Dem
47
GOP
53
To figure out what Donald Trump's real priorities are, Axios has gone over all his campaign speeches and counted how many times he mentioned each topic. Here is the list, if you want the whole story. Below is a table with the Top 10, along with how many times he mentioned each one.
| Rank | Item | Mentions |
| 1 | Settle the Ukraine war | 33 |
| 2 | Close the border | 32 |
| 3 | Cut funding to schools that teach CRT or have a vaccine mandate | 26 |
| 4 | Begin deporting undocumented aliens | 25 |
| 5 | End the electric car mandate | 22 |
| 6 | Increase drilling and fracking for oil | 17 |
| 7 | Begin ending inflation and making life affordable | 10 |
| 8 | Terminate Joe Biden's "open border" policies | 8 |
| 9 | End Bidenomics and start MAGAnomics | 8 |
| 10 | End Green New Deal policies | 6 |
Some of these are easier said than done. For starters, Trump can tell Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he is not going to get a single new bullet from the U.S., so he had better give Vladimir Putin what he wants. This will cause Zelenskyy to go beg the E.U. for weapons, especially offensive ones that can hurt Putin at home. Maybe he'll get them, maybe he won't, especially with France and Germany in turmoil now. But Trump can't settle the war on his own.
Trump could close the border if he really wants to and is willing to take the flak for it. He could simply order the Border Patrol to shoot to kill any person crossing the border illegally and leave the bodies there as a warning to others. The Supreme Court would probably uphold the principle that law enforcement officers who see a crime being committed may use force to prevent the crime from being committed. In the abstract, that may sound fine.
Since no schools teach CRT, no schools will lose funding over it. Many schools have vaccine mandates and most of the parents want that. If Trump really follows through on that and schools get rid of their vaccine mandates, make a note on your calendar for Nov. 3, 2026, reading "Watch out for blue wave today." And on and on. Many of the items require Congress to pass legislation, and other than budgetary legislation, very little of this will get through the Senate.
These and the other items fall into three buckets. First is immigration. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan will certainly get to work rounding up some immigrants for a photo-op that Trump can brag about. How much more he gets done depends on how much the Democrats are willing to go along and what price they demand in return. But maybe all Trump wants is a couple of photo-ops.
Second is red meat for the MAGA faithful. Some things, like bans on DEI within the government and its contractors, are doable with XOs. Banning trans women from women's sports is not a budget item and would require legislation. Senate Democrats are never going to go along with that until they get something enormous in return, like a path to citizenship for Dreamers, which the Republicans would never agree to.
Third is giving big business goodies in the form of tax cuts, reduced regulation, and protection for American companies from foreign competition. Democrats might actually go along with some of this, although it will cause a major battle internally.
And things will come up that are not on Trump's agenda, like hitting the debt ceiling. A default would be horrendous, but the Democrats might be willing to risk it so that Trump would be blamed for the consequences. That would be easy to defend, as in: "The people voted for Trump and Republicans, so they are in charge and we are not going to bail them out. The job of the opposition is to oppose." (V)