Trump Now Has A Loyal Team, But Overreach Could Again Threaten His Success

Donald Trump returns to the White House on Monday with more experience and far fewer Republican enemies than he had when his first term began in 2017. Nearly all political insiders expect him to bend the national Republican Party and the courts to his will, and achieve much more than he did in his first term.

To hear Trump’s allies tell it, the shortcomings of his first term were the product of bad personnel decisions. Since he did not anticipate winning in 2016, and there were so few experienced Republican aides and experts in Trump’s mold, Trump had to rely on many old-guard Republicans who were not loyal to him or his agenda, according to these Trump allies.

“He basically just threw everybody together, and he had no experience governing, so he didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” said John Feehery, a former Republican congressional aide turned lobbyist and consultant. “He knows now. He’s had four years to stew on it, and he’s a smart guy.”

But Trump is still Trump ― arrogant, disinterested in the practical application of his grandiose ideas, and vulnerable to manipulation by people who flatter him. Overconfidence, personal grievances and contradictory impulses, both in Trump’s own mind and within an increasingly unwieldy coalition, could easily undermine his presidency and sharply limit his successes.

“His win was real and it was large, but it was not a giant mandate,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “He is showing every sign that he is about to overreach.”

Consolidating Power

There’s no doubt that figures like former Trump homeland security secretary and chief of staff John Kelly ― one of several first-term Trump officials to trash Trump after serving with him ― will no longer be at Trump’s side. The ranks of Trump skeptics in Congress have thinned as members have retired or have been scared into fealty.

Trump’s takeover of the conservative institutional scaffolding nurturing Republican intellectual and legislative talent has been equally sweeping. The Heritage Foundation, for example, has transformed itself into a Trumpian vehicle, embracing Trump’s nationalist trade policies that would have once been anathema to it, and cheering on the nomination of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an ideologically heterodox abortion rights supporter, as Trump’s health and human services secretary.

Those twin achievements ― Trump’s conquest of both the GOP and the party’s institutional support system ― have vastly expanded the talent pool and policy expertise to which Trump has access. They have also removed potential internal roadblocks or countervailing voices that might have put a check on Trump’s illiberal impulses ― a scary reality for many Democrats and independents.

“Those guardrails for those of us who care about democracy are all gone,” Bennett said.

Deportation Debacle?

But a closer look at two of the biggest policy debacles of Trump’s presidency show overreach and ideological contradictions were as big of a drag on his tenure as staffing problems.

First, Trump tried to impose hardline immigration policies that went beyond what the public supported. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order banning travel from an array of majority-Muslim countries, causing chaos at major airports, wall-to-wall negative news coverage, and a prolonged battle in court that saw the plan dramatically scaled back.

Then, in April 2018, Trump initiated a “zero tolerance” policy for unlawful border crossings that separated parents from their children by arresting adults and detaining the kids separately. The policy got shot down in court several months later, but not before images of children crying for their parents behind chain-linked fences circulated on Americans’ television screens.

The policy was deeply unpopular with the public and became a humanitarian ordeal well into the Biden administration, which convened a task force to reunite families. As of May, 1,400 children separated during the operation were still not reunited with their parents.

This time around, Trump won in part due to broad public frustration with the historic spike in border crossings under the Biden administration. Those new arrivals are generally in the process of claiming asylum, to which they have a legal right, but even many Democrats believe that economic migrants and the smugglers who transport them have been abusing an asylum system not designed for these kinds of sudden inflows.

Trump, who has promised to erect the biggest deportation program in U.S. history, claims he will prioritize deportation of undocumented immigrants guilty of crimes, and the 4 million-plus undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers who arrived under Biden and remain in the country (either because they are awaiting a court date, or because they evaded authorities upon entry).

It’s unclear though whether Trump can reach his target deportation rates without expelling many undocumented immigrants who have stable jobs, deep roots in their communities, and children or other close family members with U.S. citizenship. And the more common crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, who have a lower crime rate than either legal immigrants or U.S.-born citizens, are most likely to be minor offenses like traffic violations.

“If they do start with felons ― well, that doesn’t give us a lot of purchase to go after them, but if they go too far, which they probably will, because they always do, then we might have something,” Bennett said.

Chris Roman, a Trump-backing independent political consultant in Las Vegas and former Spanish-language TV executive, takes heart in Trump’s assurances that he will try to protect “Dreamers,” a term for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children.

As for efforts to deport other people with deep roots in the country who have not committed crimes, Roman conceded that it could cost Trump with many of his newer, less conservative supporters in Nevada, including Latinos. “That’s where the red line will be,” he said.

The Obamacare Repeal That Wasn’t

The other major political fiasco of Trump’s first term was his failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, commonly known as Obamacare. Trump admitted at the time that he knew little about health care policy. But he was determined to satisfy small-government conservatives ― in and out of Congress ― and of course, undo one of Obama’s core accomplishments.

Trump learned the hard way that voters liked many of Obamacare’s key provisions, requiring insurers to cover people on the individual market regardless of their “preexisting conditions,” capping annual out-of-pocket costs, and subsidizing states’ expansion of Medicaid.

