Here’s what we know about how Trump will tackle these major issues

Featured photo: President-elect Donald Trump at a rally in Greensboro in March 2024. (photo by Carolyn de Berry)

This story was originally published by The 19th

Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump has made big promises on issues of enormous consequence to Americans, from the economy to reproductive health care — but offered few details on how he would see those promises through. 

What he’s said in his campaign and what he did during his first term offer some clues, as does Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump term written by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Though Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, saying he has “no idea who is behind it” and that he has not read it, six of his former cabinet secretaries contributed to it in some form and much of what is in the 920-page document aligns directly with statements Trump has made this year. 

Though there are still many unknowns, here is what we know so far about how a second Trump term will approach reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the economy, education, immigration, climate change and aging and disability care. 

Abortion

Throughout his campaign, Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the fall of Roe v. Wade. He appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn the decades-old case protecting federal abortion rights. His stance on abortion access has wobbled over time between a national ban and state-by-state laws. 

Though Trump has said he would not support a federal abortion ban and he’s called restrictive abortion laws like Florida’s six-week ban “a terrible mistake,” it’s unclear how much he will stick to those statements: A day after he said people needed “more time” than six weeks, he said he would vote to uphold the ban in Florida, where he lives. About 57 percent of Floridians voted in favor of an amendment to undo the six-week regulation, but it fell short of the 60 percent threshold it needed to pass. 

The biggest question mark heading into the election was his support of a federal ban. During the presidential debate in September, Trump said “there’s no reason to sign a ban, because we’ve gotten what everybody wanted, Democrats, Republicans and everybody else, and every legal scholar wanted it to be brought back into the states,” meaning the issue had been returned to the states. A majority of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court decision that led to a patchwork of abortion decisions, according to polling from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

What Trump will ultimately do will likely come down to who he appoints — and listens to — in his administration. Some of his closest supporters, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have said they support a national ban on abortion, though during the vice presidential debate in October, Vance acknowledged that his position is not popular with “a lot of Americans.” 

Trump has also said he’s open to limiting whether mifepristone, one of the pills used in medication abortions, can be sent by mail. 

Economy

Much of Trump’s win Tuesday was likely due to Americans’ view on how he could improve the economy — and particularly their own personal finances. Early exit polls show that the economy was a lead motivator for many after record inflation during the Biden administration brought on by a confluence of factors, including supply chain issues, Russia’s war in Ukraine and coronavirus stimulus checks. 

In the end, the reason for the inflation — and how much of it was Biden’s doing — didn’t matter. Trump presented himself as the person to “fix” the economic troubles that have plagued Americans over the past four years, and it appears to have been a salient message. 

Trump inherits an economy in repair: Inflation is back down to 2.1 percent from 9 percent, hovering at the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent goal. And the country has been adding jobs consistently for months, though the most recent report shows fewer jobs added in October than expected. Still, the unemployment rate is down to about 4.1 percent from 6.3 percent when Trump left office in January 2021. 

The biggest economic showdown of a second Trump term will likely come next year, when parts of Trump’s 2017 tax bill expire. Among those provisions is the child tax credit, which was expanded in 2017 to $2,000 per child. Trump has expressed support for the credit, but has not said what he’d do with it in 2025. Vance has floated increasing the credit further to $5,000 per child. Trump has also called for further lowering the corporate tax rate, which he brought down from 35 to 21 percent in 2017, to 15 percent.

The president-elect has also proposed several tax breaks — on tips, Social Security and overtime pay — but it’s unclear how he would pursue those aims. 

Cutting taxes on tips would impact the women who make up the majority of tipped workers directly, but only those who earn enough to be taxed in the first place. Nearly 40 percent of tipped workers already don’t earn enough to pay federal income taxes. 

If Trump also eliminates payroll taxes on tips, most workers would see some impact, but could also see their Social Security benefits diminish (payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare). The same would happen if taxes are cut on overtime pay, though it’s also unclear what the impact of that would be. Trump has offered no details on how he would approach the policy. 

Trump has also called for eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, a proposal that would impact about half of recipients, most of them higher income, who currently pay taxes. But that proposal alone could make Social Security insolvent three years earlier than predicted, by fiscal year 2031, rather than 2034, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization. 

LGBTQ+ rights

Trump’s first term has been characterized as one of the most hostile towards LGBTQ+ rights in modern history. LGBTQ+ advocates expect his second term to be worse. A lynchpin of Trump’s 2024 campaign has been depicting trans people as dangerous or harmful to society, while his campaign proposals offer more extreme policies than LGBTQ+ Americans saw in his first term. 

It is likely that the second Trump administration will vigorously pursue curbing the rights of trans Americans. Trump’s campaign has proposed terminating Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans youth, attempting to charge teachers with sex discrimination for affirming students’ gender identities and ordering federal agencies to “cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” Trump has also pledged to ask Congress to halt the use of federal funds to promote or pay for gender-affirming care, without distinguishing between care for adults or minors.

Leading up to the election, Trump falsely claimed that schools were performing gender-affirming surgeries on children without parental knowledge or consent — a claim divorced from reality that marked a particularly bizarre moment in a campaign littered with anti-trans misinformation. At an October 28 rally, as Trump did at multiple rallies on the tail end of his campaign, he doubled down on framing anti-trans policies as key to his vision for the Republican party, saying: “We’re the party of common sense. That means no open borders, and no transgender operations.” 

In October, about 41 percent of the campaign’s ad spending was focused on messaging around trans people, particularly trans athletes and children receiving gender-affirming care. 

