With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
What about just general predictions?
Trump has talked a big game and promised a lot of things to a lot of people. What will he actually follow through on?
Some things are of course easier than others. Pulling out of the Paris accords again, pushing fossil fuels at home and cutting taxes seems like easy and painless wins for him; expelling millions of illegal immigrants less so, even if the base might be gung-ho.
Other things might have made sense as an election strategy, like going back on the TikTok ban, but now once elected there are incentives to just let it go through anyway.
What do you guys think actually will happen? I personally have very little idea and Trump seems tired so maybe he will go furher on the direction of allowing someone else to steer the ship?
Harbaugh said it best "Like Moses, I'm going to die leaning on my staff"
Trump is not physically capable of actually forcing most of those policies through, he will rely on others to do the work for him, from the Cabinet on down. So the question is, who can he bring in who can and will implement these policies, while avoiding the Trumpian tendency to fire or marginalize or mock his own people? I don't actually know.
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I consider myself pretty well informed politically but I have literally no idea what the immigration follow-through will or won't look like. I'm pretty sure he'll be convinced to stay in NATO but not nearly as sure as I'd like to be given how long-term horrendous that would be for American power. Tariffs and chinese crackdowns seem obvious, I think he's going to bring back Lighthizer and he was pretty clear about his goals, but a Taiwan conflict I also have no idea about. Tax cut seems a lock. The degree of bureaucratic downsizing is also unknown -- will he really put Elon in charge? RFK will clearly have some role but would he be in charge or just some consulting schtick?
That aside however, I'm mostly asking about the revenge stuff because I remember seeing some very strong opinions one way or the other about whether people on the list above do or don't deserve punishment, and another accompanying but sometimes different set of strong opinions about whether Trump would actually do so or not.
What makes the 'stay in NATO' thing so amusing/frustrating is that it's not actually based on a Trump claim to want to leave NATO. 'Leaving NATO' is the political reframing attack. What was actually said could be interpreted as even worse- that he wouldn't act to support countries that weren't spending on their own defense- which doesn't require leaving NATO in the first place.
This is arguably worse- much worse!- both from a treaty-obligation perspective (it is better to leave a treaty than violate while claiming the benefits of membership) and from a NATO-credibility perspective (it says the quiet part out loud that Article 5 doesn't actually require NATO members to do anything specific).
In some respects it would even be preferable for the EU-Europeans to have the Americans leave NATO, so that the EU could functionally absorb NATO as an EU organ rather than an institution in perpetual competition for the same role that is necessary for EU-centralization fantasies. A constant issue in the EU-centralization and defense spheres is that EU-military efforts are duplicative to NATO, are often opposed when they come into conflict with NATO, but at the same time without defense credibility EU-centralization itself loses credibility.
Letting the US leave NATO clears a lot of that by letting someone else more European come to lead it. Which... has been an explicit goal for some since its inception. Many people forget / never knew that France left the NATO command structure in the Cold War after its failed attempts to play a decisive leading role in it as a founding member (partly disproven by US pressure during the Suez Crisis). (Which was rather the point. The US inclusion in NATO wasn't simply as a counter-balance against the Soviets, but to counter the influence of Germany and France over other, smaller, European countries.)
If the US were to leave NATO- and thus create a precedent for countries departing / being forced to depart from it- then NATO could credibly be replaced by EU institutions that had the same European-consolidating effect with an opt-in measure for the non-EU allies (i.e. the US, Canada, Turkey, the UK, and so on). Because there wouldn't be a loss of US participation, this would greatly increase the influence of key EU members (France and Germany) over NATO-style standardization, defense procurement, and coordination efforts, while inheriting many of the systems and existing institutional elements of NATO rather than recreate them.
It would also be an extreme shift in the power dynamic between the EU and NATO-but-not-EU-periphery members that would be highly appealing to some states (Albania, hypothetical Ukraine), but at substantial expense to others (think UK, Turkey). Depending on your point of view, that could be a substantial advantage- such as a strong incentive/pressure for the UK to re-enter the EU, or giving Greece and Cyprus more leverage against Turkey.
But- notably- these sort of European-centric defense changes only occur if Trump takes the US out of NATO- which he has not threatened to do- rather than have Trump compromise NATO from within but keep it from the influence of EU-centralicists- which is even worse.
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