What Trump 2.0. Really Means – by Damon Linker

Donald J. Trump has stood at the center of American political life for more than nine years now, thrilling some, disgusting many others, but transfixing nearly all of us for much of that time. How is it possible that a louche Manhattan real estate mogul, tabloid celebrity, and reality-show television star launched a successful hostile takeover of one of the two major parties in the most powerful nation on earth, managed to get himself elected president, served out a single chaotic term, attempted a hapless self-coup to keep himself in office after losing his bid for re-election, became a convicted felon and faced numerous additional charges in several different jurisdictions, and then returned to run for president for a third time, all the while keeping himself within a couple of points of his opponent?

We’re all familiar with the story. But it’s worth rehearsing in these stark terms because the fact is that human beings can get used to just about anything, given sufficient time for acclimation. Even the prospect of Trump returning to the White House to become president once again.

With that in mind, it’s possible to place the things Trump has said and done in the past—and the kinds of things he intends to do if he is returned to the Oval Office—into three distinct categories. Some of these things are normal acts for a Republican president. Others, by contrast, are abnormal for a Republican, though still within the range of deeds that should be considered legitimate within a liberal political system that responds to shifts of public opinion. Still other acts belong in another category altogether. These are actions that threaten to degrade and even frontally assault the liberal democratic system itself. I will call these acts truly alarming.

When Trump first ran for president, his campaign understandably generated headlines for breaking from various elements of the GOP’s Reaganite consensus, especially on immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

But in office, the administration pursued plenty of standard-issue Republican policy priorities: It worked with Congress to pass a large corporate tax cut; it attempted and nearly succeeded in repealing the signature legislative achievement of the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act; it cut various regulations on business; and it appointed a large number of conservative judges to the federal bench, laying the groundwork for the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, a decades-long GOP priority, as well as other decisions congenial to the conservative movement going all the way back to the 1960s, if not before. In all of these ways, the first Trump administration was as normal as could be. Nearly any alternative Republican president would have done much the same things and been happy to take credit.

In a second Trump administration, we’d be likely to see more of the same. This is clear from the policy pledges on the Trump campaign website. There we find promises of more tax cuts; absolutist defenses of gun rights; a vow to “strengthen and modernize our military,” including the building and deployment of a nationwide missile shield; a call to fight crime; and expressed intentions to cut costly and burdensome regulations. Once again, any Republican running for president in 2024 would be promising a similar policy agenda. If you’re a longstanding GOP voter uncomfortable with Trump but nonetheless considering casting a ballot for him next month, these stances are probably the reason why.

But of course Trump is promising far more than warmed-over and lightly updated Reaganism—just as his administration pursued plenty of unorthodox policies the last time he held the presidency. Some of these divergences—like Trump’s promise, first made nine years ago and reiterated during his current campaign, to protect Social Security and Medicare, including keeping the retirement age at its current level—have been acts of relative moderation, bringing the GOP closer to the ideological center.

But other policy shifts were more extreme. Let’s take them one by one.

First there are the policy changes that mark Trump as a right-populist aligned with like-minded politicians and parties abroad. Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all favored liberal immigration policies and the expansion of free trade, while Trump joins with right-populists around the world in strongly opposing such openness. In its place, they propose raising walls and other barriers to the free movement of people and goods. Instead of working to build a universal market, with products and supply chains freely circling the globe, the populists admire and idealize autarchic independence and therefore prefer protectionist policies (including tariffs on trade) and tightly controlled borders. 

It would be one thing if Trump staked out these positions in dispassionate terms and sought to work with public policy experts and allies in Congress to devise thoughtful ways to implement them. Many right-populist parties abroad have done exactly that—as has, for that matter, the Biden administration, which has taken a relatively protectionist approach to trade and done a lot to craft a thoughtful industrial policy for the 21st century United States. Whether or not you believe such policies are wise, they can be revised or repealed in the future in light of evidence about their relative success or failure. 

The problem with Trump is not primarily that he favors policies that, for a Republican, are abnormal. It’s that he makes an abnormal case for these abnormal policies and supports imposing them in abnormal ways. He loves to exaggerate and lie in tendentious and demagogic terms as a way of whipping up fear of foreigners and other kinds of internal enemies—and then to propose irresponsible policy responses to the supposed threat.

The most incendiary example is Trump’s promise to deport more than 10 million undocumented immigrants. Deportations are nothing new. More than 12 million people were deported during the Clinton administration. The total was more than 10 million during George W. Bush’s presidency and more than 5 million under Barack Obama. Trump’s numerical goal would bring the country back up to the levels reached during the Clinton and Bush administrations, though with one crucial difference: the overwhelming majority of those deported in the 1990s and 2000s were people apprehended at or near the southern border or people picked up for criminal activity in the interior of the country. Few were apprehended in the interior of the country solely for residing here without proper documentation. 