When polled, most Americans do not rank trans issues highly compared to issues like the economy or abortion rights. It is currently unclear if these ads motivated Trump voters to turn out in 2024 or if they were incidental to issues that voters rank more highly. 

Education

Trump has called repeatedly for an end to the Department of Education and presented himself as a champion for school choice, a position that will likely take center stage in a second term.

That stance aligns with details in Project 2025, which also supports eliminating the agency, as well as gutting protections for LGBTQ+ students and what he sees as progressive curriculum. Trump has vowed to cut federal funding for schools that teach lessons related to race or that teach “gender ideology.” Much of the impact will be on trans students, especially in sports. 

Under his previous administration, then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos worked to limit trans women’s participation in women’s sports, arguing it violated the anti-discrimination law Title IX. 

DeVos also sparked outrage by revising Title IX regulations to make it harder for sexual misconduct survivors on college campuses to hold perpetrators accountable. 

Earlier this year, the Biden administration reversed these controversial DeVos-era regulations and offered protections for LGBTQ+ students in schools, but the incoming Trump administration will almost certainly introduce their own updates to this federal law. Specifically, Trump is expected to go further by defining “sex” to exclude transgender students from playing on teams or experiencing school generally in ways that align with their gender identity.

Gutting the Department of Education would also have a major negative impact on disabled students, who rely on federal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect them from discrimination, lack of access to appropriate education, unnecessary segregation and abuse. 

Immigration

Some of Trump’s most divisive rhetoric during his campaign was toward Latinx people and immigrants, who he blamed as the reason for many of the country’s challenges, from safety to job loss to affordable housing. In the final days of his campaign, at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” 

Throughout his campaign, Trump has called immigrants “the enemy from within,” saying undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

His response as president, he said, would be to mount the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” but he has offered very little information on how that would happen, who would be targeted and with what resources. 

Much of what Project 2025 has to say about immigration overlaps with Trump’s campaign promises. The document discusses reinstating “every rule related to immigration that was issued” during Trump’s first term, and the president-elect has specifically called for putting back into place his “Remain in Mexico” policy, by which some asylum seekers had to wait out the outcomes of their U.S. immigration cases in Mexico.

Plans laid out in Project 2025 would also make it even more difficult for undocumented students to attend college. It calls for the Department of Education to deny loan access to students who aren’t in the country with authorization and for loan access to be denied to students at schools that offer in-state tuition to the undocumented population. Nearly 20 states, including California, Texas and New York, offer in-state tuition to undocumented students.

Disability and aging

During the presidential debate in September, Trump indicated that he had “concepts of a plan” for replacing the Affordable Care Act, which protects disabled, chronically ill and older Americans from being excluded from standard health insurance coverage. 

Opposition to the Affordable Care Act was a centerpiece of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and his first year in office was characterized by a failed, widely unpopular attempt to repeal and replace it, in addition to cutting Medicaid funding. Medicaid, a federal poverty program, funds the majority of long-term care for disabled and older adults in the United States.  

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated that he is willing to commit to dismantling the Affordable Care Act during a Trump presidency. While Trump promises on his website not to cut Medicare, which provides health insurance for Americans over 65, he has made no such promises about Medicaid. 

Affordable drug pricing may also take a hit during a second Trump term. The Biden administration vigorously pursued Medicare price negotiation to lower the cost of some particularly expensive prescription drugs for older adults. While Trump promised to pursue a similar policy during the 2016 race, he never implemented that promise. 

Both Vance and Trump have promised a tax credit for family caregivers of older and disabled adults between $5,000 to $6,000 per year. The average cost of home care in the United States, per the most recent data from the Federal Long Term Care Insurance Program, is $42,120 per year. The average cost of a shared room in a nursing home is $100,740 per year. 

Climate change

In his first term in office, Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, rolled back over 100 environmental regulations, deleted climate change references from agency websites and caused an exodus of federal employees from places like the Environmental Protection Agency, which plays an important role in protecting public health from industry.

A second Trump term will aim at clawing back any of the progress the Biden Administration made to transition the country to clean energy and will likely gut historic efforts by the White House to focus environmental dollars on environmental justice and marginalized communities. Trump has also stated that he would rescind any unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate spending bill in history, though he would need congressional approval to do so.

A keynote of his campaign cycle was focused on expanding energy production with a particular affinity for oil and gas and a particular disdain for clean energy sources like wind and solar. As he has stated repeatedly in his speeches and as recently as last night, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world.” He effusively has told crowds, “We will drill, baby, drill.” 

But the acceleration of oil and gas production will clash with an increasingly narrow timeline to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis. For decades, scientists have been warning that the burning of fossil fuels is directly causing climate change, and that in order to avoid the most harm, the U.S.needs to urgently curb fossil fuel consumption and transition to clean energy. 

If Trump follows through on plans laid out in Project 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency, which plays a role in protecting the public from pollution and toxic chemicals, would be heavily downsized, making it harder to enforce existing regulations meant to protect the public. The manual also refers to the “climate fanaticism” of the Biden administration and states it will need a “whole of government unwinding.” It also states that the government should reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Programs and related climate change research programs. It says that any future climate change assessments, which are supposed to inform policymakers on how the climate crisis will impact the country, should include “diverse viewpoints,” which legal scholars say is language for climate deniers. 

A Trump presidency could have global climate implications too, and not just because the promotion of oil and gas will impact international efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Project 2025 also calls for the retraction of any foreign aid directed at climate change impacts and would direct agencies like USAID to instead support fossil fuel expansion in other countries.

Nadra Nittle and Orion Rummler contributed to this reporting.