McManus: A guide for the worried

“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps,” Tom Homan, a former acting director of ICE under Trump, said last month on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

Environmental rollback

Trump has the plans and the power to roll back some environmental gains. On Day One, he is expected to open more federal lands and offshore waters to oil and gas drilling. He also is likely to ease restrictions on the oil industry’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and to revoke Biden’s pause on increasing liquid petroleum gas exports.

Trump also plans to roll back Biden’s efforts to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles and repeal federal subsidies for solar, wind and other renewable energy projects. But a full-scale repeal of Biden’s 2022 energy law could run into resistance from Republicans in Congress, because much of the program’s spending has flowed into GOP districts.

Tariffs

“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff,” the president-elect said last month. He has proposed tariffs of at least 10 percent on goods from every other country and at least 60 percent on China — and as high as 200 percent on Mexico.

A president has wide authority to impose tariffs, and Trump has been so voluble about his love for the trade barriers that they appear inevitable. But tariffs — which are essentially taxes on imports — come with two problems. They raise prices on many of the goods Americans buy, pushing inflation upward, and they prompt other countries to retaliate by imposing tariffs on U.S. exports.

Retribution

Trump has threatened to order the Justice Department to prosecute a long list of his political opponents, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen.-elect Adam B. Schiff and former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney.

That’s not a new impulse on his part. During his first term, he publicly demanded that Attorney General William Barr arrest Biden, former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for what he claimed was a “treasonous plot” to spy on his 2016 campaign. (Barr ignored the order.)

If Trump appoints a more pliant attorney general this time, he has the power to order the Justice Department to investigate his critics, a GOP lawyer who is reportedly advising the president-elect wrote last week. The department’s independence from political meddling is a long-standing norm, but it isn’t protected by law.

Still, if he targets his critics, his term will be dominated by legal firestorms — potentially getting in the way of the rest of his agenda.

Two actions Trump is virtually certain to take: He will order the Justice Department to drop the federal criminal proceedings against him, stemming from his attempt to overturn Biden’s election and his concealment of national security documents at his Florida estate. He has also promised to pardon most of the more than 1,000 people convicted of or indicted on charges of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Foreign policy

A president’s power to change direction in foreign policy is almost unfettered, and Trump has vowed to do exactly that. He has promised to negotiate an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine even before his inauguration — and his other statements suggest he would do so by demanding that Ukraine surrender chunks of its territory.

Trump is also likely to renew his first-term drive to pull the United States out of the 75-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or at least to weaken the U.S. commitment to defend European countries against a Russian invasion.

Installing loyalists

Trump has promised to impose new rules on the federal civil service allowing him to fire bureaucrats more easily and replace them with loyalists. He imposed such a rule in the final months of his first term, but Biden revoked it.

He also has promised to fire senior military officers whose political views he dislikes and to purge the CIA and the FBI, accusing both agencies of “persecuting” conservatives.

Those moves “would turn much of the civil service into an army of suck-ups,” Robert Shea, a former aide to President George W. Bush, told me this year.

Abortion

One issue on which Trump may hesitate to buck public opinion: Abortion. Polls show that most voters oppose harsher restrictions, and last week, voters in seven states — including conservative Missouri and Montana — approved abortion rights measures.

During the Republican primaries this year, Trump sought to take credit for nominating the conservative Supreme Court justices who enabled states to pass restrictive abortion laws. But once he was running in a general election campaign, he sought to avoid responsibility for the laws, arguing that he had left the question up to the states.

Some anti-abortion activists want Congress to pass a national abortion ban, but Trump said during the campaign that he would not sign one into law. Trump has also indicated he does not intend to block access to mifepristone, the pill used for more than half of U.S. abortions. “The matter is settled,” his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said last month.

Obamacare

Conservative Republicans in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have said they hope to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance law popularly known as Obamacare.

Trump has said he is open to changing the law, which he tried and failed to repeal in his first term. But he has not presented a proposal, and admitted in the debate that he had only “concepts of a plan.”

If the new Congress fails to renew Biden-era subsidies, as many as 20 million users — especially middle- and high-income families — will see their health insurance costs rise.

Where are the restraints?

Trump, like all presidents, will hold vast power. But even a strongman may discover that there are limits to what he can do.

Courts can still overturn an administration’s actions — and Democrats are preparing to spend much of the next four years going to court.

The most important factor could be public opinion. Trump may have waged his last campaign, but Republicans in Congress face another election in two years. They know that voters often punish the party in power, especially if they believe the president has gone too far.

So the 2026 congressional election may be the strongest restraint on what Trump can do — and that campaign is already underway.