The betting website PredictIt now puts the odds of Donald Trump winning the White House this November at 22%. I don’t think that estimate is too far off: Trump is ahead in virtually every recent Republican primary poll, and he trails Hillary Clinton by 3.4 percentage points in a general election matchup (according to the RealClearPolitics polling average). If there is, say, a 1-in-2 chance that he wins the Republican nomination and a slightly less than 1-in-2 chance (conditional on winning the nomination) that he defeats the Democratic candidate in the general election, then 22% seems just about right.

At the very least, the possibility of a Trump victory is not so remote as to make it too soon to ask ourselves: what would life under President Trump look like? To some extent, the answer depends on what the next Congress looks like — many of Trump’s proposals (like lowering the top individual income tax rate to 25%, ending birthright citizenship, and issuing concealed carry permits that are valid in 50 states) would require statutory changes. But not all of them. For example, Trump could accelerate the pace of deportations without any new legislation (though it would help if Congress allocated funds to triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, as Trump has said it should). Moreover, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) already gives the President broad authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” when he (or she) finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” (Others — including my colleague Eric Posner — have discussed whether the First or Fifth Amendment would prevent President Trump from banning Muslim immigrants from entering; I won’t weigh in on that question except to point out that President Trump presumably could ban some or all immigrants under § 1182(f) as long as he did not target immigrants of a particular religion, race, ethnicity, gender, or other “suspect class.”)

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