President-elect Donald Trump is surely reckoning with the truth of something the late Mario Cuomo often said when he served as New York’s governor: “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.”

Trump disparaged immigration and immigrants during his successful campaign for president. The often xenophobic theme appealed to many voters as therapy for their own disappointments. But Trump seems to have abandoned or modulated his anti-immigrant voice in recent days, pushed by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, his budget cutters at the Department of Government Efficiency.

The latest evidence of this: the dramatic split in the Trump camp over H-1B visas offered to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. The program’s goal is to attract highly skilled professionals to the United States to boost productivity and American competitiveness. Trump told the New York Post it’s “a great program” he’s used “many times” (although he may be confusing them with the H-2B visas he has used to hire foreign workers for temporary jobs at his hotels). Musk has gone further (and more defiantly): “The reason I’m in America along with so many other people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H-1B … I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” Ramaswamy has sermonized that American culture had “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

But MAGA stalwarts like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer have stuck to the anti-immigrant script instead of joining the president-elect in governance mode where reality matters. It would be perilous for the U.S. economy for our nation’s leaders to ignore the huge percentage of Silicon Valley start-ups that have been pioneered by immigrants — or, more fundamentally, how this country was born of immigrants fleeing Europe for liberty, opportunity or religious freedom.

Trump’s reversal is no novelty. President Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 generally denouncing Trump’s efforts to break the back of illegal immigration including his “Title 42? program expelling thousands of immigrants without an asylum hearing because of the COVID health emergency. As president, however, Biden left the Title 42 program largely undisturbed. Indeed, deportations under Biden surpassed the benchmarks set by President Trump.

But the executive branch flip-flop is far more deeply rooted. President Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned on a balanced budget in 1932. But after his election, his New Deal ushered in unprecedented federal deficits under the banner of New Deal economics. FDR paid no political price for his about-face. Indeed, he was elected president a record-breaking four times.

Trump should not treat his 2024 campaign themes as gospel. Americans should expect him to recede from his ultimatums to China, Mexico, Canada and the European Union to end the flow of fentanyl, illegal immigrants or trade imbalances or institute punishing tariffs reminiscent of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that helped fuel the Great Depression.

He is, after all, a businessman. He must know that whopping tariffs would spike inflation and shield American companies from the stimulant of competition — the mother of prosperity. Experience teaches, moreover, that companies would switch their operations to countries outside the tariff barriers to frustrate their purpose and foreign countries would retaliate with equally stiff trade restrictions. The result would make all nations and their people losers including the United States and the American people.

Further, Trump would do well to reconsider his campaign pledge to turn the U.S. Department of Justice against his opponents including Biden, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith. Political opposition is not a crime. And a prosecution transparently motivated by vengeance like the fictional Captain Ahab seeking out Moby Dick may constitutionally shipwreck, a point the Supreme Court made in a landmark 14th Amendment case more than a century ago. There is a reason why “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW” is enshrined above the Supreme Court Building’s main entrance.

What about pardons for the Jan. 6 defendants that Trump promised to consider? Over 1,200 have been charged. Nearly all have been convicted in trials or guilty pleas presided over by Trump appointees and others. Sentences have ranged from a slap on the wrist to 22 years’ imprisonment. Some defendants employed violence. Others did not. President Biden’s abuse of power in pardoning his son Hunter should not be Trump’s benchmark.