The Dismantling of Democracy
Time's profile of what Trump WILL do if elected should give us all pause.
Last week, Time Magazine’s Eric Cortellessa published a terrifying piece on what Trump would do if he’s elected president again.
The piece is based on in-person interviews with Trump, and “more than a dozen of his close advisors,” including Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
“What emerged,” Cortellessa writes, “were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
Let’s look at this issue by issue.
Immigration and Crime
Trump will round up everyone he sees as an illegal immigrant - whether they are citizens or not, wether they have visas or not - and put them in ”migrant detention camps. He will also deploy the U.S. military” both at the border and within states.
Cortellessa cites 11 million people who will be put in detention camps. That’s his extrapolation from Trump wanting to get rid of undocumented immigrants, which number about 11 million in the U.S.
But former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan - who is now a key Trump advisor - strikes a more ominous note.
“People need to be deported,” says Homan. “No one should be off the table.”
Let’s be clear. Trump and his advisors are saying they are going to round up anyone they deem as undesirable and put them in camps with the goal of deporting them.
In 2019, when Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez called migrant detention facilities concentration camps, “sensible” people thought she was being dramatic. Now Homan is stating it more clearly.
Trump would also deploy the military and the National Guard to fight crime in the U.S. To that end, he is lying to his supporters that crime is on the rise. In reality, violent crime is dropping, and has been for a while.
What caught my eye was that Trump will send troops in to fight nonexistent crime without a request from governors or mayors. It is illegal to deploy federal troops to U.S. territories. Trump doesn’t seem to care. If he sends the military to, say, Arizona, for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will invade a U.S. state.
Federal Budget
If governors do succeed in blocking troops from coming into their states, Trump is threatening to withhold federal funds.
Cortellessa writes that Trump “plans to approve Justice Department grants only to cities that adopt his preferred policing methods like stop-and-frisk.”
In laymen’s terms, this is called a shakedown. “Hey, nice state ya got there. Sure would be a shame if all the federal money that goes to education or Medicaid or even Medicare or Social Security for people who live there just dried up.”
You think an autocratic administration would hesitate to hold individual citizens virtual hostages in order to coerce the leaders of the states? Think again.
Justice Department
Remember, the Justice Department doesn’t just work in Washington D.C. There are 12 federal district courts, and each state has at least one U.S. Attorney and a raft of judges. Trump has said he will go after his enemies. He told Cortellessa that he “would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.”
You think judges will administer law fairly to those people who were picked up for walking down the street while Black? You think Trump won’t try to fire judges whom he doesn’t like? Authoritarians don’t care about the rule of law.
Cortellessa writes that Trump “would also seek help from local police and says he would deny funding for jurisdictions that decline to adopt his policies. ‘There’s a possibility that some won’t want to participate,’ Trump says, ‘and they won’t partake in the riches.’”
As Yale professor and authoritarian expert Timothy Snyder writes on his Substack, Thinking about…, under an authoritarian regime, “only loyalism and wealth will matter. Americans who do not fear the police will learn to do so. Those who wear the uniform must either resign or become the enforcers of the whims of one man.”
Abortion
Trump has been all over the place with abortion, but has rested on letting states decide. “He would,” Cortellessa writes, “let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.”
Monitor women’s pregnancies. So… all privacy laws are out the window? Federal and state officials will know when a woman is menstruating or not?
“Trump’s allies don’t plan to be passive on abortion if he returns to power,” writes Cortellessa. “The Heritage Foundation has called for enforcement of a 19th century statute that would outlaw the mailing of abortion pills. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes more than 80% of the House GOP conference, included in its 2025 budget proposal the Life at Conception Act, which says the right to life extends to ‘the moment of fertilization.’”
Trump dodges the issue when Cortellessa asks if he would sign or veto a national abortion ban. Which shows that he knows how important abortion rights are to voters.
Civil Service
It is an American pastime to rage at bad government employees. I have and will continue to argue that it is systems that are bad, not employees. Many folks who work for the government are experts in their fields. They do things like make sure the meat we eat is not contaminated, or the drugs we take will do what the pharma companies say they will.
Trump wants to replace them with loyalists who do what he wants.
Have you gotten your tax refund? Mine came pretty quickly this year. Perhaps that extra money Biden and Congress passed to employ more people at the IRS to give customer service to American citizens is actually…working?
But the IRS is focusing on going after rich tax cheats. And Trump will not be able to countenance that. As long as the rich tax cheats bow at is knee. I’m sure George Soros and Nick Hanauer will be subjected to multiple audits if Trump gets elected.
I mentioned Social Security checks above.
Snyder, in his Strongman Fantasy piece, points out that social security checks or safe water might be subject to loyalty tests. “Insofar as such goods are available under a dictatorship, they come with a moral as well as a financial price. When you go to a government office, you will be expected to declare your personal loyalty to the strongman.”
Cortellessa writes: “A senior U.S. judge offers an example of how consequential [filling the federal workforce with loyalists] could be. Suppose there’s another pandemic, and President Trump wants to push the use of an untested drug, much as he did with hydroxychloroquine during COVID-19. If the drug’s medical reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration refuses to sign off on its use, Trump could fire them, and anyone else who doesn’t approve it.”
Foreign Policy
This is only a smattering of how domestic policies will become compromised under Trump and his dictatorial confidants. Money for Ukraine would go away. Russia would be free to attack Poland, or any other state Putin thinks should be under his control. China would be free to invade Taiwan. NATO states would be held hostage - no payment, no American support. Let’s be clear… countries in Europe are not required to pay the U.S. anything. They just have to point some of their defense budgets toward NATO.
Trump keeps framing this in extortion terms, so it’s not clear that he knows this.
It’s also been pointed out quite often that Trump’s promise to raise tariffs on every country we trade with will only lead to higher prices for American consumers. It will likely also put a lot of people in the U.S. out of work.
Remember back in 2018, when Trump imposed high tariffs on China and eventually had to bail out American farmers? The U.S. will not have the money to bail any industry out if the trade policies Trump talks about on the stump come to pass.
Cortellessa writes that Trump is “considering a tariff of more than 10% on all imports, and perhaps even a 100% tariff on some Chinese goods.”
When Cortellessa pointed out to Trump “that independent analysts estimate his first term tariffs on thousands of products, including steel and aluminum, solar panels, and washing machines, may have cost the U.S. $316 billion and more than 300,000 jobs, by one account,” Trump’s response was to “dismiss these experts out of hand.”
The one foreign policy point that Cortellessa writes about that amuses me is that apparently Trump doesn’t like Israeli Prime Minister Benjaman Netanyahu.
“‘I had a bad experience with Bibi,’” Trump tells Cortellessa, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “In [Trump’s] telling, a January 2020 U.S. operation to assassinate a top Iranian general was supposed to be a joint attack until Netanyahu backed out at the last moment. ‘That was something I never forgot,’ [Trump] says. He blames Netanyahu for failing to prevent the Oct. 7 attack, when Hamas militants infiltrated southern Israel and killed nearly 1,200 people amid acts of brutality including burning entire families alive and raping women and girls.
“‘It happened on his watch,’ Trump says.”
It did indeed. My worry is whose watch will the future of the U.S. be under?
Interesting that he would distance himself from the man doing the most to split the "left" with his Gaza "special operation".
How could Trump legally accomplish these things? I’d like to see a point by point analysis. For example, the National Guard is not under his jurisdiction. Would we expect court challenges? The ACLU says it will be ready. And Congress would have to step up to legislate away rights he thinks he has where it’s unclear in the Constitution.