Trump felt compelled to appoint several top aides with roots in more traditional GOP factions, particularly for national-security posts (such as James Mattis as defense secretary and John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security). Having effectively crushed all other power centers in the GOP, Trump this time is naming loyalists up and down the government, daring Republican senators to oppose even his most extravagantly contrarian selections. The senior officials in Trump’s first term who had roots outside the MAGA movement resisted some of his most combustible ideas. Despite the influence of Susie Wiles, a more conventional GOP operative, as his White House chief of staff, Trump’s new Cabinet appointees are unlikely to push back nearly as much. The second Trump administration could be less divided than the first, but could as a result be even more divisive.

When Trump arrived in Washington in 2017, the Supreme Court was split 4–4 between Democratic- and Republican-nominated justices, after Senate Leader McConnell had refused to allow a vote the previous year for outgoing President Barack Obama’s choice to replace the conservative Antonin Scalia, who had died. Justice Anthony Kennedy—though appointed by Ronald Reagan—did not always align with the Court’s conservatives and tended to act as a swing vote.

Now Trump returns with a solid majority of six Republican-appointed justices. They already issued a ruling in their last term to make Trump virtually immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in office, removing that potential constraint. And that majority has repeatedly proved willing to override long-standing precedent to advance conservative causes and circumscribe the authority of federal regulators, assisting another Trump-team priority. Court-watchers caution that the way justices rule on any given case is not always predictable, but few legal experts expect this majority to obstruct many of Trump’s plans.

Other sources of possible restraint on Trump have visibly weakened. Many prominent business leaders who largely kept their distance from him after his first victory have made pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, as Trump triumphantly noted at his press conference this week. Major mainstream media outlets may have less appetite for aggressive oversight of this Trump administration than they did for the first one. Late in the campaign, the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post killed editorials endorsing Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. More recently, ABC News settled a Trump defamation case that many legal analysts considered flimsy.

Even elected Democrats have been more muted. Last time, Democrats were pressed into full-scale opposition by an energized resistance movement that began with the huge women’s march against Trump the day after he took office and rarely slackened over his first four years. This year, after Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, the liberal grass roots appear numbed and uncertain how to respond. Congressional Democrats in turn have mostly kept their heads down and spoken out relatively little, even about Trump’s most provocative Cabinet nominations. Likewise, Democrats—including Biden himself and leaders in the Capitol—have mostly stayed in the background while Republicans have torn themselves apart over a failed deal to prevent government shutdown.

“I don’t think it’s uncertainty [about how to respond to Trump’s victory], so much as a belief that the activist resistance opposition to Trump was misguided, and that it created an activist agenda that created problems for the party,” Stanley B. Greenberg, the longtime Democratic pollster, told me. Behind the relative quiescence is “a determination that elected officials [rather than activists] should get back in charge of figuring out the direction of the party.”

One reason Democrats haven’t focused more fire yet on Trump, Greenberg said, is that many of them recognize how much work they face to repair their own party’s image after an election showing that many voters considered it more focused on niche social and cultural issues than the economic fortunes of ordinary families. Elected Democrats are conscious of a need to express “respect for the working-class vote that he won,” Greenberg said. “A majority of this country is working-class: He won them … It is a different starting point.”

[Jonathan Chait: How liberal America came to its senses]

Republicans’ coming choices about how far and fast Trump should move in this more favorable climate echoes the defining internal GOP debate of the early 1980s. During Reagan’s first term, movement conservatives were repeatedly frustrated that moderate White House advisers, led by Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and the image guru Michael Deaver, steered the president toward incremental rather than revolutionary change. Those disaffected conservatives rallied behind a four-word mantra: “Let Reagan be Reagan.”

The course set by Baker and Deaver prioritized deal-making on the biggest issues with Democrats at home and Soviet leaders abroad; more ideological flourishes on secondary fronts came only intermittently. By nourishing the base and reassuring the center at the same time, Baker and Deaver guided Reagan through a successful first term and toward, in 1984, a landslide reelection. But conservative insurgents, led by an impatient young House backbencher named Newt Gingrich, bristled because Reagan did not pursue more sweeping change or try harder to polarize the electorate against liberals and Democrats.

This time, the hard-liners in the GOP do not plan on being frustrated. Prominent MAGA acolytes such as the designated White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and Trump’s cheerleader in chief, Stephen Bannon, are updating the cry of conservatives a generation ago to “Let Trump be Trump.” With the guardrails so weakened, they see a generational chance to remake American life.

That expansive vision of radical change could quickly lead to a backlash. Blanket pardons for January 6 rioters, restricting access to abortion medication, deporting long-residing undocumented immigrants without any criminal record—possibly along with their U.S.-citizen children—are all policies that poll poorly. If Trump’s health appointees, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice as secretary of Health and Human Services, undermine school vaccine compliance in a way that triggers outbreaks of childhood diseases, the outrage could be intense. “If we have a resurgence of measles epidemics, a resurgence of polio, a resurgence of tooth decay, that’s going to have a whale of an impact on people,” the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me. (Ayres believes that Republican senators would actually do Trump a favor if they reject such nominees as RFK Jr. “who are going to do nothing but create problems for him over the next four years.”)

Any such controversies could chip away at Trump’s public support. But just as during the campaign, Trump’s political standing in office will likely be determined mostly by voters’ assessment of his impact on the economy and their personal finances. The exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the AP VoteCast survey both made clear that many voters who harbored doubts about Trump’s character or agenda voted for him anyway because they thought he would be better for their pocketbook.

If that pattern holds, many voters may look past actions they dislike, as long as they believe that Trump is delivering them greater economic stability. “Voters will forgive a lot if the country is doing well,” Davis told me. Greenberg and some other Democratic strategists concur. That explains why some Democrats are urging the party to pull back from their approach during Trump’s first term—generalized resistance on many fronts—and concentrate on making him accountable for one big thing. They want the party to highlight the contradictions that will surely emerge between Trump’s pledge of widely shared prosperity and a policy agenda that could reignite inflation while benefiting principally the wealthiest individuals and big corporations.

“I know Elon Musk is interesting, but these voters who broke for Trump were not looking for the oligarchs to take charge, and they are,” Greenberg said.

The conundrum facing Democrats is that their chances in the 2026 and 2028 elections will likely rise the more Trump advances a maximalist MAGA agenda—but so will the damage he inflicts on a wide array of causes and constituencies that Democrats prize, not to mention the erosion he may cause to the rule of law and small-d democratic institutions.

“The very crass political answer is: Democrats benefit” in the long run from Trump’s stronger position “because Trump always goes too far when he is uninhibited,” Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, told me. “However, he is going to break things that are very hard to fix. And he is going to hurt people who are very vulnerable—whom my fellow Democrats and I are in this business to protect. So we can’t root for that.”

But with Republicans holding both congressional chambers and GOP-nominated justices controlling the Supreme Court, the uncomfortable reality is that what Democrats prefer doesn’t count for much. “I think in official Washington,” Bennett told me, “there’s a deep understanding of how few levers Democrats have to stop Trump.”