What would a second term for Trump give?
Without a real and risky program facing a Democratic-majority Congress and Senate, the president would have very limited power to do harm.
As the 2020 Republican Convention begins, the Republican Party is visibly more united and sidelined behind Trump than it was four years ago - even if the main stakeholder is in worse shape than he was. the same stage in 2016. The significant and persistent delay that Trump accuses against his rival Joe Biden does not necessarily make him a president beaten in advance, but at the very least makes him the great neglected of his re-election campaign.
However, is an ascent impossible? In principle, no. It is not said that the country will not rebound in the face of the multiple crises - health, economic, social - which have afflicted it for the last few months just in time for the president to partly harvest the credit, or even a unexpected shock will not muddy the waters between now and November 3.
If Donald Trump were to surprise again, what impact would his second term have?
Continuity in chaos
One could wonder in 2016 if Donald Trump would become more “presidential” once elected; the answer is now obvious to the whole world. As the modus operandi of his White House for the past four years has often seemed to be chaos, there is no reason to believe that the next term will be any different. The reality show that in some ways is the Trump presidency would simply be carried over to 2025.
It's not just about morning presidential "tweets" here, but the often bewildering decisions made and announced in near real time - the most recent round of tariffs on Canadian aluminum being a prime example. This style of management forces traditional allies of the United States, such as Canada, as well as their most important rivals, to remain constantly on the defensive. Who knows where trade and diplomatic disputes with China would end? Relations with Vladimir Putin? Those with Iran and North Korea? Especially on the international front, unpredictability would continue to reign.
Padlocked at home
The prognosis is much clearer in domestic politics: Donald Trump would be considerably constrained in what he could hope to accomplish. His party, which already lost a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, would be extremely likely to lose it in 2022 as well, if not this year. Given the immense difficulties Trump had in getting what he wanted out of Congress when it was controlled by his own party, the task would be next to impossible with a Congress entirely under Democratic rule.
As long as his party continued to have a majority in the Senate, he could continue to reconfigure federal courts with Conservative judicial appointments. However, if the Democrats took control of the Senate, these appointments would risk being blocked most of the time. It would almost certainly be the same with all the less contentious legislative proposals of the president. When there is a proposal, because, for the moment, no matter how hard we look, it is difficult to find a clear program for a second term for the president.
In theory, Trump could finally come to an agreement with the Democrats on his massive infrastructure plan promised in 2016 - but there has been no sign of real progress on this file for almost four years. Of course, the most significant infrastructure project of the Trump era - the Mexican-American border wall - could largely be completed in a second term. But then again, that would depend in part on the willingness of the courts which are already called upon to rule on the president's legal power to unilaterally finance its construction as he did - after Mexico, unsurprisingly, refused. to pay the bill.
All in all, the biggest motivation for Republican voters should be to prevent the Democrats coming to power and the changes they want to make, because when you consider what their party president could actually accomplish in a second term, we have to admit that the grocery list is rather short.
