For Clues to Trump’s Success, Watch His Actions, Not His Bluster

Voters are unusually sensitive to inflation. Unilateral tariffs could lead to another spike and devastating political consequences.

I’m reminded of the old joke about the woman asked by a friend, “How’s your husband?”

“Compared to what?” comes the woman’s reply.

Now that Donald Trump’s second presidency has arrived, we might answer the question, “How will he do?” the same way. Compared to his first four years? Compared to Joe Biden? Or compared to people’s expectations?

Reality is probably something less than the euphoric hopes of his MAGA base, which are something akin to the Second Coming (or would it be the third?), but it will also likely be better than the apocalypse that most Democrats and progressives fear. There is a lot of territory, however, between those two extreme outcomes.

On any Inauguration Day, looking out over the remaining 1,459 days in a presidential term, an almost infinite number of potential crises await. Some are fiscal, like a government funding shutdown, the federal debt ceiling being breached, or a recession. Some are natural: wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes, with climate change potentially increasing their severity. Still others are distinctly man-made, such as attacks on America or Americans by terrorists or nation states.

One troubling scenario is the possibility of another inflationary spike, triggered by Trump’s likely coming tariffs imposed on goods coming into the U.S. from abroad. Prior to April 2021, there were several generations of Americans whose only knowledge of inflation came from history or economics books. It simply hadn’t been a problem in 40 years. Regardless of whom or what one might want to blame for the spike four years ago, people now know what it is, and if anything, maybe they’ve become hypersensitive to any signs, real or imagined, of prices going back up.

Outside of President Trump’s innermost circle of advisers, no one knows just how serious he is about tariffs. Selectively applied, tariffs can be an important tool of trade policy, the latter half of the proverbial carrot-and-stick approach. In fact, sometimes that’s the only stick that can work.

On the other hand, it simply isn’t cost-effective for some things to be made in the United States. If we force some things to be made here, it will do little more than raise the price of goods and, voilà, you can have inflation—on top of the 20 percent increase in the cost of living over four years ago.

If that’s the case, there will be a political price to be paid for Trump and Republicans, just as there was by former President Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who was guilty by association.

For my money, the smartest observation I have ever heard or read about Donald Trump was that of conservative writer Salena Zito in her 2016 piece in The Atlantic finding “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

But whether it is looking at Trump’s threats to apply widespread tariffs or the myriad other threats he has made, it’s important to remember that an important component of Trump-speak is hyperbole.Part of his “Art of the Deal” ethos is beginning a negotiation by making an outrageous demand and by the end, settling for something closer to what you originally had in mind. But it also has to do with the delivery, as if to say, “anything worth saying is worth yelling.”

This may be important for people to remember over the next four years. Journalists and elites tend to listen to Trump in a more literal way than voters do. But people use less precision in their words today than they used to, and there’s a certain literary license that people now build into anything they hear or read from a politician—especially Trump. So with the new president, it is more important tosee what he does than listen to exactly what he says.

Republicans hold the narrowest imaginable margin in the House, just a three-seat edge until vacancies are filled, and historically, a president’s party loses seats in that chamber in 90 percent of midterm elections. In other words, Republicans in the Capitol-area zip code have no margin for error in 2026.

The pattern of midterm losses is not nearly as strong in Senate elections, and given the dearth of Democratic pickup opportunities, it is difficult to see how Republicans could lose the four seats necessary for the chamber to flip.

If things go well for Trump and his party, maybe the GOP holds its own in the House or picks up a half dozen or dozen House seats, building a bit of an edge in that chamber and maybe even picking up a Senate seat or two. But if things go poorly, the House majority will be gone and the Senate majority potentially cut in half, taking the GOP down to 51 seats or even 50, strapping Vice President J.D. Vance into the Senate president’s chair to break ties. With the GOP nominally in control of Congress, it is hard to blame Democrats for too much, and it isn’t likely that Trump can blame a federal judiciary that has become more compliant than not.

It’s probably a good idea to take seriously anyone who is president of the United States, but it is equally advisable not to take any politicians too literally anymore.

This article was originally published for the National Journal on Jan. 20, 2025.