It’ll be slim pickings for macro data aficionados in the days ahead.

For US traders, it’s a holiday-shortened week, and most headlines will revolve around Donald Trump’s first few days in office. He’ll be sworn in Monday during a VIP-only, indoor ceremony. It’ll be too cold to have the event outside, said Trump, who doesn’t “want to see people hurt, or injured” in what he called “dangerous conditions for law enforcement, first responders, police K9s and even horses.”

Trump now has two things in common with Ronald Reagan: Tax cuts and an indoor second inaugural. Trump promised “a very beautiful experience for all, and especially for the large TV audience!” It’s always about the TV ratings.

The new administration will presumably get right to work on Trump’s agenda, starting with immigration raids. According to internal ICE communications, Trump solicited “volunteers” for a “post-inauguration” crackdown called “Operation Safeguard” targeting immigrants in Chicago, where dozens of officers were set to deploy for — I don’t know — door-kicking roundups, I guess. As The Wall Street Journal explained, “They settled on Chicago both because of the large number of immigrants who could be possible targets and because of the Trump team’s high-profile feud with the city’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson.”

For what it’s worth, an Axios poll showed little in the way of overall voter support for deportations targeting anyone other than adult immigrants in the country illegally, and while a majority of Republicans supported the use of active duty military personnel for roundups, overall support for such an initiative was low — fewer than four in 10 Americans. As an Ipsos pollster who worked with Axios on the survey put it, “There’s essentially broad agreement with Trump’s position on [undocumented adult immigrants], but as soon as you start pushing into specifics, a lot of that dissipates.” The devil (and Stephen Miller) is in the details.

Trump’s team may also push to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, a controversial move that’d set in motion all sorts of litigation. The ensuing legal battle would probably last years. Trump’s called the birthright citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment “ridiculous” and vowed to “get it changed.” It helps that Trump has a beholden high court. As the Times recently noted, this Supreme Court “has proved itself willing to break with historical precedent in cases involving other conservative priorities, like abortion and presidential immunity.”

Trump may, or may not, move ahead with a plan to pardon some, or even all, of the January 6 Capitol rioters and commute the sentences of those convicted and jailed. That’s obviously crazy, but if we’re going to get caught up in long-winded harangues about every crazy thing Trump says and does, it’s going to be a very long four years. Suffice to say blanket immunity for people who engaged in the first violent attempt to usurp the US government since the Civil War would send the wrong message to all the coup aspirants waiting in the wings to overturn any future presidential election that goes for Democrats, or just against Trump’s chosen successor (or Trump himself in a not-at-all-far-fetched third term scenario).

As for trade, there’s still no clarity on exactly what Trump plans to announce this week. He’s variously promised to implement sweeping, across-the-board tariffs on anybody and everybody, from allies to enemies and everyone in-between. But Scott Bessent and the practical faction know that’s likely to result in market volatility, something Trump wants to avoid. The optics of a “week one” selloff on Wall Street wouldn’t be great for a man who insists he’s God’s gift to the stock market, never mind the incongruity between that and the idea of Trump, blue-collar champion.

On the foreign policy front, Trump’s almost surely going to press Volodymyr Zelensky to make a deal with Vladimir Putin to “end” (note the scare quotes) the war in Eastern Europe. Any such deal would will likely entail Ukraine ceding territory currently held by the Russian military. Trump will probably make it clear to Zelensky that Kyiv can’t count on additional military and financial assistance from the US unless the country agrees to a ceasefire which would presumably come with Western security guarantees. The problem: Putin won’t accept any deal that puts Ukraine on a path to NATO membership, which is the only security guarantee Zelensky cares about. In fact, Putin would probably insist on the opposite, which is to say he might be willing to walk away (temporarily) with 20% of Ukraine’s territory, but only if Kyiv promises not to join NATO.

I don’t know how Trump plans to square all those circles, but what I do know is that any deal brokered by the Trump administration will favor Russia, not necessarily “because collusion,” but simply because Trump’s had a lot of success in the domestic political arena playing the “America first” card, and the right-wing echo chamber where his support base spends an inordinate amount of their time is full of anti-globalist Ukraine propaganda. Toss in Trump’s instinctual aversion to NATO — this is a man who not so long ago told supporters that if alliance members don’t “pay” enough into his protection racket, he’ll encourage Russia to invade them — and the fact that as a trained KGB agent, Putin has the psychological upper-hand in virtually any negotiation, and the stage is set for Kyiv to get the shortest end of the stick.

More broadly, I worry that Trump, not exactly a student of history, might stumble into a Neville Chamberlain moment with Putin, with Xi or with both. He’s plainly terrified of Putin, but seems to think pandering’s a viable strategy. He thinks Xi’s his friend, and says as much every chance he gets. To call that naive would be generous. I talked at length about Trump and foreign policy in the latest Weekly, when I wrote, “For all Trump’s bombast, and with whatever respect’s due to Pete Hegseth for his military service, the two men are hopelessly out of their element and league, respectively, playing Risk with Putin and Xi.”

Personally — and I say this in a non-pejorative way — I think America’s pushing its luck with Trump in the Oval Office. One term’s one thing, two terms is another. Forgetting for a moment all of Trump’s policies, and accepting that he’s right about more (and probably a lot more) than his critics give him credit for, the inescapable fact is that he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. While that’s been true of many American presidents, the difference is that Trump believes he’s a genius (he’ll tell you as much) and strongly believes nobody can tell him anything he doesn’t already know.

There’s some truth, I think, to Nancy Pelosi’s contention that, deep down, Trump knows he doesn’t belong in The White House. But at the same time, he’s a very superficial human being. Having survived a literal gunshot wound to the head, and having now been reelected to the highest office on Earth in a vote which, while not a proper landslide, was more unequivocal even than Trump’s supporters imagined it might be in a best-case, it’s probably fair to suggest he’s very much out of touch with any sort of doubts buried “deep down.” (Hell, I would be.)

In the Weekly, I said a storm’s coming. I doubt America and the world will emerge from a second Trump term better off. The last several years were rough on many people, and in many respects. There’s no getting around that. But as any Gazan (or Ukrainian or Sudanese or Somali or Libyan) can tell you, things can always get worse. And putting someone who, if we’re all honest, is inherently (and in some sense proudly) incompetent in charge of the world’s a good way to raise the odds of bad outcomes.

I’m allergic to the saccharine, but I’ve made an exception for Kamala Harris’s concession speech to Trump. I’ll quote from it again on the eve of his coronation. “I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case,” she said. “America, if it is, let us fill the sky. Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”