Trump can and likely will win the Republican nomination shortly. Hillary Clinton, an extraordinarily weak campaigner, will win the Democratic nomination, making a Trump presidency a real possibility. If he wins, my expectation is that by the end of Trump’s first term, perhaps 50 miles of wall would be half-constructed on the border, not paid for by Mexico. Trump would likely institute his “touchback” amnesty plan, and some thousands may take advantage, but millions of illegal immigrants would probably prefer to live as they have in the United States, and overall immigration enforcement would relax.

American foreign policy would turn on public opinion, causing Trump and his hyper-aggrieved sense of honor to involve our nation in military commitments he doesn’t bother to understand or have patience to see through. His strategic absence of mind may be accompanied by his relish at instituting things “worse than waterboarding” as he promised. By 2020, no major trade deals will have been renegotiated and the de-industrialization of the American nation will continue at the rate jobs can be outsourced and machines can replace human labor.

In other words, the Trump phenomenon that is proving everything we knew about electoral politics wrong in 2016 will also prove that governance is much more resistant to dramatic change. Trump would end up relying on the substantial portion of the Republican Party that helped elect him, perhaps even passing many items from the GOP’s pre-existing elite agenda. It may be a victory over the GOP’s current apparatus of power, but it would be a bitter pyrrhic victory. Such a victory would rely on of all the hostility Trump and his supporters have for others, but would result in no gains for his supporters or their country.