Trump wants to change this—to track down undocumented immigrants inside the country and remove them. That goal, which the Trump campaign website describes as “the largest deportation operation in American history,” would be extremely difficult to implement. It would require hiring and training thousands of additional employees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These employees would have to conduct sweeps through immigrant neighborhoods, demanding residents show papers. Those who fail to produce the required documents would presumably be arrested and transported to vast, newly constructed holding camps while their identities and immigration status are confirmed. Those found to be in the country illegally would then be removed.  

To call such actions abnormal in the context of the 21^st century United States would be a considerable understatement. But it is possible to imagine them being undertaken with sufficient care and common sense that the most egregious violations of individual rights are avoided. Unfortunately, Trump’s track record gives us no reason at all to presume that he and his team will put serious thought or effort into doing anything with care, least of all a policy designed to forcibly remove millions of “illegals” from the country. 

This inability to restrain his worst impulses was on full display over the past couple of months when Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance showed themselves willing and eager to deploy demagogic lies about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. That’s bad in itself because of its contribution to cultivating xenophobic fear of and hostility toward immigrants that could easily culminate in vigilante violence. But Trump and Vance have also indicated that they would seek to use the negative feelings they’ve encouraged to build support for stripping these Haitians of their Temporary Protected Status and deporting them, even though they are currently in the country legally. This suggests an intent to use incendiary smears to expand the ranks of those who would be forcibly removed under a second Trump administration—again, by coming after immigrants in their communities, a departure from most deportation practices from previous administrations.

Beyond immigration, there is international affairs. No domain of policymaking gives the president greater leeway to enact, and change, policy based solely on his personal judgment. On one level, Trump showed during his first stint in office that his assessment of people and situations can shift wildly from one moment to the next. He flipped very quickly, for example, from threatening to rain nuclear “fire and fury” on North Korea to considering Kim Jong Un a close personal friend and trusted confidante. 

But underlying such mercurial judgments are certain core convictions that guide Trump’s enduring view of America and the world. As in other areas of governance, Trump despises nothing more than being hemmed in and constrained by binding norms, rules, or laws. In foreign policy, this means he detests alliances that obligate the United States to defend and fight on behalf of other countries. 

During his term in office, he diverged from long-standing Republican foreign policy commitments in many ways. The withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, negotiated with the Taliban and fulfilled by the Biden administration, is one relatively benign (and even defensible) example. A more abnormal one is Trump’s denigration of NATO and his insistence on treating the military alliance like a protection racket in which our allies are cast in the role of ungrateful underlings delinquent on payments of tribute.

An even more extreme example is Trump’s personal admiration for strongmen such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean president Kim Jong Un, along with his often contemptuous attitude toward democratically elected counterparts abroad. Trump thinks about the world the way a mob boss thinks about carving up the neighborhoods of a city with a small number of rival bosses: He conceives of himself as a strongman and respects his strongman counterparts abroad, above all Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Let Putin and Xi do what they wish in their near abroad, while the United States exerts its influence in Central and South America, as well as in the Middle East, where we will deepen ties with Israel and the region’s wealthy Sunni powers (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates) against Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. 

Viewed in historical terms, this would be a return to a 19th century model of international relations: Great powers dividing the world amongst themselves with no consideration given to the shape or direction of internal reform within countries or regions. Practically speaking, this would amount to a great stepping back of the United States from the decades-long aspiration to geopolitical and moral primacy. Rather than acting as global hegemon or sole superpower guaranteeing global order while using our great influence (exerted through both soft and hard power) to nudge countries in the direction of liberal democratic reforms, we would become free agents doing or taking what we will, while permitting other rising or revanchist powers to do the same within certain prescribed spheres of influence. 

The strong, in other words, would dominate, taking advantage of the less strong and the weak. This was the norm in international affairs for much of human history, and Trump appears instinctually inclined to revert to it from the higher-minded goals that began to emerge early in the 20th century, rose to dominance over the course of the Cold War, and reached a kind of apotheosis during the first two decades of its aftermath. Whether or not one views such a tectonic shift in the geopolitical order of the world as truly alarming, the prospect of the impetuous and incontinent Donald Trump effectuating and overseeing it ought to raise alarms among all who care about the fate of freedom and stability around the globe.

There is nothing about favoring strict limits on immigration, protectionist trade policies, and a less internationalist foreign policy that entails the rejection of the results of a free and fair election, a refusal of the peaceful transfer of power, and a (hapless) effort to launch a self-coup, including an active (and successful) attempt to incite an insurrectionary riot against the national legislature. Yet Trump did all of this in the closing months of his administration—because the only things that ultimately matter to him are aggrandizing his own power and avoiding being publicly recognized as a loser.

