The Second Term

I first met Peter Rousmaniere in the fall of 1959 at a small school in a small town in the middle of Massachusetts. Over the intervening years he has become a wide-ranging thinker, with a special expertise in workman’s compensation and immigration issues, a combination that gives him a unique perspective on the three-way intersection of immigration, labor, and health care. Recently, he sent me the following description of what Donald Trump’s second term might look like, particularly in its early stages. It is the most insightful analysis I have read to date.

We are seeing signs of Trump's classic style of leadership, more organized and more forceful than the first time around. I found the best depiction of his style in a book on group psychology, Mind and Society, written by Pascal Boyer, who is a specialist in African tribal culture. In 2019, I compared Boyer’s depiction of tribal leadership and Trump's behavior. I'm updating that below with specific references to what we have seen in the last few weeks.

The Bargaining King

Trump frames his leadership story as an economic success. He exploits popular beliefs about economics, namely that economics involves bargaining in which a win for one is a visible loss for the other – a zero-sum game. This is why tariffs came up so quickly and will be a constant theme, as they represent a stylized form of bargaining that looks to people like a zero sum (rather than a win-win) game. We already see that Trump is enjoying a public victory in his tariff demands on Canada, where [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau announced that Canadians are spending a lot more money on border surveillance. Trudeau is Trump's kind of foil: a pretty boy whom you can throw onto the mat with one clean, quick maneuver. With Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, we are seeing something quite different – which seems to be a pattern among women heads of state regarding Trump. Basically, they don't take any shit. Mexico has a strong bargaining position with the United States in several ways, not least of which is that the country is trending toward building very strong economic ties with China. Sheinbaum will not be thrown onto the mat

Stripping Away Government Control

Trump promotes the right of private ownership to have its way. It isn't so much a dislike of public programs, such as Medicare, as an instinctive need to have good things flow from him. “L'etat, c'est moi." This includes stripping away government bureaucracy and replacing it with personal power. (Trump's billionaire and Heritage Foundation flocks must consequently contend with his progressive impulses, which are based on his need to have all good things flow from him.) Count on Trump trying to sell the Postal Service to private parties. This will be a grand, visible game in which, dressed in regal clothes, he will dispense with the Postal Service as if it were a piece of land he’s granting to a vassal. When privatization has occurred, there have been reduced service frequency (such as no Saturday delivery), closures of postal facilities (such as thousands of village post offices), price increases (such as doubling first-class postage), and workforce reductions (by as much as a third).

One big show of stripping away government control will be the destruction of environmental regulation by government. He knows that people pay close attention to the price of gasoline as a proxy for the state of the economy; and he characterizes environmental initiatives as the work of a cabal. We are hearing a lot about how this cabal has constrained the production of oil.

Another Trump support of private ownership is to dispense with any serious regulation of Internet giants and artificial intelligence. It is not well understood by the public that these giants and AI depend upon complete discretion to use of the bonanza of free-to-grasp data as they see fit. A key feature of economic growth, at the company or national level, is the new provision of really cheap resources. Social media and artificial intelligence draw upon essential resources that are virtually or entirely free. And these giants demand complete autonomy on how to apply these resources. Thus, we see a shocking degree of steps by big business to bend their knee.

With regard to cryptocurrencies, Trump has perceived that the public – particularly young men –  view cryptocurrencies as their way to make a fortune. There will be a crypto bubble, enabled in part by a reversal in government policy of crypto. This will be easy to do because Elizabeth Warren’s and SEC policies, which suppressed crypto, were out of date and subject for reversal at some point in the near future. Trump will be like the baseball player who walks home from third with the bases loaded and declares he hit a home run.

Moral Degenerates and Traitors

It is important for Trump to find individuals and groups he can call moral degenerates. He has used the fascist depiction of people with impure blood to describe poor migrants. A key feature of tribal leadership, which Trump has adopted, is the castigation and punishment of disloyal people and parties – people he can call traitors. Fauci is one of them, but there are thousands of others on a private list he or one of his retainers has.

Free Riders

This group includes perceived beneficiaries of DEI, such as Black presidents of Ivy League colleges, as well as pretty much the entire immigrant community. Biden presented Trump an enormous gift when he admitted into the United States millions of temporary visa holders and large numbers of asylum seekers. This surge, amounting to at least three million people in the last three years, generated tons of local news stories about the demand for shelter and education, whose costs were borne by American cities and states. Reducing overall immigration, however, puts Trump in a conflicted situation. On the one hand, in his view every immigrant is a free rider. On the other hand, thousands of businesses depend on these immigrants – from high tech firms to Texas home builders to Wisconsin dairy farmers. And there is only so much he can do by executive action that would not be bottled up in lawsuits. (I believe that mass deportation will collapse early in 2025.) So, Trump needs Congress, in particular the Senate, to pass a major front-page story on immigration reform. As someone who follows immigration closely, I expect a Senate initiative sometime in 2025.