Friday Talking Points -- No Guardrails
We've all already seen this movie once, so we should kind of know what to expect. And sequels are usually much worse than the original.
Which is why today we're going to devote this column to pondering how bad things could really get in Donald Trump's second term in office (rather than sticking to our normal Friday format). Some things will probably not be as horrifically bad as Democrats now think, some things will indeed be precisely that bad, and some things will be even more horrific than anyone's imagining right now. And my apologies, because this is not an attempt at making a comprehensive list of predictions but rather just free association, what might be called initial thoughts.
As far as he is concerned, Donald Trump now has not only a mandate to do whatever he pleases, but he will also have the power to make it all happen. There will be no guardrails at all. Republicans will control the Senate and most likely the House as well. Democrats will be almost powerless. Mitch McConnell swore this week that the filibuster would remain in place in the Senate, but as he is on his way out as a Senate leader, that will really be up to the next guy to decide. There will be no filibuster on budgetary matters or judge confirmations, and if the filibuster ever gets in the way of Trump and the Republicans doing something they consider a big deal, it will be jettisoned (perhaps just for that issue, or perhaps for everything).
Few, if any, congressional Republicans will stand up to Trump on anything. Most of the anti-Trump GOP senators and representatives are already gone, or will be in January. Those that are left know full well the wrath of Trump will descend on them if they ever defy him, and the wrath of Trump equals political suicide in the Republican Party right now. So Congress is going to pretty much rubber-stamp anything Trump asks for.
The only exception to this might be on the budget. There will be an enormous fight next year on the budget, because all of the original Trump tax cuts will be expiring. So they are going to have to rewrite the tax code in one way or another. The problem is, Trump has promised so many things to so many people that if they implemented them all at once the deficit would explode. Trump has promised (and this is also just from memory, not a comprehensive list): no more income taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime pay, no taxes on Social Security income, being able to write off interest on a new car loan, huge corporate tax cuts, rolling back Biden's tax increases on the wealthiest, and he even flirted briefly with the idea of abolishing the income tax altogether (because, according to him, his tariff scheme would bring in so much money it would no longer be necessary).
Republicans are not likely to abolish the income tax completely, but they may be pressured into (at least partially) doing all the other things Trump has promised. This would blow the biggest hole in the deficit and national debt ever seen though, so perhaps there are enough fiscally-conservative Republicans left to at least rein in Trump's impulsiveness. Because all these promises are breathtakingly expensive, when you consider the effects on the budget for the next ten years.
Trump, however, has answers for any such nay-saying. He's going to slap tariffs on everything he can, which (according to him) will be a bonanza for the U.S. Treasury. He's going to create so much growth that it'll all bring in more money than ever. And he's going to sic Elon Musk on the federal budget, so costs will be slashed (more on this in a moment).
Getting back to the bigger picture, in Trump's White House there will no longer be any "adults in the room" with Trump. Instead, there will only be yes-men and yes-women. They will never tell him he can't do anything, or even that doing something might be a bad idea. They will instead praise their Dear Leader to the skies and facilitate whatever impulse he happens to have.
Trump's team will be a total circus. There will be people in far over their head, there will be total incompetents, there will be nepotism galore, but there will also be some very scary people who have very definite ideas about what they want to achieve (Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and R.F.K. Jr. all immediately spring to mind). They will be even worse than Trump, and he will fully approve anything they do as long as it sufficiently annoys liberals. Few of the nutjobs who have surrounded Trump will not be rewarded with choice positions (Rudy Giuliani's the only one that really springs to mind here who would be so crazy even Trump would consider him beyond the pale). The only reason any of them will ever be fired is for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump, or if he happens to need a handy scapegoat to blame for something which went horribly wrong.
Trump's cabinet appointments will likely be rubber-stamped by the Senate, but even if he appoints someone so disastrously unqualified that Senate Republicans balk, Trump has already figured out the loophole that allows him to ignore this -- he will just appoint the person as an "acting secretary" instead (which the Senate cannot block).
The most significant appointment Trump will make will be his attorney general. He certainly learned his lesson last time, and this time around will simply not care what qualifications any candidates have, instead he will be looking for someone who is so loyal to him personally that they will do anything and everything Trump asks. This is scary indeed, because he may then unleash a real wave of "lawfare" against Trump's political opponents. Trump's new attorney general will go along with any and all of it, and will be backed up by Trump's new appointees to lead the F.B.I. and all the other federal law enforcement agencies. Any legal weenies who balk at anything Trump wants to do because it is unconstitutional will be swiftly fired and replaced.
