Activate as soon as you reach the White House the Insurrection Lawlast amended in 1871, which would allow the army to be deployed on American soil to repress potential protests, send soldiers to perform police duties in cities governed by Democrats, and to the border.
Immediately appoint an attorney general who agrees with the idea of ending the independence of the Department of Justice in order to pursue critics, opponents and those who he considers were disloyal to him during his first term.
Weaken the protections that tens of thousands of civil service officials have to clean up and install “conservative warriors” to help him dismantle the administrative state, which reviled as “deep state”.
“Take revenge” from the press. Put more currently independent government agencies under the control of the West Wing. Immigration detention camps, mass deportations and the end of asylum or birthright citizenship in the country…
The priorities on Donald Trump’s agenda If he manages to return to the presidency of the United States in November 2024, they take shape through the public and private messages of the Republican favorite and press articles that detail planning his potential second term. They have set off alarm bells about the radicalization of your proposalfor the reinforcement of his autocratic tendencies and his violent rhetoric and even seeing the drift towards an idea that in recent weeks has become central in the political conversation in the United States: a potential dictatorship.
An extensive article-essay published on November 30 in ‘The Washington Post’ by the historian Robert Kagan He assured that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” To the aforementioned piece, which reviewed the weakening of the checks and balances that have served as safeguards of democracy and the continued submission of a Republican Party that remains prostrate at Trump’s feet, similar warnings launched by Liz Cheney in interviews, columns and a book were added. A special from ‘The Atlantic’ magazine was also added, which in 24 essays included under “If Trump wins” he explores a future of “serious and extreme consequences” as dystopian as possible, as well as endless analysis and warnings, from both progressives and moderate Republicans.
The alert is heightened because Trump, the former president who is charged with 91 charges in four federal criminal cases, the president who broke with the American democratic tradition and tried to reverse the legal results of 2020 that they gave victory to Joe Biden and the peaceful transition of power, is today the undisputed favorite, more than 50 points ahead of his main rivals in the Republican primaries in the average of polls maintained by Fivethirtyeight. He leads President Biden in polls in pivotal states that will be decisive in November. And both in statements and in strategy, whether its own or that prepared by allied groups such as ‘Project 2025’, it is allowing us to venture into that radical potential for a second term.
The language
Trump, his conservative allies and defenders, accuse the media or figures like Kagan and Cheney of fueling paranoia, of exaggerating, or of taking seriously what they say are “jokes,” like the phrase the Republican uttered on Fox News assuring that it would be “a dictator only on the first day” (a phrase he volunteered when host Sean Hannity had given him a promise not to abuse his power, and which he later repeated again).
The reality is that he is repeating one of his tactics that have already proven dangerous, such as using a jocular tone that contributes to desensitization to extremist approaches or launching antidemocratic ideas such as that the general Mark Milleywho was chief of the Defense staff during his term and was one of those who stopped him in his first term, should be “executed for treason”.
“If you repeat something enough you normalize it. You are making everyone desensitized to the effect it would have if you follow through on what you say, which is your intention. “He’s making it a joke, which doesn’t mean he’s joking,” warned Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology professor at Princeton.
Trump is also using language with more than echoes of that of Adolf Hitler or European fascism. He has repeatedly launched, for example, the idea that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country & rdquor; and she has promised: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and criminals of the radical left “that live like vermin in the confines of our country.”
“History shows that autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do. “We simply don’t listen to them until it’s too late,” he warned in a statement to ‘The New York Times’. Ruth Ben Ghiathistorian, scholar of fascism and author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the present.”
The plans
Trump’s absolute priority if he returns to the White House is to choose the attorney general, who would be the key person to apply drafts that his team already has prepared with plans to end 50 years of precedent that they have sought after the Watergate scandal. guarantee the independence of the Department of Justice. He is distancing himself from jurists who he considers too “institutionalist”, or soft to make the changes he seeks, distancing himself even from the conservative Federalist Society, which was key in his first term. And he is looking for new alliances to be able to put into practice his plans to investigate and persecute those who he considers political rivals or former disloyal collaborators, among whom he has especially pointed out Milley; John Kelly, who was his chief of staff; and William Barr, who acted as his attorney general.
“You don’t need to change your statutes, but your mentality,” he explained. Russ Vought, one of Trump’s allies, who headed the Budget Office and today is at the Center for Renewing America, one of the ideas laboratories that has fully dedicated itself to preparing for the possible second term. “You need an attorney general and a White House legal office that don’t see themselves as trying to protect the President’s Department.”
He is part of that same ‘think tank’ Jeffrey Clarkcharged in the federal case in Georgia and named in the assault on the Capitol and who is now leading the work to prepare the possible invocation of the Insurrection Act, another of the actions that Trump has marked among his priorities and which is one of the that most concern experts such as those at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
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Plans to radically alter the civil service system, eliminating protections against arbitrary dismissals of officials and converting multiple positions into political appointments, also provoke special alert. That change, according to different calculations, could affect 50,000 or even 100,000 officials.
Trump and his team of advisors are working on the plans, but so is an ethereal conglomerate of think tanks and other conservative groups, albeit unofficially, from the Heritage Foundation, behind the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, to America First Legal (from his former advisor Stephen Miller) or the Conservative Partnership Institute (from his last chief of staff, Mark Meadows). They are creating an ideological manifesto and developing everything from policy proposals, draft executive orders, reports and transition plans that they share with campaign advisors and with Trump himself to personnel recommendations. And they are expanding a database that they have already branded as a “conservative LinkedIn.” from which they expect the army of “conservative warriors” to emerge. that Trump needs to undertake his plans.