How bad could a second Trump presidency get?

ON THE stump, Donald Trump makes lots of eye-widening pledges. He will deport illegal immigrants by their millions; he will launch missiles at Mexico’s drug cartels; he will use the army to crack down on the “far-left lunatics” who run the Democratic Party.

Yet Trump’s tenure as president, whatever its merits or failings, was not the cataclysm that many Democrats had predicted. The economy hummed along, until the pandemic struck. There were no big foreign policy crises. And although Trump tried to steal the presidential election of 2020, he failed.

So what would a second Trump term be like? Many voters dismiss Trump’s overheated rhetoric as just that. They may see the election as a finely balanced decision about which candidate would manage the economy better, or as a choice between divergent stances on such issues as abortion and immigration.