A Field Guide to the Second Trump Administration in Three Words

This post is a longer essay in response to the 2024 election and attempts to lay the groundwork for how to think about the next Trump administration particularly as it relates to immigration. I am fortunate that this newsletter has an incredibly diverse following, including people who do not necessarily agree with me on all matters, but who remain interested and invested in understanding immigration policy. As always, please share your reactions (including your disagreements) in the comments below so that I can learn from you.

The fact that Donald J. Trump’s second coming occurred before Jesus’s all but confirms my long-held suspicion that we live in the world of G.K. Chesterton’s God, who, at the end of Job, is just as confused as Job about the unfolding calamity in the universe he created.

The story of Job is a tragedy, perhaps the oldest recorded tragedy. I believe Simon Critchley is correct in his recent book on Greek tragedies, that tragedy is not simply something that befalls us, but something in which we participate to degrees unknown (and perhaps unknowable), and it is this unknowability that prompts anxious and speculative reflection.

Just like in the ancient text, Job’s friends have arrived on social media and cable news shows to offer apparently well-reasoned but wildly contradictory explanations for the results of the election, a cottage industry of dubious prognostication that may as well be called political astrology and which, in my view, is more about providing a sense perceived control in uncertain times rather than objective analysis.

I don’t know why Trump won the election. I can get my head around the various reasons that people have for voting for Republicans, or not voting for Democrats, or not voting at all. I have never been particularly partisan myself and I have, over the course of my life, voted for members of both parties. I have also chosen, at times, to actively abstain from voting. But none of my personal experiences, and certainly not my education, which, even as a political geographer, is entirely free from any studies of elections, has prepared me to understand the why of the results of this election.

What I may be marginally more helpful in doing is helping us navigate the how of the second Trump administration, specifically as it relates to one of the most controversial and contentious themes of our time, a theme that will be at the center of Trump’s agenda: immigration. Over the past two weeks, I have realized how many immigration lawyers, graduate students, and journalists were not working in this field during Trump’s first term, and, as a result, I have also reluctantly realized that I am in the uncomfortable position that many 40-somethings find themselves: I have lived just long enough to find that what I considered to be our shared experiences, others now call “history.”

What I would like to do then, pushing aside Job’s friends for the time being, is to draw upon several years of my own deeply local and also very national experience as an immigration researcher to outline the shape of what is likely to come with the second Trump administration. This is not merely an analytical exercise. Understanding alone may not change the world, but it can prepare you for how you respond to the world, particularly when the world is tragic and unknown. As Edgar Allen Poe said, “it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most of all.”

Anselm Kiefer’s painting “Lot’s Wife,” which hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art, depicts gritty destruction and ruin, and raises questions about what it means to look backward while moving forward.

Three Keywords for Trump 2.0

My argument, to put it in those terms, is that if the second Trump administration is anything like the first, it will be characterized by three features: volatility, hypocrisy, and cruelty. I prefer to think of these as trends, tendencies, or effects, because I do not think it is always accurate to impose a framework of intentionality on these properties in a way that warrants referring to them as principles. Nevertheless, even if volatility, hypocrisy, and cruelty are not always (though not never) the goal, they have the combined effect of exacerbating social tensions and tilling the soil from which violence is all too likely to sprout.

So with that, let’s discuss three keywords that I believe will define the next four years of our collective lives, especially as it relates to immigration. As you continue reading, think about how you can use this perspective to wisely and strategically shape how you direct your own limited attention.  

Volatility

In 2020, a month before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I gave a talk in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University on the topic of volatility as a form of immigration governance during the Trump administration. In that talk, I argued that although the Trump administration’s policies were terrible for immigrants themselves (this point is hardly worth substantiating), a separate, less-recognized, but nonetheless powerfully negative characteristic of these immigration policies was their volatility, and I argued that it was policy volatility, not just their substance, that undermined immigrant legal defense and immigrant rights organizing.

That talk was inspired in no small part by a phenomenon that everyone inside the immigration world understood and seemingly no one else did: the Friday policy announcements. The Trump administration’s barrage of creatively cruel policies appeared uniquely timed for release late in the workday on Friday afternoons, which served as a final gut punch to people working in immigration law and policy at the end of what was always an exhausting week. 

