Edward P. Freeland, PhD
Survey Research Center
Princeton University
January 21, 2025

For only the second time in the history, a US president has been re-elected after serving previously as president, being voted out of office, and then, returning four years later, this time riding a wave of populist sentiment, anti-elitism and an outpouring of reverence more often reserved for prophets and saints. But despite appearances, Trump's victory in the 2024 election was actually narrow. Setting aside the popular vote (which does not decide the outcome) and looking at the state-by-state outcome for the Electoral College (which does decide the outcome), Trump's margin of victory came down to only 230,000 votes in 3 states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan). That's less than two-tenths of one percent of the 152 million votes that were cast. In 2016, the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump came down to just 78,000 votes that would have changed the outcome; and in 2020, the margin was even narrower with the result decided by a mere 43,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Far from being a mandate for Trump's agenda, these figures show the American electorate is still very much divided.
But as the Trump team prepares to take office, there are three important factors that will limit their ability to carry out the changes they have promised (or threatened). To begin with, the new administration is already riddled with internal contractions. Second, Donald Trump may perform well as a crowd-pleasing candidate, his skills as a manager are lacking. Third, any effort to downsize or purge the federal bureaucracy will face a wall of resistance because, as the saying goes, you cannot dismantle a car while you are driving it.
 

Trump's Incoherent Agenda
In American politics, there is a tradition known as the party platform. These are public documents assembled by the two major parties every four years just before each presidential election. This practice goes back as far as 1840. From being just a few pages long in the 1800s, these platforms have evolved into carefully composed documents of 30 to 40 thousand words. They outline the party's basic values, plans and priorities: they are an effort to be transparent and to appeal to voters with a coherent plan and a vision for the future. Four years ago, for the first time since 1936, there was no Republican party platform. In this break from tradition, it was as if Trump was saying "No need for a platform - I am the platform." In this, one hears the echo of an earlier aspiring monarch, Louis the 14th of France, who in 1655 famously declared "l'état, c'est moi."

For the 2024 election, a short platform was pulled together hastily by Republicans to draw attention away from Project 2025, which the Trump campaign publicly disavowed but covertly helped assemble. At 5,201 words, it is the shortest Republican platform since 1948. Disregard for a party platform makes sense for a populist: having no plan makes it easier to change your mind and to evade accountability. But without a coherent plan, how are members of the new administration to be judged on their qualifications or their performance? What are the benchmarks? The guiding principles? In the absence of a plan it seems that loyalty, as opposed to experience or expertise, is the prime criterion for choosing new senior officials. With no plan, everyone joining the new administration does so for different reasons, which is why the infighting on the Trump team has just begun. Some examples:

• The nominee for HHS secretary has some very strange ideas, some that are clearly dangerous to public health and safety, but some that may be helpful. He wants to curtail the use of toxic substances that can harm children, our food supply and the environment. But in the previous Trump administration, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency worked hard to allow more legal use of toxic chemicalsparticularly those that generate large corporate profits. We're likely to see a repeat of this effort in the new administration.
• Trump has called for the immediate expulsion of undocumented immigrants. If that happens the dairy and meat processing industries will collapse, and food prices will skyrocket. This will break one of Trump's central promises from the campaign. Meanwhile, Trump's newfound tech billionaire advisors want more immigrants to come to the US, especially those on H1-B visas because they are highly skilled, low-paid workers who can be kept under the threat of having their visas revoked if they complain about their working conditions or low pay.
• The tariffs and trade wars at the top of Trump's agenda will likely reduce access to foreign markets that many US businesses depend on. Trump is very popular in rural areas because he has promised to help farmers. But how will this happen if new trade barriers close access to export markets in Canada, Mexico and China, three countries that buy billions of dollars' worth of agricultural products every year from US farmers?

• Trump wants to reduce income taxes while raising taxes through tariffs. According to an analysis from non-partisan tax experts, under Trump's proposed tax plan, 80% of American families will see a net increase in their federal taxes of around $1,400 per household, and the burden will fall most heavily on lower income households. Can you guess the average net savings for the richest 1% of households? It's $36,000. So the plan extends a 50 year effort by Republicans to shift the federal tax burden away from the wealthiest Americans and onto working and middle class families.

  

• Reducing crime: Trump campaigned on the idea that crime in America is out of control. It's notbut through skillful use of media images, many Americans perceive that crime is worse than ever. Trump's nominee for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has promised to investigate and criminally charge Trump's political enemies, including many of the people who worked in his first presidential administration. That would mean diverting limited law enforcement personnel from ongoing criminal cases which will have to be suspended or terminated so investigators can use their time to harass Trump's political rivals.

So, it seems that if they are going to come through on their promises, all or most of these internal contradictions will need to be worked out. But that can only happen with competent, disciplined leadership, which leads to my second point.

