Who comes after Trump isn’t the question to ask

With U.S. mid-term elections set to take place later this year, attention will begin to turn to Donald Trump’s lame duck period and who will succeed a president that has upended the United States’ relationships with allies and adversaries alike.

For policy makers in Seoul, the question of Trump’s successor touches on whether the United States under a new administration might return to a more traditional role on security and trade policy or whether the changes we’ve seen are more permanent. It also holds implications for whether policy makers will need to continue making concessions to the Trump administration or can take firmer stands as Trump’s term approaches its end.

Despite the inclination to view Vice President JD Vance as a strong contender to succeed Trump, history would suggest he faces a difficult road ahead. The last sitting U.S. vice president to win the presidency was George H.W. Bush in 1988. Prior to Bush, the last sitting vice president to win the presidency was Calvin Coolidge in 1920. The most recent vice president to run while still in office was Al Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election.

While Dick Chaney and Joe Biden did not run for president when their respective administrations came to an end, other recent politics suggests that the next U.S. president will likely be an unexpected figure. In the 2008 presidential election, Senator Hillary Clinton was expected to be the Democratic nominee and likely presidential winner. Instead, a more junior senator from Illinois by the name of Barack Obama went on to win the nomination and the White House.

When Donald Trump first declared he would run for president in 2015, an NBC/WSJ poll had former Florida governor Jeb Bush at 22 percent, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker at 19 percent and Senator Marco Rubio at 14 percent in the Republican presidential primary. Donald Trump was only polling at 1 percent. Clinton was again seen as the likely winner, only to lose this time to Trump.

While not a presidential race, Zohran Mamdani only garnered 2 percent in initial polls for this past November’s New York mayoral election. He is now the youngest mayor of New York in decades.

None of this means that Vance cannot win the presidency, but history and recent U.S. politics suggests that the eventual winner will likely emerge from a group of lower profile individuals.

This means there are two questions Korean policy makers should be considering. The first is whether Trump will have been a transformative president by the time he leaves office or whether his two terms in office will be an aberration in U.S. policy.

Prior U.S. presidents such as Franklin D. Rosevelt, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan fit this mold. While Republicans have long fought against changes made by the Rosevelt administration such as Social Security, they became a part of the U.S. governmental and political structure that each succeeding administration dealt with. Truman and the later parts of the Rosevelt administration set the foundation for post-World War II U.S. foreign policy and trade policy that both parties have hewed to for more than seven decades, while Reagan set forth a neo-liberal economic policy that both parties accepted.

Trump is trying to largely overturn the legacies set out by both Truman and Reagan. If he is successful in establishing a transformative "America first" approach to U.S. foreign policy and higher tariffs as a tool of economic policy, his successor will be less free to reverse course. This is especially true on trade policy, where if Trump’s use of tariffs is seen by the public as restoring manufacturing jobs, it would be politically difficult for a new administration to reverse course.

The second question is whether there have been fundamental changes in the United States. Polling from YouGov this past November found that 55 percent of Americans believe that trade makes America better off, while only 15 percent support higher tariffs. While the politics of trade may be difficult, especially if Trump is successful in restoring some manufacturing, these figures and those in other polls suggest America’s view of trade overall may not be shifting.

This extends beyond foreign policy and trade. Trump has worked to dismantle much of the opposition to his policies, coupled with a decline in press freedom and democracy under his watch. Polling from multiple outlets suggests that growing numbers of Americans from both political parties support a more authoritarian form of government. If America is transforming into a more authoritarian country, that would have longer-term consequences for how the United States approaches foreign policy and trade.

While the question of who the next US president will be is an important one, focusing on how America is changing is the best approach for considering how Trump’s successor might govern.

Troy Stangarone is the director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy and the deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.