I do not know if it was ever confirmed that this was intentional, but the existence of the phenomenon is undisputed among immigration folks (e.g., attorneys, policy advocates, service providers, immigrants themselves) who have already begun to express concern about this again. In fact, some of you, upon simply reading that phrase “Friday policy announcements”, will have a near (or actual) PTSD response at having your weekends, not to mention your client’s cases, suddenly thrown into question. 

As a researcher, with a rather totalizing and unforgiving urge to understand every single thing about immigration law and policy, I can attest to the number of Friday evenings I spent with an old fashioned and my iPad, trying to make sense of the fine print of some new policy or court ruling, then thinking up new data studies that could empirically inform public understanding. 

I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t have clients and I wasn’t directly affected by those policies, so I’m hardly asking for sympathy. Even so, it was personally exhausting and, moreover, as a researcher, the frequency of policy changes and the unpredictability of their substance (not to mention their inevitable roller coaster through the courts) made it impossible to meaningfully and empirically assess each and every policy change that exploded onto Twitter. (It is, and will always be, Twitter. #BeUngovernable.)

The volatility of immigration policies had a direct effect on attorney’s ability to serve immigrant clients facing deportation, precisely those people that the Trump administration wants to target. Please stay with me on this point, because it’s crucial for what’s to come. We typically think (or at least I used to think) that the value of an attorney is determined by the outcomes they can get for their client. It’s not not that, of course. But more fundamentally, the value of an attorney is creating a set of reasonable expectations for a client about what is likely to happen with their case. 

A criminal attorney who mostly represented immigrants first explained this idea to me in a research interview. “Most of my clients are guilty,” he said. This was not usually in dispute in the cases on his docket. So if his clients are guilty, and they are not challenging that, then why hire an attorney? One key reason is: predictability. He, the attorney, as a result of his experience in the local court system and his relationships with institutional actors, can help map out (and, to some degree shape) the path that a person’s case takes through the court system. This is something experienced attorneys have (and can charge for) and that new attorneys often lack, and it’s why judges overwhelmingly prefer parties to have attorneys. Attorneys save time and facilitate the routine operations of legal institutions. When legal systems cease to reflect or embody some degree of regularity, not only do attorneys have a harder time doing their job, the legitimacy of the legal institutions themselves may ultimately be called into question. 

The same is true for immigration attorneys, whose clients may, for instance, wish to apply for asylum. Asylum is difficult to apply for and even more difficult to obtain. Every immigration attorney I’ve ever interviewed or known personally sees it as part of their job to set reasonable expectations with their clients from the beginning by explaining how the process works and discussing the likelihood of various legal options (given factors such as the strength of one’s case and the disposition of the immigration judge). You see, it’s not just about outcome, it’s about foreshadowing how the process is likely to unfold along the way—this is an essential part of what brings clients some degree of stability and even comfort in an otherwise overwhelming and confusing system.

Trump’s immigration policies will blow this up. Again. I am not suggesting that the Biden administration has been a walk in the park; it hasn’t. But the difference between an administration that is committed to what we used to call “good governance policies” sometimes comes down not only to the substance of every policy, but the tactfulness with which an administration communicates forthcoming policies to stakeholders so that they can prepare for changes. 

To be clear: there is a long and robust critique of this “business-as-usual” approach to government policy-making, much of which I agree with. And terrible policies can (and have) been implemented through these so-called routine channels (a brief look at the Clinton administration shows us that). So don’t take this as an endorsement of one party or approach over another. Instead, what I’m arguing is simply that the manner in which the Trump administration is likely to roll out immigration policies (and other policies, I’m sure) is likely to have severely disruptive effects in addition to the substance of these policies.

The volatility won’t just come in the form of policy announcements. There will also be a revolving door of agency heads, too. Currently Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s governor, is slated to replace Alejandro Mayorkas as head of the Department of Homeland Security, and Matt Gaetz is slated to replace Merrick Garland as the Attorney General (who oversees the Department of Justice, including the immigration court system). But, like—we’ll see, you know what I mean? Donald Trump goes through political appointees like he goes through wives, so there’s no telling whether either of these two people will make it to January 20, much less to the end of Trump’s second Year 1 (year 2.1?). 

