Why a second Trump term may be more radical than his first
In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Most of the West, across traditional partisan lines, was aghast at the crackdown that killed at least hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed.
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Donald Trump said in an interview with Playboy magazine the year after the massacre. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
It was a throwaway line in a wide-ranging interview, delivered to a journalist profiling a 43-year-old celebrity businessman who was not then a player in national politics or world affairs. But in light of what Trump has gone on to become, his exaltation of the ruthless crushing of democratic protesters is steeped in foreshadowing.
Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.
As he runs for president again facing four criminal prosecutions, Trump may seem more angry, desperate and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term. But the throughline that emerges is far more long-running: He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.
What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him
— would all be weaker.
As a result, Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.
A radical agenda
To be sure, some of what Trump and his allies are planning is in line with what any standard-issue Republican president would most likely do. For example, Trump would likely roll back many of President Joe Biden’s policies to curb carbon emissions and hasten the transition to electric cars.
Other parts of Trump’s agenda, however, are aberrational. No U.S. president before him had toyed with withdrawing from NATO. He has said he would fundamentally reevaluate “NATO’S purpose and NATO’S mission” in a second term.
He has said he would order the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, which would violate international law unless its government consented. It most likely would not.
He would also use the military on domestic soil. While it is generally illegal to use troops for domestic law enforcement, the Insurrection Act allows exceptions.
Trump’s plans to purge immigrants living in the country illegally include sweeping raids, huge detention camps, deportations on the scale of millions per year, stopping asylum, trying to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to parents living in the country illegally and invoking the Insurrection Act near the southern border to also use troops as immigration agents.
Trump would seek to expand presidential power in myriad ways — concentrating greater authority over the executive branch in the White House, ending the independence of agencies Congress set up to operate outside of presidential control and reducing civil service protections to make it easier to fire and replace tens of thousands of government workers.
More than anything else, Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values. Building on how he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.
Asked for comment, a spokesperson for Trump did not address specifics but instead criticized The New York Times while calling Trump “strong on crime.”
Weakened guardrails
Even running in 2016, Trump flouted democratic norms.
He falsely portrayed his loss in the Iowa caucuses as fraud and suggested he would treat the results of the general election as legitimate only if he won. He threatened to imprison Hillary Rodham Clinton, smeared Mexican immigrants as rapists and promised to bar Muslims from entering the United States. He offered to pay the legal bills of any supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies and stoked hatred against reporters covering his events.
In office, Trump refused to divest from his businesses, and people courting his favor booked expensive blocks of rooms in his hotels. Despite an anti-nepotism law, he gave White House jobs to his daughter and son-in-law. He used emergency power to spend more on a border wall than Congress authorized.
But some of the most potentially serious of his violations of norms fell short of fruition.
Trump pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries. The Justice Department opened several criminal investigations, from the scrutiny of former Secretary of State John Kerry and of former FBI Director James Comey to the attempt by a special counsel, John Durham, to find a basis to charge Obamaera national security officials or Clinton with crimes connected to the origins of the Russia investigation. But to Trump’s fury, prosecutors decided against bringing such charges.
And neither effort for which he was impeached succeeded. Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into Biden by withholding military aid, but it did not cooperate. Trump sought to subvert his 2020 election loss and stoked the Capitol riot, but Vice President Mike Pence and congressional majorities rejected his attempt to stay in power.
There is reason to believe various obstacles and bulwarks that limited Trump in his first term would be absent in a second one.
Some of what Trump tried to do was thwarted by incompetence and dysfunction among his initial team. But over four years, those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. After courts blocked his first, haphazardly crafted travel ban, for example, his team developed a version that the Supreme Court allowed to take effect.
Four years of his appointments created an entrenched Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court that most likely would now side with him on some cases that he lost, such as the 5-4 decision in June 2020 that blocked him from ending a program that shields from deportation certain people living in the country illegally who had been brought as children and grew up as Americans.
Personnel is policy
Perhaps the most important check on Trump’s presidency was internal administration resistance to some of his more extreme demands. A parade of his own former high-level appointees has since warned that he is unfit to be president, including a former White House chief of staff, John Kelly; former defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper; former national security adviser John Bolton; former Attorney General William Barr; and others.
Trump in turn has denounced them all as weak, stupid and disloyal. He has privately told those close to him that his biggest mistakes concerned the people he appointed, in particular his choices for attorney general. The advisers who have stuck with him are determined that if he wins a new term, there will be no officials who intentionally stymie his agenda.
In addition to developing policy papers, the coalition of think tanks run by people aligned with Trump has been compiling a database of thousands of vetted potential recruits to hand to a transition team if he wins the election. Similar efforts are under way by former senior Trump administration officials to prepare to stock the government with lawyers likely to find ways to bless radical White House ideas rather