While Donald Trump in the Oval Office may be a familiar sight, when the former United States president returns to the White House in January, he will find a different national and global scene from the one he left four years prior.
Trump became the third candidate in the row to defeat the incumbent party. He himself beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 when Barack Obama was president, but he failed to retain the White House four years earlier.
And once again, Americans voted for change this year, ousting the Democratic Biden-Harris from power.
But what kind of policy shifts will Trump make, and will he be able to satisfy the nearly 77 million people who voted for him?
Here, The Yemeni American News looks at what to expect from Trump in key policy areas.
Foreign policy
Trump ran as an anti-war president and promised to bring “peace” to the Middle East and Ukraine.
But the details on how he would do that are scant.
What is clear is that Trump intends to push on with Washington’s staunchly pro-Israel policies. Over the past weeks, the president-elect appointed many pro-Israel fanatics to his administration.
For ambassador to Israel, he nominated Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, who denies the existence of the Palestinian people.
He selected Senator Marco Rubio, another politician with a religious devotion to Israel, as secretary of state. Rubio has led efforts to penalize Americans who boycott Israel in violation of free speech in the US.
Trump’s national security adviser will be Mike Waltz, a pro-Israel congressman.
But the president-elect is unpredictable, so it remains unclear how much his aides will influence his policies.
The incoming president previously called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza.
Trump may be interested in ending the war that Biden helped fuel for the past 14 months, but his cabinet picks suggest that he is unlikely to put meaningful pressure to stop the killing.
On Russia-Ukraine, Trump named retired general Keith Kellogg as his envoy to the region. The appointment gives us an idea as to how the former president intends to approach the conflict.
Kellogg supports military aid to Ukraine, but he also backs negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.
In a policy paper he co-authored in April for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), he called for offering “to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees”.
That position signals that Trump is willing to put Ukraine’s bid to join NATO on the negotiations table – something that the Biden administration refused to do.
The economy
While his foreign policy plans are not detailed, Trump has given the public a clearer picture on how he plans to handle the economy.
The incoming president wants to impose tariffs of up to 20 percent on imports from foreign countries with especially higher fees on China.
His rationale is that the tariffs will force manufacturers to make their products in the United States and create jobs.
But many economists have warned that companies may just shift the burden of the tariffs to consumers, which would cause a spike in the prices of imported goods and drive up inflation.
Trump nominated hedge fund mogul Scott Bessent, who supports tariffs, as his Treasury secretary.
In a column for Fox News before his nomination Bessent dismissed the idea that tariffs would amount to a “sales tax” for Americans.
“The truth is that tariffs have a long and storied history as both a revenue-raising tool and a way of protecting strategically important industries in the US President-elect Trump has added a third leg to the stool: tariffs as a negotiating tool with our trading partners,” he wrote.
The incoming president also wants to extend his 2017 tax cuts and lower the corporate tax rates even further. His biggest tax promise has been to make tips tax-free. If he succeeds in implementing this proposal, it would be a boon for the service industry workers.
Trump’s Republican Party has a majority in the House and the Senate, which would allow it to push the president’s economic agenda forward.
Immigration
Trump made immigration a – if not the – key focus of his campaign.
He painted the influx of migrants at the southern US border as a grave threat to the country, promising to deport millions of people.
Trump also says he wants to “shut down the border” from his first day in office.
The former president appointed former law enforcement official Tom Homan as his “border czar”. He is also bringing back Stephen Miller, an extreme anti-immigration advocate, to the White House.
Homan made his plans known early on. “Let me be clear: There is going to be a mass deportation because we just finished a mass illegal immigration crisis on the border,” he said this month.
It remains to be seen whether the US under Trump will have the logistic and legal ability to deport so many people. But the president-elect is expected to gut the refugee resettlement program and make it more difficult for people to apply for asylum.
What about the Muslim ban?
Early in his first term, Trump imposed a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, including Yemen.
This time around, however, Trump courted Muslim voters and has not promised to specifically restrict Muslims’ entry into the country.
But like with all things Trump, nothing is certain. The proof, they say, is in the pudding.
