Postby planosteve » Tue May 28, 2024 5:18 pm
Since you probably didn't get to read it. Here's what it says:
Donald Trump reportedly did not expect to win the presidency in 2016, which isn’t surprising considering how ill-prepared he and his team were to take control of the country. He appointed established conservatives to key positions before learning some had personal principles that extended beyond indulging the president’s ego. Trump wreaked havoc on the United States for four years, but the damage might have been even greater if he wasn’t battling career public servants who tried to check his impulses, or if he wasn’t such a political neophyte.
Trump will not be the dog that caught the car heading into his second term. He’ll be ready and waiting to take the wheel and hit the gas. The former president has now had nearly a decade to burnish his understanding of how Washington, D.C., works, and to assemble a political machine laser-focused on exploiting a federal government full of loopholes to give him the power to enact an authoritarian agenda that could spell disaster for the economy, the environment, human rights, and democracy.
Trump’s romp through the primaries has confirmed that he is in total control of the race and barring something unforeseen will be squaring off with Joe Biden in an election to determine the fate of the nation.
Here’s what’s at stake:
Trump has made abundantly clear that he will use a potential second term in office to take revenge on his enemies. He’s planning to do so by helming the Justice Department with a loyal attorney general willing to appoint a slew of special prosecutors to go after everyone he feels has wronged him. These plans have been in the works since 2021, as Rolling Stone reported in August, and focus not just on Biden, whom Trump believes is the primary force behind his myriad legal woes, but also on Special Counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and plenty of others. “There are almost too many targets to keep track of,” one Trump adviser familiar with the discussions says.
Trump’s potential revenge tour has already been mapped out in detail. Rolling Stone reported last year, for example, that Trump’s team has been exploring legal strategies to criminally charge Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who indicted the former president for paying porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair ahead of the 2016 election — including by using the DOJ’s civil rights divisions to go after Bragg, who is Black, for “racist law enforcement policies,” as one source put it. The Washington Post has also reported on the specificity of Trump’s plans to take down his haters, noting in November that he even wants to investigate former allies he believes have turned on him, including his former Attorney General William Barr and former chief of staff John Kelly.
The plans for retribution are being hatched behind the scenes, but Trump has been fantasizing publicly about putting them into motion. “The precedent on doing what they did, with the weaponization, using the DOJ and the FBI to go after their political opponents, that is so bad,” Trump told Lou Dobbs in January, referring to the idea that all of his indictments and all of the lawsuits he is facing are politically motivated. “That means I can do it too,” he continued. “Pandora’s Box is open and that means that I can do it too.”
Trump is planning to crack down on illegal immigration — hard. The New York Times reported last November that he is going to “scour” the nation for undocumented immigrants and deport them “by the millions per year.” He wants to throw the undocumented into detention camps while their cases are being processed, but will do away with due-process hearings to make it easier to kick them out of the United States. He’ll reportedly pull money from the military to fund the effort, if Congress won’t comply.
Trump has intensified his rhetoric, telling Newsmax in March that he will order mass deportations of undocumented immigrants on his first day back in office, and that he’ll start with the “bad ones.” He added that he will enlist local law enforcement to help him root out said “bad ones,” and will give police “immunity” to crack down on migrants. He said on Fox News the following morning that migrants are “poisoning” America.
Trump mused late last year that he will be a “dictator” for one day only, should he win reelection. Rolling Stone reported shortly after his comments that part of this authoritarian plot is to send potentially hundreds of thousands of troops to help seal the border and build new detention camps to house migrants. Trump tried to do something similar during his first term, but he was shot down by officials and attorneys due to fears of legal repercussions. He’s going to surround himself with more compliant actors in a potential second term, who are already working on ways to make a militarized border “perfectly legal.”
Trump told Time Magazine in April that he would also be willing to deploy the military inside the United States, not just at the border, as part of his effort to rid the nation of undocumented immigrants.
Trump was talked out of bombing Mexico to take out drug labs during his first term, but he hasn’t let go of the idea. “‘Attacking Mexico,’ or whatever you’d like to call it, is something that President Trump has said he wants ‘battle plans’ drawn for,” a source familiar told Rolling Stone last year. “He’s complained about missed opportunities of his first term, and there are a lot of people around him who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”
Trump claimed last year that our “once great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged.” His solution is to ban urban camping and corral the unhoused into tent cities, which will be staffed by “doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug-rehab specialists.” Trump says he will pay for all this with the money the U.S. saves from “ending mass, unskilled migration.”
There is no bad peace and there are no good wars