Trump's Weak Management Skills
What are Trump's goals as president? I've mentioned a few, but did I mention that he might continue selling Trump-branded merchandise while in the Oval Office? Selling crypto-currency? Given the failure of the impeachment process and Trump's newly awarded immunity from criminal prosecutionhe will be free to spend time to enriching himself and his family. One hopes his work as president will not distract too much from time spent promoting the family businesses.
As for the leadership and management skills on his day job, nearly everyone who worked for him in his previous administration was alarmed by his day-to-day waffling, his inability to handle complex details, his impulsiveness, and his focus on personal grievances; in a moment of exasperation, his own secretary of state called him a moron. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that Trump's leadership skills are at their worst during a crisis. At a point when he could have rallied Americans (especially his supporters) to take reasonable and simple actions to contain the spread of the virus, Trump was distressed that the pandemic was distracting attention from his re-election campaign.
Trump is sidelining one of the best resources available to him for governing effectively and for fulfilling his promise to re-shape the federal bureaucracy: his own political party, which, like the Democratic party, has a deep pool of experienced, talented and knowledgeable professionals. Instead he is drawing on his own personal network, people whose lack of knowledge and expertise is astonishing. But this again is in keeping with populist antipathy toward elites and experts. The congressional hearing for Peter Hegseth, Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, was a national embarrassment. It should have been obvious to anyone watching those hearings that the nominee is dangerously underprepared for the job.
During the last month of the election campaign we heard the word "fascist" used by people who worked closely with Trump in his previous administration. Yes, you can call him a fascist, but he is not nearly as focused, driven, or as smart as the best-known fascists in history. That said, there will be people in the new administration working diligently to increase the power and autonomy of the executive branch. And we know there are plans afoot to move the country toward autocratic single party rule, similar to what we have in Hungary, Russia, Venezuela and Ohio. But I'm not convinced this can happen without a competent executive. In fact, I am more concerned about the potential harms that may result from re-runs of the sheer incompetence we witnessed in the previous Trump administration.
 

Attacking the Deep State
And finally, what about Trump's plans to purge the Deep State? What Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and their new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will soon discover is that reforming the federal bureaucracy (or technocracy as some call it) is not so simple. People who work in these agencies are busy guarding the nation's food supply, protecting the environment, tracking dangerous weather, putting out fires, landing airplanes, preventing floods, and regulating the interstate shipment of radioactive materials; they do important life-saving work every day. You cannot simply shut them down while you figure out how to reorganize them.
Jennifer PahlkaU.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and author of Recoding Americais part of a group she calls the "government tech community" watching as Musk and Ramaswamy learn about all the obstacles that she and her colleagues have struggled against for decades while pushing to modernize and streamline the federal government.

"As I talked about in my book, outsiders (and certainly the right) imagine dangerously concentrated power in the executive branch, and seek to limit it. The reality is shockingly diffuse power. The bad outcomes they are fighting to prevent - burdensome, overreaching government - are the product of exactly the conditions they help create. Neither the left nor the right really has the mental models (nor, perhaps the desire) to effectively challenge the status quo of the technocracy."

The problem is not the concentration of power in a "deep state". The problem is the web of regulations meant to forestall anything like a deep state. The contingencies to be encountered by any proposals for agency reform will be staggering. For any given policy, office or agency, there are myriad connections to agency rules, legal precedents and patchwork fixes throughout multiple levels of government that have been built up by Congress over many decades. These are not easily ignored or swept aside, at least not by anyone who respects the rule of law.

There's a reason bureaucracy is called the iron cage. The sociologist Max Weber understood bureaucracy as one of the most powerful technologies ever invented by humans; without it, large corporations and governments, and much of modern life as we know it, could not exist. But that same power makes it resistant to change. Reform of the federal bureaucracy, with its legions of scientists, lawyers and technical specialists, can only be accomplished through either of two extremes: destruction (which has enormous costs) or (ironically) a well-organized, methodical and disciplined effort, much like the one Pres. Obama pulled together to get the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. The same can be said for George W Bush's reorganization of homeland security after the September 11 attacks. These efforts succeeded with a mix of expertise, persistence, salesmanship and compromise.

For Trump's appointees the lesson soon to be learned is clear: you cannot dismantle a car while you're driving it. You cannot dismantle a car while you are driving it. It may take them four years just to understand how their agencies work. This is what reformers in the Reagan administration learned back in the 1980s. Like Trump, Reagan also campaigned on the populist image of the federal bureaucracy as bloated, wasteful and inefficient. But after years of hacking awaythe total federal government workforce actually grew from 5.0 to 5.3 million. If Musk and Ramaswamy are to find any ways to reduce discretionary federal spending, they will, like Reagan, settle on the usual suspects: Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, two of the nation's largest anti-poverty programs.

In sum, Trump has shown you can win an election as a populist candidate, but governing as a populist will be much more challenging, and perhaps even dangerous.