Trump’s First-Term Errors Could Make or Break His Foreign Policy Agenda

During the opening days of Donald Trump’s first term as president, a source summoned me to a quiet cafe. There, he slipped me a copy of a draft Trump executive order that would ban people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. “It’s crazy,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

We all knew Trump had pledged to bar Muslims from U.S. shores. But the draft order was full of legal holes. I remember thinking it would never become a reality because, surely, the lawyers would stop it. But within days, the ban took effect, spawning chaos at airports, lawsuits and confusion among many U.S. officials who, although tasked with enforcing it, knew nothing about it.

The reason it happened that way? A few Trump acolytes had drafted the order in a secretive, haphazard way — skipping the usual policy process and the legal pressure-testing that comes with it.

Trump backers tell me this will not happen in his second term, because his team will be more knowledgeable and disciplined. They are especially adamant that Trump’s national security team will be a well-oiled machine. His nominees for multiple top positions this week include some flamethrowers, but they generally are people experienced in government, including lawmakers.

But I am still skeptical that even the best hires will make too much difference. Trump’s aides may be more focused and more motivated than ever, but their boss has a history of struggling to follow an orderly process — especially on national security and foreign policy issues — having contradictory priorities and fixating on vengeance over policy. He also thrives on chaos, undermining even his most loyal underlings.

You may or may not think all this is a good thing, depending on if you want Trump to succeed. But the bottom line is that Trump’s ability to accomplish what he wants in a second term will depend a good deal on whether he can avoid the errors of his first term.

Three of those mistakes in particular stand out:

He was better at destroying than building

Trump has made a number of second-term national security promises that arguably fall under the idea of “creation,” such as building a missile defense shield system and a turbocharged deportation apparatus that could include large detention camps.

But his history, at least in politics, is more about destruction.

During his first term, Trump went about negating many policies Barack Obama had supported, from the diplomatic opening to Cuba to ergonomics programs.

Some of this was due to genuine ideological differences, but much of it seemed personal, especially when Trump couldn’t point to clear legal or technical reasons for canceling an Obama act and offered no alternative.

One career federal employee mentioned to me how hard it was in 2018 to watch Trump abandon the Iran nuclear deal, which Obama’s team had finished negotiating in 2015. “People spent years of their lives working on that deal,” the staffer said. “And he just wiped it away in an instant.”

(That decision led Britain’s ambassador in Washington to reportedly tell his superiors that Trump was acting out of spite against Obama.)

Another U.S. official told me: “All Trump and his team seem able to do is walk away from things, quit things, destroy things — and they count these as accomplishments. But they never build anything.”

Ultimately, Trump could point to some constructive achievements, such as the Abraham Accords; an upgraded trade deal for the U.S., Mexico and Canada; several hundred miles of a border wall; and, if you stretch the definition of “building,” massive new sanctions and tariff structures aimed at other countries.

But overall, his first-term legacy was more about stops, reversals and abandonment, not building new things.

This is an odd point to make about a guy who spent decades as a real estate mogul. That said, it’s also much easier to destroy things.

A former Trump administration national security official told me the dearth of constructive accomplishments in the first term was largely because many of his aides defied him.

“I don’t think it was a lack of vision or options for building,” the former official said. “It was a lack of continuity, a lack of senior officials who shared his vision, were willing to implement it, or were competent enough to implement it.”

This time? “That’s going to be fixed,” the former official said. I granted this person, and others, anonymity to speak candidly and without authorization.

When I asked the Trump transition team for comment on this and other issues raised in this column, I got this boilerplate response from spokesperson Karoline Leavitt: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”

Still, many of Trump’s scattershot pledges for a second term are about eliminating things, from the Department of Education to protections for transgender people. And the president-elect’s No. 1 passion seems, again, to be about exacting revenge on his foes, including Obama.

He took a chaotic approach to making policy, and it burned him

Trump opponents worry that he and his aides have learned how to work the system. His supporters say that’s true: the president-elect and his team figured out how to run a standard inter-agency policy process in the weeks and months after the messy travel ban rollout.

The reality was more complicated.

It depended, in part, on who was the national security adviser at the time. John Bolton, for one, ran a less open process than H.R. McMaster; enough so that Cabinet members complained that they were out of the loop. Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller effectively took over processes he wasn’t technically a part of to push through anti-immigration ideas.

But Trump himself, with his freewheeling style, would sometimes undermine the process via a single tweet or after talks with various people who’d shown up in his office.

His abrupt decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria reportedly came during a conversation with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Presidents have wide latitude in how to structure their policy-making process. If Trump wants to use a Magic 8 Ball to get to a decision, he can. But that decision may face congressional limits, judicial review and, of course, reaction from voters.

Even if Trump’s aides know more now about the importance of process, the question is whether they — and the president — can stick to it. It’s also worth watching if Trump will listen to the resulting advice from that process, such as if a move is legal.

His obsession with cutting immigration hurt other goals

The president-elect has some far-reaching, somewhat vague plans on the global front for his second term, from ending the war in Ukraine to re-evaluating America’s role in NATO.

But if he follows his past patterns, his desire to curb immigration could undercut many of his promises on other fronts.

Take promoting religious freedom. This was a foreign policy priority during Trump’s first term, in part because it appealed to evangelical supporters worried about Christian persecution abroad. It was also a rare human rights issue to which the Trump administration devoted significant amounts of resources.

But Trump also wanted to scale up deportations of immigrants who’d had run-ins with the law.

That’s how Trump wound up deporting dozens of Christians to Iraq, even though his own administration had declared that Christians faced genocide in that country.

Past U.S. presidents had given these Christian immigrants a pass on deportation as long as they checked in regularly with government officials. Trump was such an immigration hardliner that he sent to Iraq Christians who’d never been there, spoke little Arabic or were even ill. At least one of the deportees died.

What I’m hearing from people in Trump’s orbit is that this approach — making curbing immigration the No. 1 goal — is not likely to change. If that means other policy goals are undercut or have to be set aside, then that’s what will happen.

“I don’t think we can even conceive of how hard he’s going to fight on that one,” a second former Trump administration official said.

Even within the broad goal of reducing immigration, there will have to be prioritization, such as which groups to target first and how fast, the first former Trump administration official said.

When I asked whether Afghans who had fled to the U.S. after the Taliban took over their country could be sent back, the first former official indicated that group would probably be lower on the priority list of people to deport. (Going after them would likely upset U.S. military veterans and draw ugly publicity.)

The first former official also predicted something else: After pursuing crackdowns on migrants, Trump could push through a comprehensive immigration reform package, a goal that has eluded many of his predecessors. “He’s the only Republican who could ever do that,” the former official said.

It was an intriguing idea. But getting there requires process. It requires focus. It requires building a plan and support for it.

Can Trump pull it off? Well, he’s surprised us before.

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