Donald Trump will be a one-term president. He will not satisfy the hopes of the “forgotten ones” and American-Firsters who got him elected.
Trump supporters — older, angry white guys from the Rust Belt and rural areas who did not attend college — may stubbornly stick with Trump in spite of the many mistakes he will make, and they will predictably be angered by the protests that Trump’s policies provoke among urban, bicoastal, minority and college-educated Americans. Trump’s base often will forget, conveniently, that a majority of Americans voted Democratic and in fact gave Clinton nearly 3 million more popular votes than him. And because American intelligence agencies now agree that Russian hackers purposefully worked to get Trump elected, the simple fact is that Trump’s legitimacy, like it or not, will remain weak, if not endangered.
On the day the Electoral College confirmed his victory, an NBC/Wall Street poll showed that 54 percent of Americans are pessimistic or concerned about Trump’s presidency. The other 46 percent who believe otherwise compares unfavorably with the percentage of Americans who were optimistic after the elections of Barack Obama (66 percent) and George W. Bush (59 percent). Trump does not have a convincing mandate nor will he get much of a honeymoon. Lacking a mandate, even with Republican majorities in both chambers, let alone the deep divisions within the GOP, it is doubtful that Trump can be an effective leader.
Add to this Trump’s abrasive, defensive, thin-skinned and egoistic temperament, the majority of voters — who did not support him — are unlikely to remain quiet when he stumbles. And he will stumble — every new president does — but Trump’s political capital is so meager that he cannot count on facing a forgiving public.
Trump’s campaign promises will prove noxious for the economy. If he is able to impose tariffs of between 20 percent and 45 percent on Chinese imports, a trade war may ensue, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs and rising unemployment. If Trump’s tax plan is enacted, wealthier Americans will disproportionately benefit and the national debt will increase by an estimated $5 trillion over the next 10 years. If Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress eviscerate Obamacare, an estimated 20 million to 25 million low-income Americans will lose health insurance coverage and hospital emergency rooms will face an unending funding crisis.
In all, the low-income Americans who supported Trump will suffer the most over the next four years, and they will begin grumbling when they discover that prices of goods at discount stores are soaring. The nagging question will be how — if at all — they can continue to support the billionaire president and his leadership team of plutocrats and generals. Trump’s promise to “restore prosperity” will be widely seen as hollow.
Trump also promises to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and to abandon the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. NAFTA’s very complexity as well as the economic benefit it has brought to many major American corporations could result in pushback from America’s major job-creators and their stockholders, which could in turn spark a GOP uprising in Congress since most Republicans have traditionally and strongly supported free trade. Trump also will face intraparty resistance if he carries through on his promise to add a 35 percent tariff on American firms that move their production overseas. This initiative is especially odd coming from a man whose product lines are made in factories overseas.
The saw that “campaigning is poetry, governing is prose” is truer than ever for Trump. To his supporters, Trump’s populist campaign messages were music to their ears, but President Trump’s actual policies — his prose, as it were — will hurt the very people he has pledged to protect. The result, I suspect, would be a massive coming together of conservatives and liberals to call for his impeachment for the lies he will most certainly tell or for those ill-advised policies that could destroy but will certainly weaken the economy.
Roger Bowen is a political scientist who lives and works in Prospect Harbor.