Donald Trump's Alarming Second Term Ambitions | Vanity Fair
Nikki Haley is out, Mitch McConnell has endorsed him, and America is now one general election away from the very real prospect of Donald Trump being elected president again, come November 2024. If you went back in time and relayed this news to someone on, say, January 7, 2021, they’d probably tell you it was “too soon” for such a joke. And when you told them you weren’t joking, they’d respond, “I’m not falling for this.” And when you promised that you were serious, they’d say, “Okay, swear on your kids’ lives,” figuring you’d break. And when you swore on you kids’ lives, they’d ask, with the color draining from their face and extreme desperation in their voice, if you were talking about an unrelated Donald Trump—one who just happened to have the extreme misfortune of being name-doppelgängers with the guy who’d incited an insurrection the day prior...because the idea that that guy would ever be president again was not possible.
Unfortunately, we are in fact talking about that Donald Trump. The Donald Trump who sicced a mob on the US Capitol because he couldn’t admit he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. The Donald Trump who was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll tens of millions of dollars in a civil trial for sexually abusing her and then defaming her after that. The Donald Trump who’s been indicted a whopping four times on 91 felony counts, with charges ranging from obstruction of justice to conspiracy to defraud the United States.* The Donald Trump whose first four years in office traumatized people worldwide, four years that included, but was in no way limited to, Trump:
Of course, a second Trump term would not simply be a repeat of the first—it would be much worse. And we know that because Trump and his allies have told us exactly that. What do they have in store? Here’s what team Trump has previewed, suggested, and outright pledged so far:
Trump has literally vowed to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American History.” Just this month, he said his administration would order mass deportations on “day one,” ominously adding that they would “start with the bad ones,” leading people to wonder who they’ll target after that. (During his first term, Trump not only went after people illegally crossing the border but significantly cracked down on legal immigration as well.)
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In addition to mass deportations, Trump reportedly plans to “ramp up ideological screening for people legally applying to come into the country,” “send the Coast Guard and the Navy to form a blockade in the waters off the U.S. and Latin America,” and expand the “Muslim ban” to “block more people from certain countries from entering the U.S.” Speaking to Axios last August, Trump adviser Stephen Miller—i.e., the architect of one of the cruelest Trump administration policies—declared: “For those passionate about securing our immigration system...the first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss — followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable.” Translating Miller-speak, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told Axios that that means Trump will likely be rushing “people through the system, stripping due process protections from them, eliminating any access to legal services, and really transforming this into an assembly line deportation machine.”
Harrowingly—for people who think the federal government should not engage in what is effectively kidnapping—Trump has refused to rule out the possibility of bringing back family separation. During his first term, thousands of children were separated from their parents and kept in detention centers with no process in place for reuniting them; last year, the Department of Homeland Security said nearly 1,000 children separated at the border years prior had yet to be reunited with their parents.
Because he’s seen how poorly vocal antiabortion Republicans have fared in recent elections, Trump likes to pretend he is a moderate when it comes to reproductive rights. Of course, this is not at all the case. For starters, this is the man who pledged to appoint anti-Roe judges to the Supreme Court, did exactly that, and then bragged about killing the national right to an abortion. Now, he’s putting it out there that he’s not opposed to the federal ban:
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And these are just the things Trump has publicly admitted to. In “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—a document that can be read as a guide to Trump’s second term—The Heritage Foundation writes:
...the Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v. Wade] is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.
The document also says the next administration should charge the Department of Health and Human services with “explicitly rejecting...the notion that abortion is health care,” and ensuring that the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force, instituted by the Biden administration, is replaced by “a pro-life task force.”
The Trump campaign has previously insisted that the Heritage Foundation and other groups do not “speak for President Trump or his campaign.” But it’s not hard to imagine Trump implementing its recommendations given (1) this is a person who has falsely and ridiculously claimed that Roe allowed doctors to murder babies, and (2) everything he’s already done to restrict abortion!
As The Guardian notes, “Donald Trump and his advisers have made campaign promises to toss crucial environmental regulations and boost the planet-heating fossil fuel sector,” plans that include “systemically dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal body with the most power to take on the climate emergency and environmental justice.” At a rally in January, the ex-president called renewable energy “a scam business” and pledged to “drill, baby, drill.” He said that on “day one,” he will end “crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate.” Myron Ebell, who led the EPA transition team for Trump’s first term has promised “Trump will undo everything [Joe] Biden has done, he will move more quickly and go further than he did before. He will act much more expeditiously to impose his agenda.”