What’s more, the pressure he faced from the GOP’s right flank to defund the ACA and gut its regulatory protections ended up depriving him of the moderate support he needed to get the bill through the Senate.

“ACA repeal was where his kind of mean-spirited, small-minded bullshit met conservative orthodoxy,” Bennett said.

The end result was an embarrassing legislative failure, which increased the ACA’s popularity, giving Democrats a powerful issue to run on in the 2018 midterm elections. Democrats would flip more than 40 House seats, retaking control of the chamber and limiting Trump’s legislative ambitions in the second half of his term.

As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden would go on to beef up subsidies for middle-income families purchasing coverage on the ACA exchanges. And during the 2024 vice presidential debate in October, Republican nominee J.D. Vance underscored the changing politics of the issue by falsely claiming Trump had actually saved the ACA.

But even if the politics of the ACA have changed in some corners of the Republican Party, efforts to have his fiscal cake and eat it too could still force Trump into some unpopular positions.

Trump is proposing an extension ― and expansion ― of the massive income and corporate tax cuts of his first term, and further proposed exempting Social Security benefits and overtime pay from income taxes. He has suggested, dubiously, he can fill much of the gap with reforms proposed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency panel, and revenue generated by new tariffs on foreign imports, while shielding Social Security and other popular programs from cuts.

Perhaps more realistically, House Republicans have drawn up a “menu” of potential options for achieving $2.5 trillion in spending cuts that includes cutting ACA subsidies set to expire this year, and imposing caps on Medicaid spending.

“If you cut Medicaid spending to poor people, that has a real bite,” Feehery said. “And how about these ACA subsidies ― most of those health subsidies go to Republican voters. So if you’re going to kick people off of their health care ― that politically is not all that popular, so you’ve got to be careful on that.”

With Republicans holding onto a four-seat majority in the House, however, even a small mistake could cost Trump a substantial amount of power in his final two years. And the political risks of severe spending cuts ― alongside tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich ― are especially great because of the breadth of Trump’s working-class support in 2024, and his pretensions to the populist mantle, argued Josh Miller-Lewis, a former top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“Trump has to make decisions about where he actually stands and what sort of coalition he really wants to build, whether his party actually represents working-class people, or whether ultimately, it represents the wealthy and the powerful that have been the core base of the party previously,” said Miller-Lewis, who is now senior editorial director of the pro-labor media outlet, More Perfect Union.

The Hazards Of A Big Tent

Trump may no longer have to contend with a recalcitrant faction of fiscal conservatives in Congress pursuing an independent agenda that conflicts with his.

But newer additions to MAGA World outside of Congress could prove just as nettlesome, particularly major figures in Silicon Valley. A number of tech industry titans and investors have either converted into outspoken Trump evangelists and donors since his first two runs, or are seeking to curry favor with him.

These tech billionaires and multimillionaires, including Musk and pro-MAGA business leaders like Ramaswamy, for example, have vastly different views on immigration policy than the hardline nativists in the MAGA base.

Musk and Ramaswamy, a centi-millionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur, both got in hot water with MAGA hardliners in December when they expressed support for the H-1B visa program that helps tech firms in particular source high-skilled foreign labor. The more nationalist branch of Trump’s supporters argued that the H-1B program exploits foreign workers to the detriment of American earning power ― a view shared by progressives like Sanders ― and also used racist tropes to denigrate the mostly Indian immigrants who benefit from the program.

Trump responded by endorsing the H-1B program, but reportedly has also soured a bit on Ramaswamy, whose contribution to the debate included a viral post on X lamenting how native-born American workers lacked the drive and nerdiness of foreign strivers and their kids.

He could soon be out of Trump’s hair though. It emerged this week that Ramaswamy will soon announce plans to run for governor of Ohio, his home state, in the 2026 election.

But divisions remain in Trump’s orbit. Following the H-1B visa debate, Steve Bannon, the former Trump advisor-turned-popular MAGA podcaster, called Musk a “truly evil person” and vowed to fight to limit his access to the White House.

Other areas where tech leaders are out of step with the MAGA faithful include their enthusiasm for libertarian-style rollbacks of the welfare state, and their opposition to strong antitrust enforcement top Trump officials are expected to champion.

“The tech oligarchs in Trump’s inner circle are more interested in boosting their bottom line and their profits than in fighting for American workers,” Miller-Lewis said. “Trump’s going to have to make some important decisions about which side he wants to stand on.”

For their part, Trump’s supporters maintain Trump is at once the final decider of GOP policy direction, and sole figure capable of shaping his base’s views and those of his colleagues in Congress.

What’s more, the narrowness of Trump’s majorities in Congress will ironically serve as its own safeguard against overreach, and force him to seek bipartisan support for key initiatives, Feehery predicted.

“They’re going to only be able to do what they’re going to be able to do,” Feehery said.

Roman anticipates that tech leaders, traditional conservatives, and most importantly, swing voters are willing to abide disagreements with Trump so long as he delivers on his promise to grow the economy and raise ordinary people’s wages.

If, by contrast, “people start feeling it in their pockets, if they get worse off, if they don’t feel as ebullient or as hopeful, he’ll go down in flames,” Roman said.