TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan is closely watching the 2024 U.S. presidential election and preparing for the possibility of former President Donald Trump‘s return.

But while Trump has supported Taiwan in the past, his personality and the spectrum of foreign policy positions of those close to him is complicating Taipei’s preparations as Chinese President Xi Jinping postures about the reunification of the self-governing island with the mainland.

Taiwan, under newly inaugurated President Lai Ching-te, has been scenario planning and considering contingency plans for a second Trump administration should the former commander in chief depart from the long-standing U.S. policy of acknowledging the Chinese Communist Party’s “One China” principle, while opposing changes to the status quo between Taiwan and China by force, according to National Cheng Kung University political science professor Hung-Jen Wang.

But Taiwan has at least one advantage in that Trump’s second administration will likely not be “entirely new” to Taipei, according to Wang.

“I believe Taiwan’s new national security team has a certain understanding of what to expect,” Wang told the Washington Examiner. “The key now is to prepare various plans for different scenarios and determine whether they are ready to make compromises to the Trump administration in exchange for a closer Taiwan-U.S. relationship … including the imposition of high tariffs on Taiwan’s semiconductor-related industries.”

To Wang’s point, Lai’s vice president, Hsiao Bi-khim, is Taiwan’s former de facto ambassador to the U.S. and was posted to Washington, D.C., during the final year of Trump’s administration. The half-American’s appointment is widely perceived to compensate for Lai’s relative inexperience in foreign policy.

Regardless of Hsiao, Taiwan’s new deputy foreign minister, Tien Chung-kwang, told the Washington Examiner the U.S. and Taiwan have a “rock solid” relationship, particularly with the island of 24 million people being the U.S.’s ninth largest trading partner. That is irrespective of whether President Joe Biden or Trump wins the general election in November.

“Taiwan and the United States, we’ve been fighting two world wars, and we have been shoulder to shoulder,” Tien said during a two-hour briefing with reporters. “Who is going to be elected is just beyond our control. … We have to, once again, show to the world we will be a valid, very valuable partner for [the] United States or in other countries, democracies, in the world.”

During a post-inauguration bipartisan congressional delegation trip, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) also told reporters Monday he did not “see either two candidates taking a weak position on China when it comes to Taiwan.” 

Simultaneously, the more traditionally conservative pro-Taiwan policy positions of the Heritage Foundation, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Elbridge Colby, Trump’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, compared to the weaker pro-Taiwan stances of 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, has created uncertainty in Taipei, according to Kelley Currie, the ex-president’s acting deputy representative of the U.S. to the U.N.

For example, Ramaswamy proposed during a primary debate that the U.S. support Taiwan until it develops its own capacity to produce advanced semiconductor microchips.

“The comments that come out of people like Tucker Carlson, and Vivek Ramaswamy, and even Donald Trump about defending Taiwan, about what we were prepared to do, what Taiwan needs to do, and others related to the security of Taiwan, I think that, even for me, it can be head spinning, and I’m somebody who worked in the Trump administration,” Currie, a Vandenberg Coalition advisory board member, told the Washington Examiner.

American Enterprise Institute Asia strategy senior fellow Zack Cooper agreed with Currie, adding Trump’s lack of support for Ukraine and tough trade negotiation tactics are causes for concern in Taiwan too.

“He’ll say to Maria Bartiromo that he’s very angry about Taiwan’s semiconductor industry leaving the U.S. and going to Taiwan, and then you’ll get Mike Pompeo endorsing almost independence for Taiwan, which is completely on the other end of the spectrum,” Cooper told the Washington Examiner. “The margin of error for predicting Trump’s policies is significantly greater.”

“It probably depends who happens to be in the room with the president when this issue is raised and, if you don’t know that, it’s really hard to predict what outcomes you would get if Trump is elected,” the former White House National Security Council and Department of Defense adviser said.

For Taiwan Institute of Economic Research’s Department of International Affairs Director Grace Chung, Taipei has been “looking very closely towards the U.S. elections.” Chung cited Trump’s history with Taiwan as a potentially positive indication for the island, though she conceded “nobody really can read his mind” and he is “very unpredictable.”

“Under the Trump administration, he’s the one that approves all the high-ranking officials coming to Taiwan and he was very open to Taiwan,” Chung told the Washington Examiner. “One side of the story says that the story would not change if he becomes elected because U.S.-China relations is going to stay this way. It’s going to stay as it is, and it’s unlikely that they will go back to favorable relations.”

“On the other side, I think most people would feel worrisome because, maybe this is not a good way to say about an ex-president figure, but he doesn’t work on international rules, his character tends to change a bit. He’s a business figure, so he’s a businessman, he has a business mind kind of thinking,” she said. “It is also very anxious for other allies, for example, Asian countries and European, even for countries like China, they also may not like Trump as well.”

The U.S.’s reliability as an ally, apart from Trump, has been underscored by the CPP in its disinformation operations in Taiwan, according to Hoover Institution research fellow Kharis Templeman.

“There’s been this undercurrent of skepticism of the United States in Taiwan, especially over the last couple of years and especially among people on the blue end of the spectrum, so the deep blue [more conservative Kuomintang] supporters, but, also again, young people,” Templeman told the Washington Examiner. “They increasingly are curious or susceptible to CCP narratives that the U.S. is the main problem in the region and that Taiwan is just being used as a bargaining chip or as a kind of tool to keep China down.”

But while there is “deep worry” in Taiwan about Trump’s “transactional” and “mercurial” personality and policies, the former president is “actually quite popular in Taiwan for what his administration, itself, did,” according to Templeman. One example is how Trump broke precedent during his 2016 transition and spoke with Lai’s predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, on the phone. It was the first time a U.S. president or president-elect had spoken directly to a Taiwanese president since 1979 as the two countries are not supposed to have a formal, diplomatic relationship after the U.S. recognized the People’s Republic of China as China decades following their civil war.

“The people he brought in with him were, on the whole, more pro-Taiwan, less constrained by past U.S. precedents, more willing to kind of stick it to the Chinese in symbolic and practical terms,” Templeman said. “There’s this kind of belief, I would argue a little bit more toward confidence that, if Trump won a second term, that would actually help Taiwan.”

Hudson Institute’s China Center Director Miles Yu, a former Pompeo adviser, reiterated that there would not be “any surprise” regarding Trump’s policy concerning Taiwan.

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“I don’t think unconditionally withdrawing from any possible American military intervention serves American interests,” Yu told the Washington Examiner. “What President Trump has said is that Taiwan definitely is very important and the defense of Taiwan is not just about the Taiwanese island itself. It’s also America’s broader interest in the Indo-Pacific and in the world because our global prestige is based upon a very sophisticated, deeply committed alliance system.”

“If we don’t defend Taiwan, that will cause a serious doubt to our commitment to our allies, not only in the Indo-Pacific, but to a broader extent in the NATO context,” he said.