Donald Trump’s emphatic presidential election victory will have profound consequences for American society if he implements the radical domestic policy agenda he promised during the campaign, including the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. And with Republicans controlling the United States Senate and possibly the House of Representatives and a conservative majority on the supreme court, there will be few legislative barriers in his way.
A second Trump term could also reshape American foreign policy, upending old alliances and walking away from multilateral efforts to deal with global issues such as climate change. Trump has promised to be bolder than before in his use of tariffs to rebalance world trade and in demanding that allies spend more on their own defence.
During the campaign he portrayed himself as the candidate of peace, pointing out that the US was involved in fewer wars during his first term than under other recent presidents. Claiming that his perceived strength deterred aggression, he has promised to bring an early end to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Vice-president elect JD Vance has sketched out possible terms for a peace deal that would see Ukraine ceding territory to Russia and ruling out future membership of Nato. Trump has suggested that ending the war in Ukraine could be the first step in a broader rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, musing about detaching Russia from its strategic partnership with China.
European Union leaders have promised never to abandon Ukraine but Europe lacks the political will as well as the military capacity to sustain Ukraine’s war effort without US support and its leaders will come under great pressure to fall into line behind any deal Trump strikes with Putin. Trump’s demand that Nato allies increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP would impose a burden of billions of euros on their domestic budgets, which are already under pressure. And his plan to impose a global tariff of at least 10 per cent on imports will hit European exporters already suffering from reduced demand in China.
Xi Jinping called Trump to congratulate him but Beijing is preparing for a trade war if the incoming president goes through with his threat to impose a 60 per cent tariff on all Chinese imports. Trump negotiated a trade deal with Xi during his first term and he could do so again but even a limited trade war would hurt the global economy.
Trump’s domestic policies could also have an international impact if the spectacle of mass deportations and disorder in the US further diminishes its authority throughout the world. And now that the US has elected for the second time a president so openly contemptuous of democratic norms, its claim to lead a contest of democracies against autocracies looks more implausible than ever.