Bracing for Trump

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2023 (972 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

U.S. presidential elections are still 11 months away. Yet the menacing spectre of Donald Trump’s return to the White House has already begun to take shape.

A second Trump presidency was previously unimaginable, given his two impeachments, myriad legal woes, courting of insurrectionists and all-consuming obsession over the 2020 election. It’s now entirely plausible. The stakes for both America and the world could hardly be greater.

Recent polling data from the New York Times suggests Trump currently leads President Joe Biden by between four and 10 percentage points in five of six crucial swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Biden appears to be hemorrhaging support among youth, black and Hispanic voters — key elements of the brittle coalition of Democrats that coalesced to defeat Trump in 2020.

Overall, Biden’s public approval rating is hovering near 39 per cent. That’s barely higher than Trump’s absolute low-point of 35 per cent in late 2017, at the tail-end of his chaotic and amateurish first year in office.

The reasons for this are as complex as they are varied. From the fallout of generational levels of inflation for consumers and Biden being associated with the alienating embrace of extreme left-wing identity politics by some progressives, to the mass influx of migrants across the southern border and his administration’s staunch support for Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza. Biden’s age — he will be 82 by the time ballots are cast next November — is also a serious liability.

“This is a dissatisfied, disaffected, disengaged electorate that doesn’t like their choices — these are the textbook conditions for political volatility,” said the Times’ chief political analyst in an interview discussing the latest polling numbers.

The MAGA movement’s true believers grasp the unique opportunity this presents. Not only to install their supreme leader back in power, but to fundamentally reshape American society by positioning themselves atop an unabashedly authoritarian state.

Indeed, behind Trump’s increasingly unhinged and dehumanizing rhetoric these days is a sophisticated state planning operation, labelled Project 2025. Run out of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, it is a concerted effort by professional far right idealogues to dismantle America’s institutions from the onset of a second Trump term. The goal is to ensure the GOP can capture all three branches of government until at least the 2040s.

Executive orders and related policies are now being feverishly drafted in anticipation. They feature reclassifying career federal civil servants as political appointees, permitting thousands of them to be fired and replaced by MAGA acolytes at the stroke of a pen. The project’s comprehensive agenda also includes gutting whistleblower protections and defanging the Justice Department.

So-called “freedom cities” would be created on federal land, where a multitude of regulations would no longer apply. Nationwide, parents would be reimbursed for pulling their kids from public classrooms and placing them in private religious schools. Convicted drug dealers would be subject to the death penalty. Children born to immigrants living in the U.S. would be denied birthright citizenship.

A Trump administration 2.0 would also pull America out of the Paris climate accords, end military and financial support for Ukraine, slash humanitarian foreign aid and slap a 10 per cent tariff on all imports into the U.S.

Fearing the worst, a bipartisan group of senators has proposed new legislation to block any future president from unilaterally withdrawing America from NATO. America’s adversaries and allies are looking on with glee and despair, respectively, at the prospect of Trump getting another chance to take a wrecking ball to international relations.

In its annual year-end special report forecasting what lies ahead globally in the next 12 months, The Economist selected Trump as posing the biggest danger to the world in 2024. It’s the first time in 38 years of compiling the supplementary edition that a single person has been selected for the dubious distinction.

“A second Trump term would be a watershed in a way the first was not,” the paper’s editors write. “Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.”

A Trump victory is by no means a pre-ordained outcome — one year represents a virtual eternity in politics. But for now, the likelihood of it happening seems to be growing by the day.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.