Millions of us are justifiably focused on seeing Donald Trump held accountable for what he has allegedly done in the past.
Conspiracy to change the legitimate 2020 elections result and resisting the peaceful transfer of power, a first for American presidents. Running from top secret documents and plotting to hide them from the feds. Falsifying business records to keep money paid to a porn star in 2016 secret from voters.
However, we must not lose sight of what Trump will serve, if, despite all that baggage, he defeats Joe Biden to become president again. His fever dreams are no secret. He has told us, and so have his followers, in interviews and with exhaustive and terrifying details in his so-called 2025 project for a second Trump term.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Among Trump's first acts? Turn the historically independent Department of Justice into his personal law firm, filled with taxpayer-paid lawyers. Roy Cohns willing to drop criminal cases against the boss.
And then, despite Trump's arguments to the Supreme Court that presidents should have legal immunity (something no other president ever sought), he will criticize his government prosecutors against Biden. As he told Time magazine in his recent cover story, “I am sure that Biden will be prosecuted for all his crimes.” What crimes? Trump does not say and his Republican lackeys in the House bubukes have occurred to them after more than a year of research.
Focusing on Trump's plans is important in its own right. But it is even more crucial for voters given that accountability for their past actions is proving to be so elusivethanks to the Republican appointees in the Supreme Court and the rookie Trump judge handling the classified documents case in Florida. They are giving in to their legal sand-in-the-gears tactics and devising their own. The hush money case may well be the only one to reach a verdict before November.
The fact that Trump 2.0 hasn't received more attention is a reflection of how normalized his outrage has become and how distracted voters and the media have been by the prosecutions of Trump 1.0.
In any other era, proposals like these would be big news: the National Guard, and perhaps the army, too, arrest and deport some 11 million people who came to this country illegally, most of them years ago, and who They now have jobs, pay taxes, and raise children who are citizens. Huge immigration detention camps. National Guard troops monitor the city streets at the presidential whim. A rollback of climate change programs to “drill, baby, drill.”
For voters unwilling to read the voluminous Project 2025, the Time report cover article provided a CliffsNotes version, “If he wins… How far would Trump go?” She attended two interviews with the journalist, reflecting her former obsession with being a Time coverboy; Before the presidency, he had a fake cover created and posted framed copies in his clubs until the magazine asked him to remove them. (Truly “fake news” headline: “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS… EVEN ON TV!”)
His agenda for the second term reflects the lessons learned from the first. Mainly this one, which is how the Time article begins: “she was too nice.”
Trump unleashed I would only hire advisors who agreed that the 2020 election was stolen of the. He would “absolutely” forgive all troublemakers convicted and accused with crimes from January 6 (more than 800 have pleaded guilty or been convicted by juries). It would gut the civil service and return to a MAGA loyalist loot system. He would spend federal funds as he wanted, not as the annual budget laws stipulated. And since “there is clear anti-white sentiment in this country,” he would consider changing laws that are “very unfair” to white Americans.
Trump would almost certainly spur inflation by raising tariffs to at least 10% on all imports and up to 100% on Chinese goods. he simply discards multiple analyzes that found its previous tariffs on steel and aluminum imports It raised prices for American manufacturers and consumers and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.. Steel companies “love me because I saved their industry,” he said. In fact, entire operations closed and the number of steelworker jobs fell during his tenure.
In foreign policy, Trump maintained his talk of encouraging the Russians to “do whatever they want” to NATO allies who, in their opinion, are not spending enough on their own defense. He told Time that he “wouldn't give a dime” to Ukraine unless Europe contributes the same amount, which – contrary to Trump's claims – it already is doing.
The former president resorted to his new stance on states' rights about abortion to rule out all questions on the topic. They say that red states want to monitor women's pregnancies to ensure compliance with its abortion bans. “I think they could do that,” she said, and “it's irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not” with it.
However, Trump may not be as indifferent as this suggests. Project 2025 envisions federal regulatory agencies enforcing anti-abortion and 19th-century revival policies. Comstock's Law criminalize the mailing of abortion pills, now the primary method of terminating pregnancies. Trump's silence on all this is how his allies want it; everyone knows that the issue of abortion rights is a failure for him and for Republicans in general.
“I just don't want it to shoot in the mouth,” said one anti-abortion ally. said The New York Times recently. “I think pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”
And the more we look at your current legal works, excluding divination your future plans, the easier this concealment will be.
