Americans elected Trump. They might not like what comes next.

Story by Aaron Blake. November 11, 2024.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling that provides presidents with broad immunity from criminal acts as long as it is official acts, presidents can command actions irregardless of whether it is constitutional or even violates federal laws.

  • Mass Deportations Polls showed Americans were about evenly split: 56 percent to 43 percent. A recent CNN poll asked people to choose between the two, and registered voters chose a path to legal status over deporting all undocumented immigrants by a 2-to-1 margin. There’s also the matter of people potentially liking this better in theory than in practice. Deporting millions of people would be an arduous and expensive enterprise that could involve separating families, expelling friends and neighbors of many Americans, and raising prices by cutting off a huge segment of the labor force. And then there are the costs. Another recent poll showed just 31 percent of people thought mass deportation would increase prices. But it would come with a hefty price tag for the government and the economy, potentially in the trillions.
  • January 6, 2021 Pardons1 Trump has pledged to pardon at least some Jan. 6, 2021, defendants. It’s not clear how many, and Trump’s campaign has said it would be handled on a “case by case” basis.
    • 69-31% A CNN poll early this year showed Americans opposed pardons for “most” Jan. 6 defendants.
    • 62-38% A CBS News-YouGov poll around the same time showed Americans broadly opposed such pardons on a smaller scale
    • 70-30% Americans, excluding a noisy segment of Trumpers (formerly known as Republicans), thought their sentences were about right or not harsh enough.
  • Firing Civil Servants Government services would be severely impacted. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. FEMA. NASA. Courts. Prisons. Swapping out federal employees when there is a presidential turnover is not just dumb. It’s fucking dumb. Gone would be the knowledge base with each mass purge/hiring. Unemployment would spike Government employees may not be the most sympathetic characters. And much depends on the scale. But these are overwhelming margins that suggest anything amounting to a wide-scale purge would be met with strong opposition. Trump has spoken about wanting to be able to fire nonpartisan civil servants who aren’t loyal to him — what he refers to as “rogue bureaucrats” — possibly en masse. Just so %rump can hire sycophants, ass-kissers, brown-nosers, and boot-lickers.
    • 49-28% Just 9 percent strongly supported the idea. A May poll from Ipsos showed Americans opposed allowing a president to fire civil servants at will
    • 67-11% firing civil servants for expressing disagreement with administration policy
    • 63-15% doing their job in a way the president doesn’t like
  • Tariffs Trump has proposed a 10 to 20 percent across-the-board tariff on imports and a 60 to 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports. A February poll from YouGov showed just 61 percent of people who said they wanted increased tariffs stood by that support when tariffs were attached to higher prices for American consumers. Tariffs can protect American industry, but they generally do lead to inflation — possibly high inflation, depending on the scale of what Trump does.
  • Reducing Ukraine Aid2 Trump’s posture toward Ukraine’s war effort is more nebulous than a lot of people appreciate. But he has suggested he will scale back support and has declined to even take Ukraine’s side over Russia in the conflict.
    • Those positions are out of step with the American public. While many on the right and some in the middle — around 3 in 10 Americans — want to cut funding, significantly more Americans say our current level of support is “not enough” or “about right,” generally around half. The American people also overwhelmingly say they want Ukraine to win. And a strong majority of Americans are broadly fearful of the threat Russia poses to the United States.
    • The downside here for Trump would seem to be that a lack of support eventually makes Russia loom larger in Americans’ minds and creates a more tense situation in Eastern Europe.
  • Prosecuting Polical Rivals/Enemies3 Trump has sent mixed signals on this, too. But he has suggested potential prosecutions of many dozens of political foes. He tried to target his political foes plenty in his first term — often privately and without the investigations leading to charges. He might be less burdened by the propriety of that this time around. Trump has regularly claimed that the Biden administration is behind his own criminal prosecutions, even as there’s no evidence of political influence. He says he has “every right” to seek prosecutions himself.
    • Opposed
      • 68-31% Americans opposed him directing the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals.
      • 73-26% Independents opposed it even more.
  • Targeting Vaccines Trump has long espoused vaccine skepticism, and now he’s talking about giving significant power to one of the country’s foremost vaccine critics, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like Trump, Kennedy suggests a link between vaccines and autism, a link scientists have not found in study after study. Exactly what Trump and Kennedy might do isn’t clear. But Trump’s transition co-chairman Howard Lutnick recently suggested Kennedy could use whatever position he gets to demonstrate that vaccines aren’t safe and get them pulled from the market. RFK-Jr is an antu-vaxxer crackpot who believes the widely debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. Vaccine skepticism took off on the right when the coronavirus vaccines hit the market. But that anti-vaccine fervor has increasingly ensnared other vaccines and led to more opposition to vaccine mandates. A recent Gallup survey showed that only half of Americans think the government should mandate vaccinations for conditions like measles — down sharply from the 1990s. And the problem with getting rid of vaccines or even just mandates is that diseases tend to reemerge. When Republicans in some states in recent years flirted with revisiting their mandates for non-covid vaccines, they quickly backed off. People might like the idea of choice, but they also tend to line up behind mandates when there is a clear and present danger to the public health. A good example of that: When covid was raging, Americans strongly supported such mandates.
    • Americans also overwhelmingly believe that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, for one, is safe and valuable, with 9 in 10 saying the benefits outweigh the risks.
    • There’s also vaccines for polio, smallpox, flu. Those that were born before the chickenpox vaccine face a threat in their later years: shingles.

  1. @RalphHightower: The January 6, 2021 Insurrection was not a “love fest” as Trump called it. It was a God-damned fucking riot/mayhem. It wasn’t Woodstock! 140 Capitol Police Officers were attacked; a few lost their life. ↩

  2. @RalphHightower: Ukraine is a democracy. Sure, Trump idolizes dictators like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and pen-pals with Kim Jung-un. Europe are our allies. We joined with them in World War I and II. ↩

  3. @RalphHightower: Damn it! This is America. Land of the Free, and Brave! This ain’t Russia or North Korea, where one can jail or kill dissenters just because you perceive them ax political enemies. We are a nation of laws! ↩