Trump’s extremism is (still) the biggest story of this election

Donald Trump went on national TV last week and proposed bombing Mexico.

Asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters if he’d consider strikes against drug cartels operating in the country, Trump said yes — and framed his answer as a threat against the Mexican government. “Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely,” the former president said.

This is not a one-off answer to a stray question. Trump suggested firing missiles at Mexico during his presidency, asked advisors for a “battle plan” against the cartels last year, and recently proposed sending special operators to assassinate drug kingpins. The idea of war in Mexico is popular among the Republican elite; a Trump-aligned think tank even drew up a broad-strokes plan for how such a war might work.

There is every reason to take Trump’s proposal seriously. Presidents tend to at least try to deliver on campaign promises, and they have nearly unlimited war-making power nowadays. As unthinkable as it may sound, there is a reasonable chance the United States will be at war on its southern border in the coming years if Donald Trump returns to office.

So how come nobody is talking about it?

The Fox interview has barely gotten any pickup in other media. The prior years of Trump musings about war with Mexico have been mostly ignored. A major party candidate is proposing the first North American war in over a century and, somehow, it’s not even on the radar in Washington.

This is part of a bigger pattern. If you actually look at Trump’s policy agenda, he’s called for some wild stuff: policies so extreme that, had they been proposed prior to 2016, would have defined the entire course of the campaign. Today, some get some coverage, but mostly feel like sideshows — with policy as a category taking a backseat to personality and polling.

Recently, the lack of policy focus is partly due to a remarkably chaotic stretch of American political life. One candidate, the incumbent president, bungled his debate performance so badly that his party replaced him with his vice president. The other almost got killed on national television by a would-be assassin.

But even in more normal times this is a general problem with the media: policy is technical and boring, while horse race reporting is exciting and easier for audiences to grasp.

Elements of Trump’s persona also make policy reporting a lot tougher: the combination of habitual lying, flip-flopping, and personal disinterest in detail can make it tough to know what’s an actual proposal and what’s something he said just for the hell of it.

But there are some times when it’s really clear that Trump means what he says. And in those areas where he clearly does — like trade and the southern border — a second Trump administration would have extraordinary consequences.

Trump’s biggest policies are deeply radical

Before I started writing this story, I asked my colleagues at Vox what stood out as Trump’s signature policy proposals in this election — the equivalent of “Build the Wall” in 2016. We came up with two big answers: Trump’s proposal for a general 10 percent tariff and his plan for “the largest deportation in American history.”

Each of these policies is genuinely extreme.

A 10 percent blanket tariff isn’t just putting a tax on specific imports to protect a particular industry, or to retaliate against a country like China engaging in unfair trade practices. It’s a blanket attempt to make all imports from every country, including from neighbors like Canada and allies like the European Union, 10 percent more expensive. 

This is a radical shift from the way that trade policy typically works in the United States — one with huge and predictably negative implications for US consumers and the economy.

The tariffs mean that people will either buy American-made goods that cost more than their current foreign competitors, or they will keep buying foreign-made goods at a 10 percent markup. That’s inflation basically by definition: an odd proposal for a candidate running against inflation as his central issue.

The center-right Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs would shave nearly 1 percent off of US GDP growth annually, costing roughly 684,000 jobs. This estimate did not take into account retaliation from other countries, who almost certainly would impose their own tariffs on American goods in response. A second estimate, from the centrist Peterson Institute, finds that every group of Americans — from the poorest to the wealthiest — would see drops in their annual income.

Neither of these estimates takes into account the all-but-certain retaliation from the affected countries, especially China (who Trump wants to hit with a special 60 percent across-the-board tariff). Typically during trade wars, countries respond to tariffs with in-kind measures. In this case, that would mean a flat tariff on all US-made goods. Both the American and world economy would suffer immensely from everything becoming more expensive everywhere.

The point is not just that the Trump trade policy is bad, though it is. It’s that it is shocking: such a radical break with the way that trade policy works that it would have massive ripple effects throughout the global economy.

Similarly, people don’t appreciate just how radical Trump’s proposals for mass deportations are.

No one is exactly sure how many people are going to be targeted for deportations: Trump never sets a specific target, but often implies he’s going to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States (there are currently around 11 million). A group of four NBC reporters tried to figure out how deporting so many people was supposed to work, and ended up concluding that it was such a break with the way immigration enforcement typically works that it was near-impossible to grasp the scope of the effort.

Typically, police don’t go out looking for undocumented migrants currently residing in the United States. They find them by accident, during a traffic stop or criminal arrest, and then discover that they are undocumented and notify ICE to begin deportation. Targeted enforcement raids happen, but they’re comparatively rare and make up only a fraction of annual deportations.

For Trump’s “mass deportation” policy to work, he would need to devote extraordinary resources — state, federal, and local — to finding and apprehending undocumented immigrants. Once found, they still pose a massive logistical challenge: current law does not allow ICE to deport longstanding US residents without a hearing (or the migrant’s consent), posing a huge burden on the legal system. The government would also need to figure out the travel logistics for deportation, including negotiating with home countries that might not be very happy to receive large numbers of functional refugees.

During all of this, the US government would need to house millions of people — which ICE currently lacks the capacity to do. Hence the now-infamous Trump proposals for keeping detained immigrants in camps: there’s literally nowhere else to put them while they await deportation.

All of this is not only a human rights disaster, but an economic and law enforcement one. The cost of devoting police and judicial resources to this task, in terms of trade-offs with addressing actual crime, would be significant. So too would be the financial cost of building immigrant camps and providing them with food and medical care. 

Removing so many people from the workforce would also be inflationary, far outweighing any (questionable) increase in wages for native-born workers. One estimate suggests that, all told, mass deportations would cost the American economy $4.7 trillion over a 10-year period.

The point, in short, is that Trump is proposing sweeping changes to the way the US economy and legal system operates — ones with consequences for every American — and we’re barely even talking about what they would mean.

How Trump gets away with his radicalism

Part of the problem with Trump’s radical policies, from war in Mexico on down, is that they’re so outlandish that most people can’t believe they could happen.

When the New York Times interviewed David Autor, a leading trade economist at MIT, about Trump’s 10 percent tariff, he said, “I don’t think they’ll do it.” The reason, Autor added, was that the impact would be catastrophic: it would have “a very large effect on prices almost immediately” and “easily cause a recession.”

Similarly, when NBC interviewed Ammon Blair — a former Customs and Border Protection agent who is currently a fellow at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation — he said mass deportations were unlikely because they’d be disastrous.

“I honestly just don’t see it happening,” Blair said. “One, because I think it’s political suicide, and two, I think we need to focus on national security issues.”

Of course, this is exactly the kind of thing people said before Trump’s first term about policies like the Muslim ban or overturning Roe v. Wade. Those things happened, and so too could a 10 percent tariff or a war with Mexico — especially since trade, immigration, and war are three policy areas where presidents enjoy broad discretionary authority.

Moreover, it’s fairly normal for politicians to try and implement their campaign promises. Again and again, political scientists have found that elected leaders take such promises seriously and try to fulfill them. In this respect, Trump’s first term is not an aberration but in line with the historical norm.

But I suspect some of the incredulity about Trump’s policies is that it’s hard to tell what actually counts as a promise.

Trump is a habitual liar who has a habit of saying whatever comes to mind. Oftentimes, an interviewer will ask him a policy question and he’ll leave the door open to whatever idea they’re suggesting should be on the table.

Moreover, it’s not obvious who speaks for Trump on policy. His campaign doesn’t focus very much on developing detailed policy plans, leaving a vacuum for others to fill. The issue page on his website, for example, does not contain any original information — it simply links out to the 2024 RNC platform. Journalists often have to cobble together his policy ideas by looking at documents like the platform Project 2025 and white papers by various former Trump White House officials scattered around conservative think tanks.

Yet there’s a difference between Trump’s random utterances, or what he might do about some obscure policy issue, and his consistent instincts on the issues central to his political identity — like trade and the southern border. And there, he could not be clearer: across-the-board tariff, mass deportation, and waging war on the drug cartels.

Even if we set aside everything else we know (or think we know) about what Trump would do, these three items alone would have the potential to transform life in America as we know it. It’s time to start covering Trump like he means what he says.