Briefing | A sting in the tail risks

How bad could a second Trump presidency get?

The damage to America’s economy, institutions and the world would be huge

An illustration of columns representing U.S. institutions being destroyed by a wrecking ball with Trump sitting atop it.
Illustration: Olivier Heiligers
|Washington, DC

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 Mr 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 Mr Trump tried to steal the presidential election of 2020, he failed.

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This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “A sting in the tail risks”

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