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If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.
There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not like Donald Trump personally, but you’ll like his policies a lot better than Kamala Harris’s. It’s a business decision.”
But how Mr. Trump understands that decision could be different. If he wins like this, how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted.
The way he’s talked about towns like Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitians who officials have said are there legally to work resembles deeply the rhythms of the 2016 campaign: grim conflation of real and fake problems, real people caught up in the gears of awful scrutiny and abuse, the building pressure on politicians and people often in very normal and modest circumstances and Mr. Trump weaving everything into a fable to prove that he was right.
In his campaign speeches, intermixed with the jokes and riffs, Mr. Trump often talks about political retribution, the threat of World War III, the ruin that the country’s become. In just one speech, he talked about how he would “liberate” Wisconsin from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” and about how immigrant gangs had “occupied” “hundreds” of towns and cities across the Midwest, leaving law enforcement “petrified.”
Mr. Trump seems to have twisted the reason that programs like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole exist — for instance, Haiti has been deemed too unstable and dangerous to return to — into a reason for the programs not to exist. “So we have travel warnings,” he said. “‘Don’t go here, don’t go there, don’t go to the various countries’ and yet she’s taking in the worst of those people, the killers, the jailbirds, all of the worst of the people, she’s taking them in.”
At various points, he escalated the migrant situation into cultural, civilizational terms that can’t be easily fixed, unlike the economy. “Nothing can be as serious as this — because this gets down to the very fabric of our society,” he said. “Your way of life.”
But, as he has noted a few times recently, deep into the Wisconsin speech he said: “You know, I won in 2016 on the border. It was one of the big things. I mean, I won for a lot of reasons.”
That’s one of the common interpretations of his 2016 victory, and clearly he thinks he could win on the border again. And yet: There will be no real way to know. It’s almost inarguable that his immigration positions helped him secure the Republican nomination in a divided field at a time when restrictive immigration politics had been dominating the conservative movement since the early 2010s. But back then, not as many Republican politicians shared his approach — it was still an active debate within the party.
It’s difficult to know why exactly he won and Hillary Clinton lost all those years ago. The 2016 election was close — a few hundred thousand votes in a handful of states ultimately separated a win from a loss — and that could have been about the border or more about Mrs. Clinton and the things she did or didn’t do than about Mr. Trump or the idea of him as a businessman in the long aftermath of the Great Recession or people wanting change or a hundred other things. There’s no real way of telling objectively and conclusively what one reason it was. And it’s not as if we can run the experiment twice to know for sure.
But if you win the presidency by 0.4 percent and two electoral votes, you win everything. Winning a presidential race can become a force that reshapes politics itself, and in particular, with Mr. Trump’s charismatic, endlessly demanding presence, his previous victory has shaped policy and politics for the past eight years, in and out of office, particularly around his hardened, transactional view of people and power.
There’s a tendency to point out what Mr. Trump did not do in office, like finish the wall. But during his tenure, to give one example, refugee admissions dropped to the lowest number in decades. It’s incredibly difficult to enter the United States through the refugee program; an applicant must clear screenings and meet a number of criteria. This, theoretically, is the kind of program that a security-minded person would support, in the realm of other parts of the legal immigration system Mr. Trump sometimes promises. The refugee program is also, certainly, in keeping with the idea of America as a place that is open to those who have suffered.
Mr. Trump had opposed the prospect of refugees from Syria in 2015 and, at times, recited the lyrics of “The Snake” when talking about admitting them. And during his presidency, as promised, refugee admissions fell. There’s this way that Mr. Trump bounces between fact and fiction, in which the story he tells is that nobody’s motivated by much of anything other than a desire to get something from another person or the United States itself and people who claim otherwise are in on the racket or naïve chumps — and real policy flows from it.
Concurrently, during the Trump era, parts of the intellectual right have transformed into nationalists who question what a more libertarian, liberal, open approach has given us and who say the crisis in America is so great that the power of the state must be used to reorganize society. That touches a lot of issues, but the change is especially clear with immigration.
“Look, the thing on immigration is that no one can avoid that it has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous and less advanced,” JD Vance said before his nomination, at this year’s national conservatism conference. That was not something many national politicians would say 10 years ago. And now it is something the potential vice president says.
Do voters really want mass deportation, with realities of sprawling detention camps or for Mr. Trump to try again to end DACA, as Stephen Miller told The Times last year that he would do? Maybe things have changed enough that they do. But when surveyed, Americans often support very restrictive immigration policies, including mass deportation of people here illegally, then balk at especially harsh measures necessary to enact them, for example, opposing the child separation policy during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Or they have a different perspective on certain situations than you might expect, given the way Mr. Trump talks about them, like the public’s positive views about accepting Afghans who’d worked with Americans or Ukrainian refugees.
If he wins, the border will have something to do with it — and it’s possible at the same time that he wins despite the way he talks about immigrants rather than because of it, that he’d be doing better if he talked about manufacturing plans and mortgage rates instead of the nuclear apocalypse and roving gangs and the 2020 election.
Everything has already changed so much in politics since 2015; there’s no reason it won’t keep changing. A second Trump win would probably make the G.O.P. more nationalistic and zero sum, swaths of the country would get more intense in reaction and the policies could be quite dark — even if a lot of voters just punched “Trump” thinking first and foremost of consumer prices. Mr. Trump himself can acknowledge the nature of this at times.
“Isn’t this a wonderful and inspiring speech? I got people sitting in the front row, they’re going, ‘Oh, my God,’” he said in Wisconsin, partway through the long speech about liberating the occupied towns. He made a comical overwhelmed, stunned face. “They thought they’d be up there jumping up and down, ‘Make America great again.’”
Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.
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