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You can see this at play in Trump’s rant, which claims immigrants threaten the long-term solvency of Social Security and Medicare. That gets things exactly backward: As many analysts have shown, more immigration would go a long way toward shoring up those programs, because immigrants would swell the ranks of working-age Americans, paying the taxes needed to support our aging population. Ron Brownstein has demonstrated that, ironically enough, Trump’s base of older blue-collar whites would be among the biggest beneficiaries.

But that aside, the point is that for Trump, economic policy is perpetually reducible to irritable nationalist gestures. Trump knows he can’t win the argument if the contrast pits Democratic proposals to tax the rich and protect Social Security against GOP vows to do the opposite. So he sidelines the debate onto political turf where he thinks he has the advantage.

Yet here’s the inescapable bottom line: We already know what Trump would do on these matters, because we saw him govern this way during his first term. That’s something we all lived through, and believe it or not, it’s in our power to consult that experience for guidance right now. Even if it did take place after 2016.