Trump Is About to Face the Choice That Dooms Many Presidencies

As happens every time a new president is elected, Donald Trump is experiencing a sudden role reversal. His campaign to earn support from voters has ended abruptly and a new one has begun among donors and activists to earn his support for their priorities. The election was about tax cuts, or maybe cryptocurrency, the arguments go. What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net.

This is the first moment when presidencies go wrong. Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.

As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes, huddle with his supporters at Mar-a-Lago and then see how much of their agenda he can advance before his popularity falls too far to effect further change. That is the formula that has left a nation seemingly resigned to the loss of both common purpose and institutional competence. It is not a formula for a successful presidency, let alone for making America great again.

He has another option. He is an iconoclastic leader with a uniquely unfiltered relationship to the American people and a disdain for the chattering class of consultants. He is also the first president since Grover Cleveland to get a second shot at a first term. He has already experienced the bruising tax fight that helped bring his approval rating down to 36 percent a year after his inauguration, the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the loss of more than 40 House seats and control of the chamber in a midterm election. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he made a promise to “every citizen” that he would “fight for you, for your family and your future” and that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Achieving that will require focusing on the challenges and respecting the values broadly shared by not only his voters, but also many others who might come to support him.

Take immigration. A promise to secure the border has long been a central aspect of Mr. Trump’s appeal, and Democrats are now clambering to get on his side of the issue. A Trump administration serving American voters would stanch the flow of migrants with tough border enforcement and asylum restrictions, reverse the Biden administration’s lawlessness by removing recent arrivals and protect American workers and businesses by mandating that employers use the E-Verify program to confirm the legal status of the people who work for them. That program, which strikes at the harm that illegal immigration does to American workers, is wildly popular. A recent survey of 2,000 adults conducted by my organization, American Compass, in partnership with YouGov, found 78 percent support overall and 68 percent support even among Democrats. Law-abiding businesses tend to like it, too — they’re tired of getting undercut by competitors that get away with breaking the rules.

That’s the path to solving the problem. Mr. Trump will hear a lot of counterarguments from the affluent and influential class that builds its business model on underpaid, undocumented labor, especially in industries such as construction and hospitality, where he has personal experience, as well as in agriculture. Those voices are likely to suggest that instead he condescend to the masses with border theater and hostile rhetoric, while expanding temporary worker programs. To this end, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes the E-Verify program on libertarian grounds, has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for secretary of agriculture. Moves like that will keep the guests at Mr. Trump’s golf clubs happy but ensure growing frustration and disillusion elsewhere.