The next four years will be an incredibly volatile. But you know this now. And that means we can start to prepare now for how to respond to the predictably unpredictable fire hose of changes and enforcement actions. While I am not advocating for sitting in dusty despair like Job, I do think that it is reasonable (if not entirely healthy) to recognize that there will be (as there have always been in this world) more tragedies than we have the ability to meaningfully respond to. Find something to hold onto. The storm’s a-comin’.

Hypocrisy

If volatility refers to the unpredictability of the institutional and policy landscape, the second keyword—hypocrisy—refers to the contempt Trump seems to harbor for conceptual consistency. This is not news to most people. Trump is a billionaire who claims to fight for the working class, but doesn’t pay his bills; a self-proclaimed protector of women who has been found liable for sexual abuse and who is appointing men under investigation for sexual misconduct to cabinet-level positions; a law-and-order candidate who holds the record for most impeachments and criminal convictions. 

I suppose most politicians are walking contradictions in their own ways, but Trump is uniquely indifferent to this whereas most politicians appear somewhat bound by a desire to remain at least marginally coherent. Moreover, his brand of hypocrisy multiplies the hypocrisy around him in ways that are the easiest and most entertaining to point out—in short, to memeify. Elon Musk, the environmentalist who has thrown in with climate change deniers, and the “free speech absolutist” who exercises draconian control what people say on his platform. J.D. Vance, the once never-Trumper who will be the next Vice President. The list goes on.

Just this week, a photo circulated online of R.F.K., Jr.—the next head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a man who has railed against everything from vaccines to food additives in the name of his Tik-Tokified version of “health”—eating McDonald’s on a plane surrounded by President-elect Trump, Trump, Jr, and Elon Musk. Naturally, the photo made the rounds online with people pointing out R.F.K.’s obvious hypocrisy.

In another moment of hypocrisy that would be even funnier if it weren’t so dangerous, Donald Trump has announced that a new para-government agency (or organization? I don’t really understand it) called the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE, get it?) will propose massive cuts to the federal government. And who will lead this new initiative? Not one person, but two people: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The hypocrisy has already been memefied through one of my favorite SNL skits in recent years.

In that classical treatise of pragmatic political theory, The Prince, Machiavelli makes the point that neither truth nor lies have any inherent value to a ruler other than that which facilitates their effective rule. The king may wish to avoid lying if the people grow suspicious of, and rebel against, a king that lies, but a king need not distract himself with the morality of lying. Lie or tell the truth—all that matters is what is advantageous to the effective accumulation and exercise of power.

Similarly, since Trump pays no cost for hypocrisy, there is no reason for him (or his allies) to relent from saying whatever is expedient now, then doing the opposite later. In some way, I don’t even blame him entirely for this characteristic any more than I would blame a wild animal for escaping a cage after the door was left open. There is clearly something in our social system that has broken and allowed hypocrisy to flourish, but perhaps this is a tragedy rooted in our shared responsibility. 

Again, to be absolutely clear about my politics, I could write a parallel screed against Democrats, and in fact I have written extensively on this website about the Biden administration’s hypocritical stances on immigration. 

Trump will not be consistent from week to week or month to month, and neither will his political appointees, and this will likely feed back into a sense of volatility. I mention hypocrisy here not only because I think it will be a main trend, but also because I think that, in a way, it receives too much reactive attention. Even as I participate in it, I recognize that the memeification of Trump’s hypocrisy is a sign that no one—ourselves included—take it seriously. It’s a core feature of Trump’s governing strategy, not a bug, and, I’m sorry to say, pointing out hypocrisy is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. 

Cruelty

Donald Trump’s first campaign to be president was powered by a sense of revanchism, but in his second campaign, he turned up the voltage considerably, often exclaiming “I am your vengeance, I am your retribution” to his crowds like a wrathful Old Testament God. In the first Trump administration, the phrase “the cruelty is the point” circulated online and in conversations as a way of claiming that the human cost of Trump’s immigration policies represented the true purpose of the text of the policies, not at mere externality. Trump appears to endorse this reading of himself, so I’m not even sure that this is so much a critique as simply an observation.

