When Donald J. Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with news cameras rolling, the moment perfectly captured two of the president-elect’s biggest obsessions: the stock market and television.
Mr. Trump’s fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington.
Those guardrails are not foolproof, of course: Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shatter longstanding political and legal norms in Washington while enduring the crush of condemnation from his adversaries at home and abroad.
But more than a dozen people close to Mr. Trump say he sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices. And they say he is so obsessed with how he comes across on television that a barrage of negative coverage can make him hesitate, or even reverse course.
One of the main reasons Mr. Trump seriously considered the idea of switching out Pete Hegseth, his embattled choice for defense secretary, for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was that he believed it would make for a “big story,” according to a person who discussed the idea last week with the president-elect.
And if Mr. Trump actually followed through on his threat to impose huge new tariffs on foreign goods being sold into the United States, it could cause the market to seriously wobble — so many people on Wall Street regard those threats as a bargaining chip rather than a real policy plan.
When Mr. Trump takes office again on Jan. 20, he will return to a Washington that bears only a superficial resemblance to the place that made him feel so unwelcome in 2017.
The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.
Mr. Trump is likely to receive only the meekest resistance from his own party, which will control both the House and Senate and whose members fear Trump-backed primary challengers. He has completed his hostile takeover of the Republican Party and the dissenters have been driven into retirement, defeated in primaries or cowed into silence.
The most powerful curbs on Mr. Trump now, people close to him say, are the old standbys. During his first four years in Washington, Mr. Trump saw the stock market as more powerful a measurement than any poll, obsessing over it and watching it closely.
The stock market’s indexes, of course, offer an imperfect snapshot of the broader economy. They tend to surge when the outlook for corporate profits are strong, but that does not always match up with moments when everyday households are earning more.
Still, as he rang the opening bell on Wall Street on Thursday, the imagery was as Trumpian as could be: a set piece symbolizing wealth by an incoming president who still prefers being in New York City above anywhere else.
People close to Mr. Trump also believe that what he calls “bad press” may end up being one of the most potent checks on his immigration plans, including his pledge to deport more than 11 million people. In private, Mr. Trump has sometimes been squeamish about the optics of rounding up families who have been living in the United States for decades and whose only crime was entering the country illegally.
Mr. Trump has said he wants his team to start by deporting violent criminals — a far less sympathetic group and a measure similar to President Biden’s initial deportation directive when he came into office. The new administration expects to begin its operation by targeting people already under deportation orders.
The prospect of bad press affected some of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies in his first term. When his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, moved to unwind protections for so-called Dreamers — undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as young children — Mr. Trump asked an aide: “How do I get out of this?”
He went ahead with trying to rescind the protections, calling them unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds. After that, he largely avoided talking about deporting Dreamers, considering the policy to be bad public relations.
Whether it is serious intent or empty rhetoric, Mr. Trump is already signaling a more sympathetic approach to Dreamers in his second term. Despite his harsh campaign rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, he has said he wants to cut a deal with Democrats to help them, essentially beginning where he left off in 2018.
“We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” on NBC.
Mr. Trump also has struck a friendlier tone toward legal immigration while speaking in front of audiences with ties to the stock market. On the venture capitalist-hosted podcast “All-In” during the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump went out of his way to reassure the hosts that he would favor policies hospitable to high-skilled immigrants.
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