Well, here we are: After a long presidential campaign full of warnings from each “major” party campaign about the horrible things the other “major” party’s candidate would do to us if elected, Inauguration Day approaches.

On January 20, Donald Trump begins his second (non-consecutive) term as president of the United States.

Within days — possibly within hours — we’ll start finding out how accurate his opponents’ warnings were, and whether or not he really intends to keep his own campaign promises.

To some degree, the warnings and the promises are identical. For example, Trump would say he promises, and his opponents would say he threatens, to launch mass abductions, cagings, and deportations of immigrants.

In other cases, the promises keep changing, often in contradictory ways that leave us just guessing at what he intends to do, especially vis a vis foreign policy.

Some of his supporters expect Trump, based on his own statements, to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine and put Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu on a leash in Gaza.

Others among his supporters expect, again based on his own statements, to double down on US support for Ukraine and/or Israel.

What do I expect? Plenty in general, but nothing in particular other than the usual theatrics from Trump, from “both sides of the aisle” in Congress, and from the media.

I expect, in a word (er, acronym), BOHICA.

That’s an old bit of military slang for the predictable recurrence of negative events: “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”

Popular perceptions of Trump tend toward the superlative.

To his supporters, he’s a fearless, iconoclastic, possibly even divinely ordained, leader figure, disrupting the establishment to Make America Great Again.

To his opponents, he’s a whiny, self-dealing criminal in terms of personality, literally Hitler reincarnate and possibly even the Antichrist in terms of politics.

In my opinion, he’s just another politician, albeit one with a flair for the dramatic and a firm grasp of what H.L. Mencken called “the whole aim of practical politics …. to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Every president, without exception, finds ways to be worse than the previous one. Some presidents also find ways to be better than their predecessors.

All presidents function within a system that’s resistant to change, but tends to drift toward increased presidential power to screw up all our lives.

Trump doesn’t look like an exception to those two rules —  but he’s better than most politicians at inspiring panic among both supporters and opponents.

That’s a job qualification. Panic is what politicians WANT from you. It’s the hook in your lip. Don’t be a fish.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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