How far Trump will go in exacting the "vengeance" he promised is really an open question. He really didn't seem all that interested in it the first time around -- he never sicced the F.B.I. on Hillary Clinton, for example. This time he explicitly promised it to his followers, but he may decide he's got more important things to do when he gets into office.
Then again, his attorney general might just make it his or her number one priority to wreak this vengeance on Trump's behalf. Who would be at the top of the list for such vengeance? Possibly the prosecutors who went after Trump, both at the state and federal level. Possibly even the judges involved (other than Eileen Cannon, of course).
Others may be at risk as well, but again it seems that Trump wouldn't really be all that interested in looking too far backwards. Journalists are frightened right now, but it's hard to see Trump persecuting them directly, at least at first (unless one journalist in particular somehow manages to get under Trump's skin in a big way). Instead, Trump may decide to attack the media outlets directly. He has already threatened television networks with "losing their license," and it's possible he may attempt something along these lines (although he first might need Congress to pass some wildly unconstitutional law which allows him to do it). He may even get so annoyed by late-night comedians that he somehow tries to rein them in. But Trump will more likely just starve the mainstream media out -- never granting them interviews, perhaps not allowing outlets he doesn't like to have reporters in the White House press pool?
Others on Trump's vengeance list might include all the "never Trump" Republicans who have opposed him over the years, but for the most part all of them have been relegated to the sidelines already. There just aren't many of them left who still hold any kind of office anywhere, so Trump may decide that this is vengeance enough. But any current Republican officeholder who strays in any way should look out, because Trump values personal loyalty to him above all else.
Trump has also threatened ex-generals for their supposed disloyalty to him, but again it is doubtful he'd waste time going after them (which he could -- he could recall them to active duty and court-martial them, if he chose). Instead, he will likely be satisfied with purging the Pentagon of any generals who treat their oath to the Constitution higher than their loyalty to Trump.
This won't just happen over at the Pentagon -- Trump is going to attempt a gigantic purge of federal employees as well. He will reclassify thousands as "political appointees" and then fire those who do not sufficiently bend the knee to Trump. What this will mean is a return to the "spoils system," where the entire executive branch is politically loyal to one man and any new president will have to sweep out all the old toadies and replace them with his or her own people. This will have far-reaching ramifications that can only be imagined, at this juncture.
Just to point out one example, Trump has always been at war with numbers (and reality in general). He strives to gaslight America in the grandest way possible, by telling everyone that everything is going better than it ever has in all of American history. Under Trump, the economy is great, foreign policy is great, life is great in general. There is nothing negative to be worried about -- nothing at all! Life under Trump is such a Utopia it's hard to see how anyone could even compare it to any period in the past.
Unfortunately, at times, those pesky numbers intrude on this fantasy. Be they unemployment figures, inflation figures, economic growth figures, pandemic death figures, whatever -- at some time, some federal department is going to issue some numbers that contradict Trump's "everything is wonderful!" refrain.
Obviously, Trump's not going to put up with that sort of thing any more. There are basically two ways he can change this, neither of them good. Since he will be purging the executive branch of any employees who don't swear absolute fealty to him, he can just install people who will fake the numbers to make them look good. It will be the ultimate triumph of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts." Inflation is up? No, no -- Look! Here are the new numbers -- inflation is actually way down now!
This will put America in the same warped space that the Soviet Union was in during the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than admit that their people were starving and the store shelves were empty, they simply adjusted their "five-year plan" to boldly state that harvests were bigger than ever and their factories were humming along. The numbers looked good, so who are you going to believe -- the government, or your own lying eyes? This would be gaslighting on an institutional and international scale, but again it has happened before in world history (and it didn't exactly end well for the governments that tried it).
The other way Trump could solve his problem with numbers would be to just announce that they're not going to put out any numbers anymore. Possibly the scariest thing that Trump has proposed so far is to have Elon Musk take a meat cleaver to the federal budget. Some department issues some statistic Trump's doesn't want to see? Well then, just fire the entire department -- and don't bother replacing them. Problem solved! No more pesky numbers to deal with....
Remember what Musk did to the Twitter workforce? He fired something like three-fourths of them, straight off the bat. That's exactly what he foresees himself doing to the federal workforce if Trump gives him free rein. We may be about to see the perennial conservative dream of shrinking the federal government to the size where it can be "drowned in a bathtub" become reality. And it won't be just abolishing the Department of Education, either. Whole major chunks of the federal government may just disappear. This will have monumental consequences for life in America, but Musk simply doesn't care. Trump may not either -- this remains to be seen.
