With just under two weeks to go to Election Day, here is how Trump, in his own words, defines his agenda.
On Oct. 13, Trump promised, to prioritize the prosecution of U.S. citizens — “domestic threats more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries” — over foreign threats, warning that he would jail American men and women he considers disloyal, using military force if necessary.
“The bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump told Fox News that same day:
We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.
The enemies from within, in Trump’s view, include elected officials. Trump specifically identified Adam Schiff, the California congressman and ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the Trump presidency, who is now running for Senate: “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.”
Trump signaled the magnitude of his plans in a July 19, 2023 Truth Social post:
This is the final battle. 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, we will throw off the sick political class that hates us, we will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.
And here he is again, on June 13, at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., after having been arraigned in Miami on 37 criminal charges: “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”
While Trump’s domestic agenda focuses on the enemy within, Trump saves much of his praise for adversaries of the United States:
Vladimir Putin: “A genius” who “liked me. I liked him. I mean, you know, he’s a tough cookie, got a lot of the great charm and a lot of pride. But the way he — and he loves his country, you know? He loves his country.”
Xi Jinping: “Top of the line. President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find, there’s nobody like that: the look, the brain, the whole thing.”
Kim Jong Un: “My relationship with Kim Jong Un was very beautiful. We got along very well. I got along great with him. Very strong guy. He is the absolute leader of his country.”
What is most striking about Trump’s agenda is that it is so public, so out in the open. Even the threat of deploying the National Guard and the military against American citizens has not derailed his campaign for the presidency.
Equally out in the open is Trump’s proposed politicization of the elite ranks of the federal work force.
The key to Trump’s plan to wrest away control of “the deep state” lies most notably in his focus on Schedule F, which mandates the elimination of civil service protections for the top ranks of federal employees, roughly 50,000 people who guide and oversee the bureaucracy. Trump intends, as the world now knows, to issue an executive order converting these key positions into political patronage jobs, subject to firing at will, with the main requirement for appointment being loyalty to Trump and a willingness to follow his orders without question.
These high- ranking federal workers play a crucial role in the operation of the U.S. government, supervising the implementation of laws and policies, writing and enforcing regulations, guiding the provision of services and resources to the public, deciding who and what should be subject to civil or criminal penalties. Under Schedule F, these public servants would be required, or under intense pressure to, switch their loyalty from the law to Trump.
On his campaign website, Trump declares:
Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is. I will immediately reissue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.
With Schedule F in place, Trump promises to
clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.
Trump has also threatened to abandon the commitment to uphold Article Five of the NATO Treaty or the protection of any nation that fails to invest two percent of its GDP into military spending. As Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic put it, “If re-elected, Trump would end our commitment to the European alliance, reshaping the international order and hobbling American influence in the world.”
At a rally on Feb. 10 in Conway, S.C., Trump asserted that under his leadership, the United States would not come to the aid of a country that had failed to meet a target of two percent GDP spending on defense and was subsequently attacked by Russia. Trump claimed that the president of a NATO signatory country asked him “ ‘If we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ ” Trump’s reply: “ ‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.’ ”
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email responding to my inquiries about the Trump agenda:
The real mystery in Trump’s political resilience has never been the devotion of the MAGA base to him. We can find reasons that free trade, globalism, immigration and secularism threaten MAGA’s political, economic, and social status and make them angry. It is more puzzling that mainstream Republicans continue to support or even return to the fold for a person who fomented violence on Jan. 6, defends protectionist policies, and lies constantly and yet retains the support of so many mainstream conservatives.
MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans are two separate species.
A 2024 study, “MAGA Republicans’ Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence in the United States, by Garen J. Wintemute, Sonia L. Robinson, Elizabeth A. Tomsich and Daniel J. Tancredi of the University of California-Davis, compared 1,128 MAGA Republicans with two groups of non-MAGA Republicans, 640 “strong Republicans” and 1,571 “other Republicans.”
They found that:
MAGA Republicans were substantially more likely (30.4 percent) to agree strongly/very strongly that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States,” compared to strong Republicans, 7.5 percent, and other Republicans, 10.8 percent; and to consider violence usually/always justified to advance at least 1 of 17 specific political objectives (MAGA Republicans, 58.2 percent, strong Republicans, 38.3 percent and other Republicans, 31.5 percent).
MAGA Republicans
were far more likely than others to agree strongly or very strongly that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities ” — (MAGA Republicans, 71.6 percent, strong Republicans, 44.1 percent, other Republicans, 33.3 percent), and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants” (MAGA Republicans, 51.0 percent, strong Republicans, 23.1 percent, other Republicans, 14.4 percent).
Wintemute and his coauthors concluded that MAGA Republicans, who make up approximately one-third (33.6 percent) of Republicans and 15 percent of the population, “are a distinct minority — more likely than other Republicans to endorse racist and delusional beliefs, sometimes by very wide margins.”
In addition, they write, “Based on this study’s findings, assessments by law enforcement experts in violent domestic extremism and prior research, concern about the potential for political violence among MAGA Republicans appears to be justified.”
The centrality of racist beliefs to the emergence of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is difficult to overestimate.
In an earlier analysis of the survey data, Wintemute, Robinson and Tomsich concluded that MAGA Republicans “are more likely to hold extreme and racist beliefs, to endorse political violence, to see such violence as likely to occur, and to predict that they will be armed under circumstances in which they consider political violence to be justified.”