If Trump 2.0 is anything like 1.0, there will undoubtedly be a long list of policy announcements, on-the-record statements, and secretive bureaucratic moves that many will find shocking, even morally reprehensible. The absurd and dehumanizing “they’re-eating-the-dogs” claims during the campaign about Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, are just the beginning. And like Springfield, these easily-debunkable claims primarily serve as informal dog whistles for right-wing media and Trump supporters to flood and disrupt local communities while Trump also mobilizes the formal institutional capacities of the Executive to do much the same thing. 

Trump promises to use the Department of Justice to go after his opponents. Elon Musk, Sycophant in Chief, keeps tweeting about the “Hammer of Justice” falling on Trump’s opponents (whatever that means from someone with no position of political authority). Thomas Homan, architect of family separation and a named advisor on immigration enforcement issues, has proposed that the solution to separating families is simply deportation families together.

I’m aware that a lot of people who read this newsletter because they trust my empirical immigration research don’t necessarily agree with me on every political or interpretive point I make. I am certain that a large number of readers, like a large percentage of the electorate, not only do not find Trump’s immigration policies reprehensible, but find them entirely morally defensible and long overdue. These readers may also interpret Trump’s and Vance’s claims about migrants eating dogs not as factual, but as their own version of memeifying social problems in ways that generate the kind of public response that simply appealing to elected officials and government agencies through normal channels has entirely failed to produce. 

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to every single aspect of these critiques. Nonetheless, what want to highlight now, and continue to highlight for the next four years, is that there is a version of robust political debate that is about pursuing specific policy agenda, and then there is a totalizing, unreflective, vengeful attack on other people that you will not be able to control as well as you think you can, that will harm communities far beyond their intended target, and, most predictably of all, are unlikely to even deliver the outcome you claim to want. 

For example, although the mental image of “mass deportations” is intended to (and quite effectively, I might add) evoke fear among immigrants and summon celebratory retribution among Trump’s supporters, there is also something sad, if not outright pathetic, about seeing so many people unironically embrace a policy that has repeatedly proven to be impossible to execute, unpopular with voters (although that may be changing), and terrible for the social and economic fabric of our country. 

Yet the hypocrisy of not even accomplishing state policy objectives is not a standard to which the Trump administration will be held. That’s apparently not how politics work anymore. The volatility will exhaust the immigrant community and undermine legal institutions, and the performative cruelty of it all will provide an illusion of success to Trump’s supporters, who are unlikely to be capable of (or interested in) evaluating Trump based on substance. In the process, a river of stories will flow into the news about the lives damaged, directly or indirectly, by these new and yet unknown immigration policies.

Your Resource for Trump’s Immigration Experiment

Over the next four years, it will be easy to feel outraged by immigration policy announcements and news headlines. One source of outrage will be confusion, confusion over what policies mean, what is legal and not legal, and whether Trump’s immigration policies will work as intended. Like Job and his friends, a major source of anxiety will be simply how to make sense of the dizzying calamity unfolding around us in real time. 

As a first-generation student from a working class background, I am wired to want to bring people with me, whether we agree politically or not, in order to create a shared sense of what is factual, what is true, and what is research-based. That is why I started this newsletter over two years and 200+ issues ago: because I wanted an outlet to share timely research and analysis with a broad audience outside of academia who deserve to have a reliable, non-partisan source that they trust. 

Trump is putting together a team to undertake an immigration enforcement experiment at a scale we have never seen before. Whether he will accomplish his aims, whether Americans actually support his tactics, what the full scale of effects will be on immigrants and non-immigrants in this country—these are questions we will have to explore together in real-time.

That’s what I plan on doing here. I invite you to sign up to receive this newsletter. I will be sharing original research summarized for a broad audience (both my own and others’), data analysis and visualizations, policy announcements, key immigration news you might have missed, longer essays, book reviews, and event announcements. Use the links below to learn more about my work and what this newsletter offers.

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