The courts aren't going to be any help at all -- that guardrail still does exist, but it is on life support (to mix a few metaphors). Oh sure, some liberal judge (or some constitutionally-minded conservative judge, for that matter) may issue some ruling preventing Trump from being able to do exactly as he pleases. Trump will appeal the decision. If the appeals court still disagrees with Trump, then it will head to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court could even decide to rule against Trump, but would that be the end of the matter?
Trump admires Andrew Jackson (and for good reason, the two are very similar in a lot of ways). Jackson was the first president to just flat-out ignore a Supreme Court ruling he didn't like. Jackson may not have actually uttered the words (about the Supreme Court's chief justice at the time): "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" but that was indeed his attitude. As far as Jackson was concerned (and as far as Trump will be concerned once a few of his pet lawyers whisper in his ear), the three branches of the federal government were co-equal -- meaning no single one of them could overrule either of the other two. A Supreme Court decision was merely an opinion about what the executive branch should do, but the president was free to ignore it if he so chose.
This is going to happen. Of all the predictions made here, it's the one that seems most likely, in fact. Trump is going to challenge the constitutional order in novel ways, the courts are not going to go along with it, and the Supreme Court will be left with the choice of attempting to uphold the Constitution or just giving Trump everything he wants. Chief Justice Roberts still has an outsize opinion of the court's legitimacy, so he will likely balk at the worst of Trump's impulses. He will then be shocked when Trump completely ignores the Supreme Court and goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. But nothing will save Roberts or his court -- public opinion of them is already at the lowest ebb ever, and as Andy Jackson pointed out, the judicial branch simply has no enforcement powers whatsoever. This will be a true constitutional crisis, but at this point it seems all but inevitable.
Roberts may come to regret his court giving Trump a green light to do anything illegal he wants, as long as he calls it "an official presidential act." Trump will not be held accountable for any of it, and he can always offer pre-emptive pardons to everyone who implements whatever policy is in question, just in case. Roberts and the Supreme Court may be hoist on their own petard, to put this another way.
Since he made it such an enormous part of his campaign, Trump will quite likely tackle immigration first (perhaps even on "Day One," as he promised). He will do anything anyone suggests in order to "close down the border." He may deploy the U.S. military to the border, and their rules for engagement may be awfully lax. With a pliant Congress, his mighty wall will get built (or, at least, more of it than he managed the first time around). He will also rewrite the rules for entry for all immigrants, to shrink their numbers as much as possible.
That's on the border. In the interior, Trump will begin raids and roundups. He may present this as "going after the really bad criminals first," but the real question is what he'll do after the easiest targets (read: "most politically acceptable to the public") have been dealt with.
Trump has promised concentration camps will be built out in the desert, near the southern border. And he's promised to deport not just hardcore criminals but every undocumented immigrant in the entire country. This is an impossible task, really, but the question is how energetically Trump will try to achieve it. Will rounding up thousands and thousands of gang members and criminals be enough for Trump, or will he then move right on to starting workplace raids and sweeps through American neighborhoods that have a high proportion of immigrants living in them?
This will all be very ugly to watch, of course. Trump is going to go after gang members and hardcore criminals first because he knows there will be little sympathy for anything he does to them. But if he then progresses to untargeted raids and just chucking people on a bus if they can't show proper papers and trucking them out to a tent camp in the desert, the public is (hopefully) not going to be as accepting of it all. Families will be torn apart. It will be completely dehumanizing. It will be fascism in full flower. But that's exactly what Trump promised, so he'll likely try to at least make major inroads on this promise.
Immigration won't be the only way Trump tries to make good on his campaign promises, of course. There'll be other scapegoats as well (such as making life miserable for trans students, just to name one). Throughout it all, there will be only one ideological consistency. The theme of Trump's entire second term might well become: "As long as liberals hate it, it's the right thing to do." If liberals cry, it means he is succeeding. Getting back to the most obvious of Trump's new policies, if public reaction to his actions on immigration becomes negative and pronounced, Trump will not care. Not even if it becomes so widespread it starts to include people who actually voted for him, because Trump can essentially say: "This is exactly what you voted for, so what's your problem now?"
