By DAVID E. SANGERNOV
WASHINGTON — A Trump presidency will plunge the United States into an era of unknowns that has little parallel in the nation’s 240-year history.
While Donald J. Trump has been vague about his position on many issues, he has been explicit about several that would fundamentally change America’s direction.
If his campaign promises become reality — and it is not clear how many he will actually pursue — the Affordable Care Act could be repealed with the help of a Republican-dominated House and Senate whose leadership had virtually given up hope of recapturing the White House. Mr. Trump said he would replace the act with something better, but he never offered a plan.
The Supreme Court would veer right – perhaps eventually far to the right of where it was before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death created a vacancy that Mr. Trump will now fill, and there is the prospect of several more openings during his tenure. The wall he promised along
He would pull back the troops that the United States has stationed around the world to keep the peace – unless America is paid for the protection. He would tell NATO that the United States will live up to its post-World War II security commitments only if other nations first pay their fair share. He repeatedly dismissed the idea that those forward deployments are in America’s own interests, that they prevent Chinese or Russian adventurism and keep open the trade routes for American goods.
As the president-elect, Mr. Trump will soon be briefed on how to use America’s nuclear codes – the codes Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama said he could never be trusted to hold. And within the first year of his presidency, it should become clear whether Mr. Trump meant it when he said that he was comfortable with the thought that Japan and South Korea, both signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, might abandon its longtime commitment and build weapons of their own.
If the United States “keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they’re going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it,” Mr. Trump said.
Perhaps the most unpredictable matter is how Mr. Trump will deal with Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom he has repeatedly praised in terms that shocked even his own party. Would he lift the sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea – a move that Mr. Trump seemed to suggest was justified – and its harassment of Ukraine? Would he back off from the Obama administration’s decision to bolster the American military presence off Russia’s borders?
The torture of terrorism suspects, something that President Obama explicitly banned, would return — interrogation techniques the current C.I.A. director recently said his officers would never return to.