Over and over again during the Trump administration, the president lashed out in vindictive rage out of an urge to inspire rapturous applause among his most fervent supporters and to inflict pain on his enemies, broadly defined to include his political opponents, the news media, and sometimes every American who dared to prefer another party or person for the highest office in the land. And time and time again, he was rebuffed or ignored by those around him who placed their loyalty to longstanding liberal-democratic norms, the law, and the Constitution above their loyalty to Trump the aspiring tyrant.

At other times, the problem wasn’t so much Trump attempting to do something truly alarming and needing to be blocked as the reverse—a presidential go-ahead or signature was required and Trump delayed providing it out of pettiness and spite, as when he needed to be cajoled and even manipulated by his staff into signing necessary disaster relief for cities or states where a plurality or majority of voters favored Democrats.

This is the picture we’ve gotten of the Trump administration from exhaustive reporting on its inner workings, along with first-hand accounts of those who toiled within it: The 45th president desperately trying to break free from the constraints his staff placed on him. From everything we can tell, Trump would make very different kinds of staffing decisions the next time around. Going forward, he wants people who will do his bidding without question, not those who will block him in the name of higher laws or loyalties.

That’s what a gambit like “Schedule F” is really about. Trump plans to revive the drive from the final months of his first administration to reclassify as many as fifty thousand career civil servants working in the executive branch as “Schedule F” employees who can be fired at will and then be replaced with personal loyalists of the president. As I wrote back in July:

Democrats might dream of expanding the size and scope of the federal government in various ways to address the nation’s many problems and to help Americans with their (mainly economic) struggles. But the Trumpified Republicans are far more radical in their aims. Instead of building on or modestly adjusting what the federal government has done since the beginning of the 20th century, [Schedule F] aim[s] to overturn the very structure of the modern state, gutting the professional, merit-based civil service in favor of a patronage-based system that would hire and promote loyalists and right-wing ideologues.

This is what needs to be understood about Donald Trump: What’s most alarming about him is himself, not the ideological commitments that animate his political disposition in the United States and around the world. Trump adds something distinctive to the MAGA version of right-populist politics: an insatiable lust for power and attention. This is why what could merely be an abnormal reform of the executive branch is highly likely to involve truly alarming acts of defiance, as the administrative state and judiciary act to protect the federal bureaucracy from being transformed into a vehicle for the execution of one man’s petulant will and that man lashes out against the effort to rein him in. 

It’s also, finally, why Trump chose J.D. Vance as his running mate. Mike Pence might have been a loyal servant through much of Trump’s presidency, but when Trump attempted to push furthest beyond the bounds of the Constitution, the vice president stood his ground and refused to claim unconstitutional powers for himself and use them to help keep Trump in office despite losing the 2020 election. Vance has made clear on numerous occasions that he would have responded differently four years ago; he’s thereby also implied he’d do Trump’s bidding in response to eyebrow-raising orders emanating from the Oval Office during a second Trump administration.

Which leads us to the most eyebrow-raising event of all: January 6, 2021. Right-populist governments in countries like Hungary and Poland have shown themselves willing and eager to give themselves an electoral edge, making free elections less fair than they used to be. Trump went much further than that four years ago with his outright denial of the results of a free and fair election, and his willingness to incite an angry mob and then stand aside while that mob broke into and ransacked the national legislature during the certification of an election.

How much further would he go if he manages to gain power once again? Widespread purging of voter rolls in Democratic strongholds within swing states? Ensuring Republican dominated legislatures and secretaries of state change how ballots are counted? Defying the 22nd Amendment’s restriction on presidents running for a third term? Worst of all, using the Insurrection Act to delay, cancel, or restrict future elections in certain Democrat-leaning regions of the country?

Or, imagine the following scenario: widespread protests understandably and predictably break out in opposition to the administration rounding up and detaining millions of immigrants; Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, giving him the power to send in soldiers to restore order, which is then followed by more protests, which is then followed by more widespread deployment of troops and the de facto imposition of martial law in several American cities. Trump has recently begun to talk about deploying the military against “the enemy within,” so he seems to be telegraphing something like this right now, just as he talked during the 2020 campaign about refusing to accept the results if he didn’t win.

Could such truly alarming events transpire? Or am I just being paranoid—foolishly giving in to “Resistance” hysteria? Maybe. But that’s what a lot of smart people said in the weeks following the 2020 election. Let Trump rant and rave. Let him challenge the results in court. He’ll eventually come around, admit he lost, concede the election, and participate in a normal democratic transition. He won’t interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. “There Will Be No Trump Coup.”

Those level heads turned out to be completely wrong, vastly underestimating Trump’s willingness to shatter the democratic system for the sake of keeping himself in power and preserving an illusion of invincibility. On the basis of what we saw then and have seen and heard ever since, we have no reason to assure ourselves that Trump won’t try something even more extreme if given another opportunity. To hold otherwise is to make a leap of faith in defiance of overwhelming contrary evidence.

Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

A version of this piece also appears today in Notes from the Middleground.

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