Trump will not care about public opinion beyond pleasing his MAGA core supporters. He will not be constrained (as presidents traditionally are in their second terms) by thoughts about his legacy. As far as Trump is concerned, his legacy is already set -- he has already been the greatest president in American history, even better than Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Nothing is ever going to disabuse him of this notion. The only doubts Trump has about his own legacy is whether there really would be room up on Mount Rushmore for his face to be added, to be blunt about it.
This column is already long enough, so here are a few stray thoughts to end on. One fear Democrats have is probably overblown (but then again who knows?). Donald Trump will likely not attempt to run for a third term in office or otherwise extend his presidency beyond another four-year term. It'd be easy to picture him making this attempt -- explaining to everyone that even though there's a constitutional amendment barring Trump from serving a third term, somehow it doesn't apply. Trump has flirted with the concept before, but it's highly doubtful this would work, so he probably won't even try.
He could declare some national emergency in (perhaps) mid-2027, and decree that because the emergency was so serious America simply couldn't afford the luxury of having another election. This also seems destined to fail, so Trump will likely not make the attempt. Trump will be 82 years old in four years, and it's hard to see him still having the energy to attempt some radical constitutional coup at that age.
Plus, there will be other Republicans champing at the bit (JD Vance first and foremost among them) to take over the reins from Trump. So even if Trump did get some wild notion to just keep being president, he would probably be talked out of it by all the folks waiting in the wings to be next. Hopefully.
Most presidents are faced at some point with some disaster outside their ability to control. Natural disasters, a pandemic, foreign wars, whatever. Trump has already proved what he will do in such a situation -- either ignore it or gaslight everyone into thinking everything is hunky-dory. Hurricanes? He'll toss paper towels at the survivors. Pandemics? There will be no free testing, no mask mandates, no shutdowns, no proactive response whatsoever. The disease will be allowed to run its course unhindered. R.F.K. Jr. will see to that. It's doubtful they'd even launch an effort to create a new vaccine, if R.F.K. Jr. has anything to say about it.
About the only disaster Trump would actually care about is anything that makes the price of gasoline spike. Trump is (obviously) going to give Vladimir Putin anything he wants (including most of if not all of Ukraine), so Russia is not likely to be the culprit in any oil shortage. But Trump's unquestioning backing of Benjamin Netanyahu could indeed lead to such a wider Middle East war that it impacts gasoline shipments from the entire region. If this happens, the price at the pump here will spike, no matter how much oil America is currently extracting. Oil is sold on a worldwide market, and disruptions anywhere have a big impact. And Trump and the Republicans made such a big political deal out of the price of gasoline that it would be a serious blow to them if the price does somehow spike (one of Trump's current campaign promises is to reduce the price of gasoline by half almost immediately, which is not likely to happen either). Now, Trump's supporters may not hold him accountable for not getting the price of gas below two bucks a gallon within a month, but if it shoots back up to five or six bucks a gallon it's going to be impossible for them to ignore.
Of course, as with everything else, no matter what negative things happen under Trump's watch, he will always have a ready explanation for why none of it is his fault in any way. Trump is king of creating scapegoats, after all. He'll always find someone else to point the finger at to deflect blame. It's even possible to see him throwing Netanyahu under the bus if gas prices spike. But whatever happens there will always be some dark nefarious force causing it -- not Trump's actions.
And finally, one final prediction that doesn't have as far-reaching ramifications, but one that seems guaranteed. In a year and a half, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. Trump has already eagerly talked about what a big party he wants to throw. This is one campaign promise that seems certain to become reality. Trump will stage a July 4th celebration extravaganza that will outdo even the celebrations for our bicentennial (which, for those of you not old enough to remember them, were pretty spectacular).
But this time, the celebrations will have a "Dear Leader" theme to them. It will be the most jingoistic display imaginable, with paeans to Trump heavily featured throughout. Not exactly the most cheerful thought to end this on, but it does seem pretty certain.
Donald Trump's second term is going to be worse than his first, that much also seems certain. He will have no guardrails at all -- Democrats will be powerless to stop him, the institutions of government have already proven powerless to stop him, and clinging to "the courts will save us from his excess" is a pretty thin reed to cling to at this point.
Trump's second term will be like his first in one respect -- it will be nonstop chaos and scandal. It will involve lots of social media blasts from Trump, with insults and outrages galore. It will be absolutely exhausting for all concerned. But this time it may not just be scandals about Sharpie lines drawn on a hurricane map, but actual constitutional crises, one after the other.
This is what America voted for, and this is exactly what America is about to get.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant