A Second Trump Term: What Are Trump’s Plans if He Wins Reelection?
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Donald Trump has officially surpassed the required delegate threshold, so there is no escaping what we already suspected would come to pass: Trump will be the Republican nominee in the 2024 general election. We’re doing this thing all over again.
No one is coming to save us from this race. For those who had hoped the Republican Party was done with Trump, even a stacked GOP primary, featuring would-be rising stars like Ron DeSantis, could not hold up against him. For those who believed Trump’s various criminal trials would do him in, the Supreme Court’s recent rulings — that Trump can remain on the Colorado ballot, and that his federal trial on charges related to overturning the 2020 election will be postponed until they can consider whether or not he has presidential immunity — are scuttling those chances. And, according to the most recent polling, most of Trump's voters don’t seem to care that he’s been charged with federal crimes.
Joe Biden, who is certain to sew up the Democratic nomination, has been plagued by falling approval numbers, lagging polls and a growing vocal resistance, especially in key battlefield states like Michigan and Minnesota, among young people and Arab and Muslim Americans who are disappointed by his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. There’s still time for Biden to turn this around, but if he doesn’t, there’s a very real chance Trump will win a second term in November.
What would that look like? Pretty harrowing.
Trump was tight-lipped about potential presidential policies during the primary elections, either by design or because he’s too busy repeating his own petty grievances at his rallies. Piece by piece, though, a frightening picture of a future Trump term is starting to form. At Trump’s victory speech on Super Tuesday, he dug back into his bag of anti-immigration tricks and went hard on migrants, promising to end alleged “Biden migrant crime” by closing the borders and deporting “a lot of people.”
In a TIME interview published in late April, he reaffirmed his dedication to building migrant camps and utilizing the National Guard, local police, and even the military for mass deportation operations that would target millions. He doubled down on his racist campaign rhetoric, painting urban areas as crime-filled cesspools, telling TIME, “There is a definite anti-white feeling in the country,” and asserting that statistics showing a recent drop in crime are “fake numbers.”
Trump was also chillingly indifferent on the topic of abortion. Even though he has been reluctant to publicly embrace a national abortion ban, a second term for the president responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade will spell nothing but doom for reproductive rights. Trump told TIME, for instance, that he would do nothing to reinstate abortion access in states with partial or full abortion bans, nor would he act if those states enacted even more extreme measures. When TIME asked Trump if he thought states with abortion bans should monitor pregnant people’s pregnancies so they would know if they got an abortion, Trump responded, “I think they might do that.”
On the climate front, Trump has promised to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act to dismantle Biden-era advancements in clean energy and renewables. He’s also promising to further increase oil and gas drilling, a move a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told The Guardian “would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety” and “destroy everything.” Trump has also vowed to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement (again).
Regarding foreign policy, Trump has generally considered himself to be an isolationist. Though he has perhaps been strategically quiet on the Israel-Hamas war, he told Fox & Friends in March that he was “on board” with Israel’s assault on Gaza, and that Israel needed to “finish the problem.”
Given that Trump adapted much of the Heritage Foundation’s agenda the last time around, it’s worth taking a close look at Project 2025, a 900-page plan funded by the conservative think tank to completely reshape the executive branch if a Republican wins the presidency in 2024. Whether or not Project 2025 comes to fruition in a second Trump term, the future it lays out is startling. The plan, presented as a conservative “Mandate for Leadership,” is a right-wing dream, pushing massive corporate tax cuts, abortion rights rollbacks (including the revival of the 19th-century Comstock Act, which would essentially ban abortion nationwide), and the demise of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
This plan would also give immense power to Christian nationalism and the concept of “natural” families, with an emphasis on hampering access to hormonal birth control and even no-fault divorce. In wildly transphobic language, it uses fearmongering in regard to the “sexualization of children,” proposes destroying “the Biden administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity, subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,’ replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”
Project 2025 aims to accomplish these Christo-fascist goals by reshaping the federal government, practically giving the president absolute power over the executive branch. The plan further proposes dismantling government organizations like the Federal Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and ousting as many as 50,000 federal workers in favor of political appointees who are loyal to the president. It provides, in short, a harrowing vision for a GOP presidency that would be unrestrained by any forces that could block the president’s agenda.
. This is the kind of presidency Trump is trying to craft if he wins reelection. The TIME article reiterated that Trump would stack his second term with loyalists, both within his administration and beyond. (His daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is already the new chair of the Republican National Committee.) Trump made it clear to TIME that he would fire any members of his administration who disagree with him, and would not appoint anyone who believed Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. He said he would consider firing U.S. Attorneys who refused his prosecution orders, and when asked if he would support his team’s efforts to give him the power to fire civil servants, he responded, “You have some people that are protected that shouldn’t be protected.” He confirmed that he would consider pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, who he has called “hostages” and “political prisoners”; he even plays a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sung by a choir of January 6 prisoners, at campaign events.
There’s no question that even “just” another four years of Trump would have a significant negative impact on this country for generations to come, as his first term did — and that’s assuming we only get one more term. As presidential historian David Brinkley told TIME, a second Trump term could spell “the end of our democracy, and the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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