Trump’s second-term vision? Much like the first with ‘more damage to our democracy’

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It was the easiest of questions from the softest of interviewers. “What is one of your top priority items for a second term?” the Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump in June.

But the US president fluffed it, rambling that “the word experience is a very important word”, that he had barely slept in Washington before becoming president and did not know many people. “You make some mistakes,” the president continued. “An idiot like [John] Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.”

As incumbent rather than insurgent, Trump has barely articulated any vision for his second term in subsequent interviews, debates and speeches. But critics are in little doubt what trajectory four more years of Trump would mean, widening chasms between rich and poor, justice and racism, truth and lies. It would accelerate American political polarisation to dangerous extremes.

Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution thinktank last week: “Donald Trump’s modus operandi as a candidate and throughout his first term as president was not to unify. It was to heighten the contradictions, to raise passions on both sides.”

“I don’t think that was a strategy that he can simply turn off at will. I think it’s an important part of who he is and so I would not rate the chances of unity in a second Trump term as being any higher than they turned out to be in the Trump first term.”

The Republican party broke from tradition by not announcing a new platform of policies at its national convention, but in August the Trump re-election campaign did release a skeletal 49-point “set of core priorities for a second term”.

It includes: create 10m new jobs in 10 months; develop a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020; bring back 1m manufacturing jobs from China; teach American exceptionalism; drain the globalist swamp by taking on international organizations that hurt American citizens; bring violent extremist groups “like Antifa” to justice.

It goes on: block illegal immigrants from becoming eligible for taxpayer-funded welfare, healthcare and free college tuition; stop endless wars and bring our troops home; continue nominating constitutionalist supreme court and lower court judges; protect unborn life through every means available.

But details are scarce. Perhaps more telling is what Trump and his campaign do not say. If they are successful in overturning Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, possibly at the supreme court as soon as 10 November, it is still not clear what would replace it or how they would protect millions of people with pre-existing conditions.

There has never been a coordinated national strategy for beating the coronavirus pandemic and little sign of one in a second term beyond refusing to contemplate more economic shutdowns. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, admitted last Sunday: “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Trump is pinning his hopes on a vaccine, though how quickly it could be distributed and take effect remains far from certain.

Generally, Trump’s pitch at campaign rallies is more of the same: four more years of killing regulations, building the wall and draining the swamp. His new slogan, “Keep America great”, was quietly dropped as the pandemic swept the country and killed more than 225,000 Americans. Now Trump is forced to add a coda to his 2016 line: “Make America great again, again.”

In July, he was given a second chance by Hannity to outline an agenda. This time Trump started with Covid-19: “We’re going to defeat the invisible enemy. We are going to rebuild the economy. We’re going to bring back jobs from all of these foreign lands that have stolen our jobs on horrible trade deals. We are going to continue to make great trade deals. We’re going to finish rebuilding our wall.”

For Democrats, the prospect of a second Trump is the nightmare scenario that could send America down a path of no return and push the planet’s climate towards catastrophe. He would feel vindicated and liberated, they argue, to intensify his attacks on norms and institutions, completing his purge of officials deemed disloyal to him. The Axios website reported last week that if Trump wins re-election, he would immediately fire the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and expect to oust the CIA director, Gina Haspel, and defence secretary, Mark Esper.

In other words, he would shoot people on Fifth Avenue if he believed he could get away with it

Tony Schwartz

Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote Trump’s bestselling book The Art of the Deal but is now an outspoken critic, said: “He has always pushed the envelope to the point that he thought he could get away with, and that has been his only constraint. In other words, he would shoot people on Fifth Avenue if he believed he could get away with it.

“If he were to be re-elected, I think the licence he would feel, and the power he would at least try and be able to exercise, would make it possible for him to do things that would make us not think much about whether he owes money to some other countries through loans he took out.”

A Trump victory could also be interpreted as evidence that the racial backlash against Barack Obama’s, the first Black president, is complete, opening a Pandora’s box of bigotry, antisemitism, homophobia, racism and sexism. Adherents of far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and conspiracy theories such as QAnon could be emboldened as never before in modern times. The hardline senior White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is reportedly preparing executive orders for an extreme crackdown on immigration.

Drexel Heard, a Black LGBTQ activist and Democratic official in Los Angeles, said: “It’s gonna be four more years of chaos, four more years of what we have just witnessed from day one. The president started his campaign in 2015, coming down an escalator and fanning the flames of us versus them, talking about Hispanic Americans in the country. This administration started out lying on day one after inauguration, just about the size of what the inauguration looked like. So we’re going to get more of that.

“They’re going to focus more on expanding the tax cut that they already have and they’re also going to have the opportunity to expand and reshape more than they already have our federal judiciary. There are two supreme court justices [Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas] that may be on their way out over the next two or three years.

“And of course this president, having not been able to control this pandemic over the past six months, certainly will put us into probably another year, year and a half underneath it because they have no idea what they’re doing. But [White House press secretary] Kayleigh McEnany is going to go out on to the podium and talk about how they want to send people to Mars. I’m pretty sure we might be better off on Mars than under another four years of a Trump administration.”

On one point there appears to be agreement on all sides. Trump is not going to “pivot” or change course. A second term would be much like the first only more so and suggest to the world it might indicate a superpower in terminal decline. The man who was dubbed “a chaos candidate” by rival Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primary would leave his mark on history with a two-term chaos presidency.

Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director, said: “For too long I kept telling myself that it was a matter of time before he would recognize what he needed to do in order to have a more lasting legacy in history. But the bottom line is that he’s not somebody who learns – doesn’t want to learn – and will basically continue to do the things that he’s done in the first four years the second four years with perhaps even greater damage to our democracy.”

Panetta, co-founder of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in California, added: “The way he’s dealing with Covid is just a good example that under no circumstances is he going to admit failure. Under no circumstances is he going to take the actions that need to be taken in order to deal with it. Under no circumstances is he going to listen to advisers or more experienced people who understand these issues.

“And for that reason, we’re going to have another four years of Trump unleashed and I don’t know what direction that takes the country except into further trouble.”