The Incoming Clubber Lang Administration

For a campaign that promises to make America great again Trump and his acolytes sure are promising a lot of pain.

Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash

All of the signs suggest that the second Trump administration will be hitting the ground running faster than the first Trump administration. Trump has named Susie Wiles already as his chief of staff. Transition team heads are being rolled out. Trump will meet with Biden this week. And so forth.

We still have some time to anticipate how the first hundred days will play out. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has some political scientists on the payroll to figure this out. Like many political scientists, I rely on Mr. T’s outstanding performance as Clubber Lang in Rocky III for political insight:

Think this is an exaggeration? Well, consider some of the more interesting rhetoric coming from the three leading figures of the incoming Trump team: Trump himself, vice-president JD Vance, and entrepreneur-in-chief Elon Musk.

Let’s start with Trump, who after the election told NBC News’ Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez that when it comes to mass deportations, money is no object:

President-elect Donald Trump told NBC News on Thursday that one of his first priorities upon taking office in January would be to make the border “strong and powerful.” When questioned about his campaign promise of mass deportations, Trump said his administration would have “no choice” but to carry them out….

As a candidate, Trump had repeatedly vowed to carry out the "largest deportation effort in American history." Asked about the cost of his plan, he said, "It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag."

It's unclear how many undocumented immigrants there are in the U.S., but acting ICE Director Patrick J. Lechleitner told NBC News in July that a mass deportation effort would be a huge logistical and financial challenge. Two former Trump administration officials involved in immigration during his first term told NBC News that the effort would require cooperation among a number of federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Pentagon.

It’s not just former ICE officials who say that mass deportation will be expensive. The American Immigration Council (AIC) and the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) separately crunched the numbers on this particular policy proposal as well. AIC found that what Trump was proposing was pretty expensive:

In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations—an estimated total of is at least $315 billion. We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time—incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible. For one thing, there would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step. To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people. 

In order to estimate the costs of a longer-term mass deportation operation, we calculated the cost of a program aiming to arrest, detain, process, and deport one million people per year—paralleling the more conservative proposals made by mass-deportation proponents. Even assuming that 20 percent of the undocumented population would “self-deport” under a yearslong mass-deportation regime, we estimate the ultimate cost of such a longer operation would average out to $88 billion annually, for a total cost of $967.9 billion over the course of more than a decade. This is a much higher sum than the one-time estimate, given the long-term costs of establishing and maintaining detention facilities and temporary camps to eventually be able to detain one million people at a time—costs that could not be modeled in a short-term analysis. This would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists.

The AIC estimate says nothing about the costs to the U.S. economy of suddenly contracting the labor supply. The PIIE study did that precise thing, however, and you will be shocked to learn what they predict: more pain:

[There are] two scenarios: a low-end estimate based on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s deportation of 1.3 million persons in 1956 under what was officially called “Operation Wetback” and a high-end count based on a Pew Research Center study that estimated approximately 8.3 million workers in the US were unauthorized in 2022.

Both scenarios cause lower US GDP and employment through 2040 than the baseline projection—in other words, compared with what would have happened without the deportations. The scenarios differ only by the degree of damage inflicted on people, households, firms, and the overall economy.

In the “low” scenario, if 1.3 million unauthorized workers are deported, by 2028, US GDP is 1.2 percent below the baseline. In the “high” scenario, GDP is 7.4 percent lower than baseline by 2028 (figure 1). On the assumption that the baseline GDP growth is approximately 1.9 percent per year, this projection implies that the level of US GDP in 2028 will be almost unchanged from that in 2024—meaning no economic growth over the second Trump administration from this policy alone….

The Trump campaign assumes that employers would simply replace the deported workers with native workers, but the historical record shows that employer behavior is far more complicated than that. Past experience with deportations demonstrates that employers do not find it easy to replace such workers. Instead, they respond by investing in less labor-intensive technologies to sustain their businesses, or they simply decide not to expand their operations. The net result is fewer people employed in key business sectors like services, agriculture, and manufacturing.

In addition, those unauthorized immigrants aren’t just workers—they’re consumers too. Deporting them means less demand for groceries, housing, services, and other household needs. This lower spending in turn reduces demand for workers in those sectors. That reduced demand for workers in all types of jobs outweighs the reduction of supply of unauthorized workers.

So that all sounds horrible — so much so that, according to NBC News’ Suzanne Gamboa and Nicole Acevedo, some Republicans are now sounding a bit squeamish about the idea of Donald Trump doing what he repeatedly promised to do during the campaign:

Republicans in immigrant-heavy states have been suggesting he’ll prioritize or only focus on the worst criminals.

“I am sure that the Trump administration is not going to be targeting those people who have been here for more than five years that have American kids, that don’t have criminal records, that have been working in the economy and paying taxes,” Florida Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar said in a PBS interview. Her Miami-Dade district is home to about 200,000 undocumented people.

“I am sure that they’re going to hone in on the criminals who arrived less than four years ago,” she added. 

Asked in the interview whether she got those assurances from Trump or someone in his potential administration, Salazar didn't directly answer, but said she is "going to be one of those voices making sure within the GOP to make that distinction."

Good luck with that, Representative Salazar! But she should bear in mind that during his first term, Trump actually de-emphasized the deportation of criminals. So it seems like Trump is promising a lot of pain that might not achieve his stated goal.

Trump is not the only one predicting immediate pain due to MAGA economic policies. In late October, Elon Musk made a similar observation, according to the New York Times’ Alan Rappeport and Theodore Schleifer:

Mr. Trump has called for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, an extension of his 2017 tax cuts and an array of additional tax cuts. He is also promising blanket tariffs on all imports.

Budget experts have estimated these policies could cost as much as $15 trillion over a decade, although Mr. Trump says that economic growth and eliminating government waste would easily cover those costs.

But Mr. Musk realizes that it will not be so simple.

As part of his endless stream of replies to fans on his social media platform that go late into the night, Mr. Musk replied to a pseudonymous account early on Tuesday morning that posited that there would be an “initial severe overreaction in the economy” and that the “market will tumble” if Mr. Trump is elected and follows through on his plan. Afterward, the account said, “There will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy.”

Mr. Musk replied at 1:46 a.m. with three words: “Sounds about right.”….

Mr. Musk has acknowledged that cutting government spending could be painful. At a telephone town hall last Friday evening, Mr. Musk proactively brought up the consequences of this austerity when a voter asked him for his first steps to cut the nation’s debt should he be appointed to Mr. Trump’s promised government-efficiency commission.

He said that cutting spending would be relatively easy given the amount of government waste, vowing there would be “no exceptions,” and that the tax law should be simplified to remove loopholes.

“But most importantly, we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity,” Mr. Musk said at the conclusion of his answer. He did not expand on the hardship.

I may be just a small-town political scientist, but I reckon that Musk is wrong and that cutting spending would not, in fact, be relatively easy. The belief that the deficit is due to waste, fraud, or abuse falls apart the moment one looks at, you know, the actual budget. Once you rule out cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt, there ain’t a lot left. I suppose military spending could be cut, but Trump certainly did not do that during his first term, and no one expects this during his second e\term either. And I doubt Musk will want government funding of space exploration to be cut either.

Once you take all of those things off the board, there isn’t enough left to trim. But if Musk tries, remember, there will be some temporary hardship!

Temporary hardship for consumers is what JD Vance tacitly acknowledged when he defended tariffs during his August 25th Meet The Press interview. Here’s Vance’s full quote:

I think economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs because there can be a dynamic effect right. So what some economists will say is what you just said, that it will actually raise costs for consumers. But what other people say, and I think the record supports this other view, is that it causes this dynamic effect where more jobs come into the country. Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer, you gain in higher wages. So you're ultimately much better off. You have more take home pay, you have better jobs.

So, basically, Vance is acknowledging that consumer prices will go up with the Trump tariffs. But what Vance also wants to claim is that tariffs will also boost wages, and that will be a net gain.

The thing is, as Welker noted during the interview, this was not true of Trump’s myriad first-term tariffs. PolitiFact assembled an array of studies that contradict Vance’s claims:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right group, called tariffs an "unambiguous negative for consumers," and said "there is vast empirical literature to buttress this conclusion."

Studies of past tariff impacts on consumers, jobs and wages include:

• The Tax Foundation, a center-right group, found in a 2024 study that tariffs on thousands of products — enacted under Trump and continued under President Joe Biden — reduced employment by 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs, while also shaving 0.2% off gross domestic product. (GDP is the market value of all the goods and services a country produces.)

• A 2024 paper published by researchers from Cornell, Yale, Duke and New York universities found that tariffs on imported solar panels were depressing employment and wages. Lifting the tariffs, the authors concluded, would have increased domestic employment and wages on net.

• A 2020 UCLA study calculated consumer losses of $51 billion from Trump tariffs through 2019, which was greater than gains to producers and the federal Treasury from tariff payments.

• A 2019 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the costs of Trump’s tariff fell entirely on domestic consumers, with a $1.4 billion-per-month reduction in U.S. inflation-adjusted income by the end of 2018.

It will not surprise you at this point to learn that the Peterson Institute for International Economics also crunched the numbers and found that Trump’s tariff proposal will cause — wait for it — more economic pain: “We find that imposing a 20 percent across-the-board tariff combined with a 60 percent tariff on China would cost a typical US household in the middle of the income distribution more than $2,600 a year. That’s up from the $1,700 loss in after-tax income that would result from his earlier plan.”

So, it sure seems as though Make America Great Again will start by making America pained again.

The Trump team might argue that short-term pain will lead to long-term gain. But I have seen this movie before between 2017 and 2021, I know how this film ends. It end with more pain.