If “strong Republicans” and “other Republicans” are so different from ”MAGA Republicans,” why don’t more of them abandon Trump?
Cain offers three reasons:
First: We tout the virtues of democracy over other forms of government in part because we believe that the policies it produces will reflect the interests of voters better. But when the voters are evenly divided and money is on the table, process can take a back seat to real or anticipated results.
Second: In the choice between safety and every other policy goal, safety usually wins. The original justification for government was providing security in the form of police and the military. Whatever the reality of the claims about violence and disorder, the fact that Trump incessantly talks about it likely gives him more street cred among wavering Republicans and some Independent voters.
Third: In the choice between hope and fear, fear has proven in the past to be more powerful even when the basis for it is grossly exaggerated. This was true in the 1980s when there were similar debates about disorder and crime. For many Republicans, the fear of economic loss due to higher taxes and loss of safety is a powerful one-two punch.
Cain is not alone in this view.
Justin Gest, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University, elaborated in an email:
Trump, Gest wrote, has
convinced Republican voters that fellow party members who oppose him are motivated by personal animus or are not really conservatives anyway. This cynicism is only possible when people already distrust elites and the establishment in the first place. It is the basis of populism.
This also helps explain why many warnings about the threats Trump poses to the integrity of American democracy fall on deaf ears. When he entered politics in 2015, many of Trump’s supporters were already dissatisfied with American democracy under Democrats — particularly the distance of government officials from average people, but also democracy’s accommodation of people from different backgrounds and protection of minority rights.
Such voters, Gest writes, are
faced with a historic choice of trade-offs: They can make a deal with the devil — a severe setback to American democracy in exchange for four years of preferable policy — or a patriotic sacrifice — four years in the opposition to preserve the world’s longest running democracy.
What might constrain Trump if he wins another term in the White House?
Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law at Yale, emailed his response to my queries:
Imagine a set of concentric circles of defense against presidential misbehavior. The first consists of the president’s own advisers, military officials, the Justice Department, and the civil service. The second circle of protection is the threat of impeachment and removal. The third is the threat of subsequent criminal prosecution after a president leaves office.
If Trump wins, the first two circles of defense will collapse, Balkin wrote, because Trump “will choose advisers who will not stand up to him” and “two failed attempts at impeachment and removal during Trump’s first term have demonstrated that impeachment is not a viable remedy for presidential misbehavior in a highly polarized environment.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, Balkin continued, “threatens to remove the third circle of protection because Trump can launder everything through discussions with his close subordinates, especially members of the Justice Department, and claim absolute immunity.”
Balkin’s concerns over the consequences of the immunity decision are widely shared.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is one of the founders of Bright Line Watch, a project that regularly polls both political scientists and the larger public to gauge “potential danger to American democratic norms and institutions.”
Bright Line surveyed 549 political scientists and 2750 Americans from Sept. 25 to Oct. 8.
Among the findings: The political scientists rated the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States, which established broad presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, as the most significant threat to democracy among the events listed.
“In total,” Bright Line reported, “86 percent rated it as a threat to democracy, including 75 percent who viewed it as either a serious or extraordinary threat.”
An earlier Bright Line survey conducted in February found that
Strikingly, a majority of Republicans endorse each democratic norm-threatening action listed except for Trump attempting to stay in power past the end of his term in January 2029, an act that only 32 percent endorse. Approval of other actions we surveyed among Republicans ranges from 56 percent for NATO withdrawal to 84 percent for investigating Biden.
Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove of each. Notably, experts believe that the actions which Trump’s base views most favorably are the ones that are most likely to happen — pardoning himself (83 percent), directing the Department of Justice to investigate Biden or another Democrat (85 percent), pardoning or suspending prosecutions of people involved in crimes related to the 2020 election or Jan. 6 (92 percent and 91 percent, respectively), or firing special counsel Jack Smith (92 percent).
Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, sent me a copy of his forthcoming article in the New York Review of Books, “Where Freedom Ends,” in which he makes the case that
the decision about presidential immunity renders virtually irrelevant the well-intentioned drumbeat urging the preservation of what is at best an illusory separation between presidential authority and the prosecutorial decisions of the Department of Justice, a separation that is unavoidably in tension with the fact that the Attorney General serves at the pleasure of the president.
The threat to all our personal freedoms and civil liberties posed by a second Trump administration is not principally that Trump will finally have learned how to thoroughly weaponize his Department of Justice, filling it with obedient acolytes.”
“It is those freedoms, both negative and positive,” Tribe goes on to say,
that are secured to all of us by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth and Fourteenth), and the Voting Rights Amendments (the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-Third, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth).”
With those freedoms at stake, it seems myopic in the extreme to focus, as many have recently done, on the threat of an administration that would turn its back on the traditions and customs protecting the independence of the Justice Department from the White House. For it is the ordinary, day-to-day life we lead at our kitchen tables and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by the tyranny that a return of Trump to power would represent.
This is the kind of tyranny that everyone who reads these words should fear most and work hardest to hold at bay. By all means valorize the rule of law and the integrity of our legal institutions, including the traditions and customs that provide guardrails beyond those of our inevitably imperfect constitutional design. But never forget that law can oppress as easily as it can liberate and that it is the content and spirit of our laws and the character of those we entrust with enacting and enforcing them that makes fidelity to law so central to our experiment in self-government.
It’s both frightening and disturbing to think that two weeks from now American voters could once again make someone as unhinged and unbridled as Donald Trump the president of the United States.
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