the harvest had just begun when agents from the immigration and naturalization service stormed across the onion fields of vidalia, ga., in 1998, sweeping up 21 immigrants who were trudging behind tractors without legal authorization to work in the united states, pulling onions out of the ground for 75 cents per 50-pound bag. the fallout was unexpected . senator paul coverdell, republican of georgia, wrote to the immigration service, complaining of its <u+201c>indiscriminate and inappropriate enforcement tactics,<u+201d> against <u+201c>honest farmers who are simply trying to get their products from the field to the marketplace.<u+201d> representative saxby chambliss blasted the immigration officials<u+2019> <u+201c>bullying tactics.<u+201d> and immigration enforcement caved: shortly after the raid, onion growers in 19 counties were granted a temporary amnesty to keep their workers as long as their paperwork looked legitimate. welcome to reality. last week, donald j. trump was elected president based on a straightforward promise to make the united states great again. he aimed his message primarily at tens of millions of white working-class americans who feel left behind in the growing economic prosperity, undercut by the advancement of minorities and women, competition from illegal immigrants at home and cheap workers in other countries. this week, mr. trump is being forced to acknowledge that his straightforward solutions are, in fact, much less straightforward than he promised they would be. the big and beautiful wall might look more like a fence . most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants won<u+2019>t be summarily deported, he said, backing off a line from stump speeches earlier in the campaign. perhaps only two or three million <u+2014> just the bad guys. that number is in the ballpark of deportations in the obama administration. undocumented immigrants who are not criminals, he said, are <u+201c>terrific people.<u+201d> mr. trump has not yet clarified his promises on trade, but most experts say it will be very hard to simply walk away from nafta and impose a 45 percent tariff against imports from china. <u+201c>in an age of global supply chains,<u+201d> said dani rodrik of the kennedy school of government at harvard, <u+201c>you cannot take a chain saw to trade agreements and not end up cutting your foot off.<u+201d> sure. but where does that leave donald trump<u+2019>s supporters? to larry bartels, the political scientist at vanderbilt university, the apparent shift in mr. trump<u+2019>s position is unsurprising. politicians don<u+2019>t follow the interests of average voters, he argues, they hew to the interests of the rich. <u+201c>trump<u+2019>s <u+2018>populist<u+2019> instincts on economic policy seem to have fallen by the wayside over the course of the campaign,<u+201d> mr. bartels told me. <u+201c>and the need to work with republicans in congress will probably reinforce that shift.<u+201d> in his book <u+201c>unequal democracy,<u+201d> published this year, mr. bartels offered a snapshot of voter preferences in 2006, before the onset of the financial crisis. on the bottom of the income scale, most voters supported policies to provide jobs and equalize incomes. but at the top, most opposed them. the picture was reversed when voters were asked about cuts to government spending. the rich were much more supportive than the poor. and what did voters get? after a brief flurry of fiscal stimulus to stop the economy from careening into the abyss, they got a round of automatic budget cuts called the sequester. the transformation of mr. trump<u+2019>s populist agenda into a rather more orthodox list of republican goals may well follow the same script. his proposal for huge tax cuts <u+2014> which would reduce federal revenue by as much as $9.5 trillion over a decade, according to the nonpartisan tax policy center <u+2014> would shower favors mostly on upper-income americans . even as he backs away from mass deportation, mr. trump is now talking about <u+201c>modernizing medicare, <u+201d> echoing paul ryan, the house speaker, who wants to weave his goal of replacing government-sponsored health care for the elderly with vouchers to buy private insurance into the campaign promise to overhaul the affordable care act . <u+201c>what is going to happen is unclear,<u+201d> said jacob hacker, a yale political scientist. <u+201c>but what paul ryan will want to do is quite clear.<u+201d> finally, while mr. trump has pitched deregulation <u+2014> notably the repeal of president obama<u+2019>s clean power plan <u+2014> as an engine for job growth in the nation<u+2019>s rust belt, he is also set to deliver enormous gains to wall street by undoing core provisions of the dodd-frank act, which was established to hem in the financial sector and prevent a repeat of the crisis of 2008. there is definitely a silver lining if mr. trump is really letting go of the most extreme elements of his agenda. the economic and social dislocation that would be caused by deporting 5 percent of american workers would be immense. nafta may not be the best agreement in the world; china certainly cheats. but igniting trade wars with the nation<u+2019>s biggest trading partners would not improve the livelihoods of america<u+2019>s working class . but the only real sliver of good news for blue-collar workers, is in mr. trump<u+2019>s proposal for infrastructure spending on a yet unspecified but surely huge scale. but how will mr. trump<u+2019>s base respond if that program is financed largely by temporarily cutting corporate taxes to 10 percent or so to encourage businesses with profits parked abroad to bring them home? and would it be enough to restore prosperity to the working class? for decades, political analysts on the left have been perplexed by working-class americans who give their vote to a republican party whose motivating principle revolves around delivering tax cuts to the rich. this time around, however, they delivered their vote to a republican who promised to directly address their plight. he has already come up short. oxford economics, under its most upbeat assumptions <u+2014> a big tax cut and infrastructure spending delivering a lot of economic stimulus while new trade barriers are limited <u+2014> foresees growth picking up for a while before falling back to the rate of roughly 2 percent a year that the united states has been living with for the last seven years. if mr. trump pursues all-out protectionism, however, oxford economics predicts the american economy will plunge into recession. under either situation, the frustrated working-class voters who cast their vote for mr. trump are likely to remain as frustrated as ever: stuck with insufficient education in a world of low growth and diminishing opportunity. maybe they will figure out that most of the industrial jobs they lost are gone for good, that protectionism can<u+2019>t bring them back, and that the main driver of their plight is technological change. deporting a couple of million <u+201c>bad hombres,<u+201d> in mr. trump<u+2019>s words, and engaging in a some prominent trade spats may let off some political steam. but otherwise it won<u+2019>t help. the critical question then is not so much how mr. trump<u+2019>s supporters will respond politically but how mr. trump will react to their inevitable disappointment. mr. rodrik <u+2014> who is generally sympathetic to the notion that globalization has gone overboard, imposing opaque global rules on democratic governance <u+2014> still worries about mr. trump<u+2019>s response. <u+201c>what happens when trump realizes he cannot adequately respond to the expectations he has raised?<u+201d> he asked. <u+201c>does he respond to economic failure like all populists around the world do <u+2014> by further polarizing the nation and deepening divisions based on identity? and what does that do the quality of our democracy?<u+201d> correction: november 15, 2016 an earlier version of a picture caption with this column misstated when the person shown was arrested. it was october 2015, not last month. email: eporter@nytimes.com; twitter: @portereduardo a version of this article appears in print on november 16, 2016, on page b1 of the new york edition with the headline: trump<u+2019>s populist blueprint runs up against some hard truths. order reprints | today's paper | subscribe
trump campaign<u+2019>s easy answers confront hard reality
eduardo porter