What are we to expect of a second Trump administration? Given his wide-ranging campaign promises, raucous (if not contradictory) collection of cabinet officials, and disruptive political instincts, this is an open—and pivotal—question for American politics as the meaning of the GOP electoral triumph takes form. To better understand new presidencies, it is common to look at presidents before, like how Reagan (successfully) and Biden (unsuccessfully) modeled themselves after FDR. With Trump, there are several obvious antecedents: Andrew Jackson, whose portrait Trump placed in the oval office in 2017; Grover Cleveland, the only other president to win nonconsecutive terms; and, of course, Trump (POTUS #45) himself. After all, a developer, entertainer, and now politician, Trump is experienced in the art of reinvention.
Yet there is another president after whom Trump has already to a large degree styled himself: William Jefferson Clinton. Beyond their interpersonal bond, reputations for sexual indiscretion, and rises to national prominence in the 1990s, Trump also mirrors Clinton in terms of presidential style. His approach to polarizing issues, sources of political power, and key dimensions of his foreign policy could be ripped straight of the Clinton playbook.
First, Trump displays the same ruthless focus on eliminating sources of electoral weakness that Clinton famously displayed after the “Republican Revolution” engineered by Newt Gingrich in the 1994 midterms. Having won the 1992 presidential victory in no small part due to the good fortunate of Ross Perot splitting the conservative electorate, Clinton set about being the “change candidate” he had promised on the campaign trail. He raised taxes, implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act, passed limited gun control laws, and proposed significant healthcare reform. Yet after 1994, Clinton famously “triangulated” to remove Republican-leaning issues from political contention. He oversaw welfare reform, set about balancing the budget, and proclaimed “the era of big government is over” in the 1996 State of the Union address.
While Trump has scrambled the established lines of partisan combat on a range of issues since coming down the golden escalator in 2015, he demonstrated a particular drive to undercut lines of political attack in the 2024 campaign. He strongly moderated his stance on abortion, so much that he had to walk some of it back to placate pro-life GOP voters. He approved the removal of all language referring to traditional families or traditional family structure in the GOP platform, a move that accommodated “Log Cabin Republicans” and apparently earned him one in five LGBTQ votes nationally. He earned a bewildering array of endorsements from actors across the political spectrum, including Arab American community leaders in Dearborn, Elon Musk, Israeli cabinet members, and Teamsters Union officials. These points suggest that such dealmaking and moderation on polarizing cultural issues may well continue into Trump’s second presidential term. And since Trump will be term-limited on his first day in office, I expect him to avoid unpopular decisions like the plague and triangulate often, such as by appointing the union-friendly Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Secretary of Labor.
Second, presidential rhetoric is vital to understanding the political power of both Clinton and Trump. Oftentimes the communicative dimensions of political leadership are downplayed as mere ornamentation. However, this perspective misses how at every step politics involves (1) strategy, (2) ideas, and (3) interpretation, which are all mediated through language. As former Clinton speechwriter Stephen A. Smith writes:
“Public discourse is not ‘mere rhetoric.’ It is the process by which we learn of the world, understand our past, construct social reality, articulate our humanity, shape our values, build our dreams, reach collective decisions, perform civic responsibilities, guard our liberties, transmit our culture, and speak to one another about the small events and grand schemes in the public sphere.”
While it might be more typical to think of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama as premier political communicators, it is this area of presidential leadership that perhaps most explains the success of Clinton and Trump.
Clinton’s ability to convey empathy and inspiration on the 1992 campaign trail—pairing “I feel your pain” with announcing “a new season of American renewal”—sharply contrasted with the rhetorically wooden George H.W. Bush, who famously disavowed “the vision thing” as well as the wider rhetorical aspects of the presidential office (“I am not a mystic, and I do not yearn to lead a crusade”). Trump similarly uses his oratory to develop a strong sense of identification with his followers as an FDR-esque “traitor to his class” who is willing to tell unpopular truths. While Trump’s speeches are hardly Rooseveltian in their eloquence, they function like Clinton’s rhetoric by generating genuine identification and affective investment with voters. Contrasted with a rhetorically weak president like George H.W. Bush or Joe Biden, neither of whom were particularly effective at building the same kind of emotional support base, and it becomes clear how rhetoric has offered a source of strength for the presidencies of Clinton and Trump, enabling them to endure scandals, build support for policies, shift public conversations, and imbue certain issues with political salience.
Finally, it appears there will be significant overlap in the approach of Clinton and Trump to one key arena of foreign policy: the Middle East. To be clear, Clinton’s overarching foreign policy strategy of “democratic enlargement” stands in sharp contrast from Trump’s “America First” mindset. Yet in the Middle East, their differences are not so stark. Both prioritized the personal and relational elements of foreign policy, such as Clinton’s tireless efforts hammering away at an Israel-Palestinian peace treaty. Trump likewise oversaw the Abraham Accords as a framework for a broader Arab-Israeli rapprochement, and his warmer ties with Saudi Arabia could lead to a diplomatic breakthrough. Each president’s penchant for high profile dealmaking speaks to the fundamentally personal approach to geopolitics that they share.
Their similarities extend beyond trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a gambit to unlock greater alignment among (the numerous) American Middle East allies. Like Clinton, whose Dual Containment strategy entailed the “aggressive” containment of Iraq and “active” containment of Iran, so Trump also seems likely to ratchet up pressure on unfriendly regimes of the Middle East with the selections of Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Pete Hegseth, and Mike Waltz to run his foreign policy. Like Clinton, whose “active containment” of Iran entailed a trade embargo, extensive sanctions, hostile encounters at sea, and covert sabotage efforts, Trump’s election heralds at minimum a resumption of the “maximum pressure” campaign of his first term and perhaps even more. Hence despite the difference with Clinton’s international grand strategy, Trump seems prepared to employ similar tactics in the Middle East. And since Clinton’s open-ended commitments to disciplining Iraq and Iran as “wayward nations” outside the fold of the international order helped generate an appetite for a more expeditious solution—George W. Bush’s freedom agenda—figuring out a sustainable Middle East security posture will be a critical dimension of Trump’s foreign policy and presidency.
In short, in determining a presidential model for Trump’s second term, there are few better points of comparison than Bill Clinton. From image management and a focus on economic growth to charismatic leadership and a pragmatic attitude to policy disputes, Trump appears likely to not only echo many elements of Bill Clinton’s presidency—an abiding irony given his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton—but also mirror his approach to political problem solving, with all its attendant potential pitfalls.