In the section on the EPA in “Mandate for Leadership,” Mandy Gunasekara, who served as Trump’s EPA chief of staff, proposes that the new administration shutter the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance and allow individual program offices to do their own enforcement, which she told The Guardian would ease the “unnecessary tension between the regulator and the regulated.” Of course, what that really means is that team Trump wants to give their private industry polluting pals a free pass, at the expensive of people who said pollution will kill. “When I think about the EPA … getting cozy with industry, it horrifies me because I think about how much death there will be as a byproduct,” Maria Lopez-Nunez, deputy director the Ironbound Community Corporation, a grassroots environmental organization, told The Guardian.
“A return of Trump would be, in a word, horrific,” Andrew Rosenberg, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, told the outlet. “It would also be incredibly stupid. It would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety, there is no logic to it other than to destroy everything. People who support him may not realize it’s their lives at stake, too.”
At a rally in February, Trump bragged that “there was great pressure on me having to do with guns” and in the face of that pressure—and numerous mass shootings—“We did nothing.” Then he pledged the same inaction in a second term, saying that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms” and “your Second Amendment will always be safe with me as your president.”
In a speech last month, Trump publicly declared that he was once asked by a “big country” in NATO if he would protect them from an attack by Russia, even if they hadn’t paid their supposed “fair share” on defense. To which Trump says he responded: “I said, ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.” (As a reminder, there is no set amount NATO members are required to spend on defense, and no one owes the US money, despite Trump’s claims.)
Shortly before the last presidential election, Trump signed an executive order known as Schedule F, allowing his administration to gut employment protections for thousands of career federal employees whose jobs—which include things like ensuring food and drugs are safe—are not supposed to be subject to the whims of whomever is inhabiting the White House at any given the time. Stripped of such protections, the move would have given Trump the power to fire whoever he wanted, and replace them with individuals whose chief qualifications were complete and utter devotion to him. Trump, of course, was not able to see the plan through, and Biden swiftly canceled the executive order. But, with a potential second term coming, Trump and his allies have made it clearer than ever that they would pick up exactly where they left off.
Two years ago, Axios reported that Trump-aligned conservative groups had been hard at work vetting potential Trump administration employees, and that sources close to the ex-president “anticipate needing an alternate labor force of unprecedented scale—of perhaps as many as 10,000 vetted personnel—to give them the capacity to quickly replace ‘obstructionist’ government officials with people committed to Trump and his ‘America First’ agenda.” In June, making it clear that all of this is about retribution and not who the best person for the job is, Trump declared in a speech in Michigan: “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country…We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
As conservative Geoffrey Kabaservice, a conservative who wrote the book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, told Politico, Schedule F is “an attempt to eviscerate government and replace it with Trump stooges.”
Trump has pledged to pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted of federal crimes following their participation in the attack on the US Capitol, and that many will receive an “apology.” As quick refresher, the Capitol attack left multiple people dead and approximately 140 members of law enforcement injured as a result of being attacked with bats, flagpoles, stun guns, and pepper spray.
Trump has said he wants to get rid of the Department of Education and have states “run the education of our children.” Naturally, he’s vowed to cut federal funding for schools that teach critical race theory or what he calls “transgender insanity.” He’s also said he’ll bring back his “1776 Commission,” which was notably devoid of any actual professional historians, to promote a “patriotic” curriculum. “What Trump is trying to resurrect is something that was thoroughly discredited by the professional historical community in a totally apolitical context,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, told The Washington Post. “There’s lots of places to look and see what happens when history education gets stripped of its professional integrity in the interest of a political party.”
Oh, and he wants parents to be able to fire principals.
Trump has threatened to punish doctors and hospitals who provide gender-affirming health care to minors, and said he’ll ask Congress to pass a nationwide law banning the practice in “all 50 states.” (“I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” he declared at CPAC last year.) He’s also said he’ll sign federal law that will only recognize two genders, and would ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.
Trump has not outright said it, but we can likely expect, with virtual certainty, that should he win the election, he will disappear the federal cases against him for his handling of classified documents and subverting the 2020 election. (Or, depending on how far they’ve progressed, attempt to pardon himself.) But not everyone will be so lucky. Trump has vowed to “appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!” A few months later, he was asked, “If you’re president again, will you lock people up?” He responded: “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”
