To know what Trump will do, listen to what he says
One of the most enduring bits of folk wisdom about American politics is the notion that a promise made on the campaign trail is almost never a promise kept.
This isn’t actually true. There is, in fact, a strong connection between what a candidate says on the campaign trail and what a president does in office.
In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton stressed jobs, taxes and health care. He followed through with a proposed economic stimulus bill, a proposed health care reform bill and an upper-income tax increase.
George W. Bush, in his 2000 campaign, emphasized education reform and tax cuts and followed through with No Child Left Behind and a large upper-income tax cut.
Barack Obama, in his 2008 campaign, stressed health care, jobs and tax cuts for the middle class. He followed through with an economic stimulus bill — which included a middle-class tax cut — and an ambitious health care bill that eventually became the Affordable Care Act.
Even Donald Trump, not principally known for telling the truth, acted on the promises of his 2016 campaign. He promised, for example, to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and he tried to do that. He promised to ban Muslim immigrants, and he tried to do that. Trump’s overt racism, his confrontational posture toward North Korea and Iran, even his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were also presaged by his rhetoric on the campaign trail.
What a candidate and a campaign say matters. How they say it also matters.
Let’s look at the rhetoric of Trump’s current campaign. At rallies and in interviews, the former president rails against his political opponents as enemies of the nation. “The threat from outside forces,” Trump said at a rally last year in New Hampshire, “is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He said that one critic, Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed for his actions during Trump’s final month in office.
He has said that if elected again, he would have “no choice” but to lock up his political opponents. He says that migrants from Central and South America “are poisoning the blood of our country.” When told that he’s using the language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Trump embraces it.
“That’s what they say. I didn’t know that, but that’s what they say. Because our country is being poisoned,” Trump said in a recent interview with Howard Kurtz of Fox News. “Look, we can be nice about it — we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct’ — but we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers. … They’re all being released into our country. And then you have mental institutions and insane asylums … terrorists pouring in at a level we have never seen before.”
None of this represents a statement of policy or future plans. There are no proposals to glean from the former president’s attacks, his invective or his endless denunciations. You could say it was just rhetoric — sound and fury, signifying nothing.
That would be a huge mistake. We may not be able to give an exact accounting of the consequences of Trump’s violent and fascistic rhetoric if he were granted a second term, but rest assured, there would be consequences.
Freed from the shackles of legal scrutiny and consumed with a thirst for vengeance, there is no question that Trump would act on the desires he has expressed on the campaign trail. As promised, he would free the Jan. 6 rioters who were prosecuted and imprisoned. As promised, he would unleash federal law enforcement on his political opponents. As promised, he would do something about the people he says are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He would try to be, as he has said, a dictator “only on Day 1.”
If there’s one promise I expect Trump to break if he gets back into the Oval Office, it’s that one. If Trump does want to be a dictator, I highly doubt it will be for just one day.