Trump’s Plans for a Second Term Are So Bad That They Almost Make the First One Look Good

Speaking of Miller and family separation, during a town hall with CNN in May, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of bringing back the barbaric practice. During Trump’s time in office, thousands of children, including infants, were ripped from their parents with no process in place for reuniting them. In February, the Department of Homeland Security said nearly 1,000 children separated at the border years prior had yet to be reunited with their parents.

Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly planning to go after not just illegal immigration but legal immigration as well (just as he did in his first term). Oh, and top of the humanitarian impact, Forbes notes that Trump’s immigration policies “will likely decimate long-term US economic growth.”

Speaking of the economy…

In August, Trump announced that should he win a second term, he’ll “automatically” slap a 10 percent tariff on virtually all foreign goods coming into the country—an that idea economists on both sides of the aisle criticized, with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, calling the proposal “lunacy.” Why isn’t the plan winning many fans? For one thing, experts say it would put millions out of work. For another, tariffs disproportionately hurt lower-income households, i.e., the group the ex-president is supposedly all about looking out for.

“A tariff of that scope and size would impose a massive tax on the folks who it intends to help,” Paul Winfree—who served as Trump’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council and is currently the president of a center-right think tank—told The Washington Post last month. “It would be a disaster for the US economy,” added Michael Strain, an economist at the center-right think tank the American Enterprise Institute. “It would raise prices for consumers and be met with considerable retaliation from other nations, which would raise the costs facing US businesses. It would reduce employment among manufacturing workers. It would be very, very bad.”

If that’s not enough, the Post reported in September that the ex-president’s economic team is “plotting an aggressive new set of tax cuts to push on the campaign trail and from the Oval Office if he wins a second term,” with the focus currently on the corporate tax rate, which Team Trump apparently thinks is just too damn high. (As a reminder, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.) “The idea I’ve been talking about with Trump is: Why don’t we go to 15% corporate rate, get rid of the credits and deductions, and just make it 15%,” Stephen Moore—whose short-lived nomination by Trump to the Federal Reserve Board was dubbed “truly appalling”—told the Post. “That’s one of the ideas that’s being tossed around.” Responding to the news that Trump and company think companies like, say, Amazon, need to pay even less in taxes, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told The Messenger that the plan in question would “turn back the clock to the trickle-down economics that hollowed out the American middle class and added trillions to the national debt.”

“You know we’re not supposed to do that”

“I will send in the National Guard until law and order is restored. You know we’re not supposed to do that,” is a real thing Trump said at CPAC in March, while speaking about crime in cities, adding, “Frankly, the federal government should take over control and management of Washington, DC. I wouldn’t even call the mayor.” In a video released in July, he announced that he would require police departments across the country to implement “stop-and-frisk,” i.e., the NYPD practice of detaining and searching civilians that disproportionately impacts people of color and was ruled unconstitutional in 2013 by a federal judge.

January 6 pardons

Trump has said that he will pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted of federal crimes following their participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, and that many will receive an “apology.” As a reminder, the insurrection left multiple people dead and approximately 140 members of law enforcement injured as a result of being attacked with bats, flagpoles, stun guns, and pepper spray.

Education

Trump has said he wants to get rid of the Department of Education and have states “run the education of our children.” Not surprisingly, he’s claimed he’ll cut federal funding for schools that teach critical race theory or what he calls “transgender insanity.” He’s also said he’ll bring back his “1776 Commission,” which was notably devoid of any actual professional historians, to promote a “patriotic” curriculum. And, naturally, he wants parents to be able to fire principals. “What Trump is trying to resurrect is something that was thoroughly discredited by the professional historical community in a totally apolitical context,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, told The Washington Post. “There’s lots of places to look and see what happens when history education gets stripped of its professional integrity in the interest of a political party.”

Going after transgender care

Trump has threatened to punish doctors and hospitals who provide gender-affirming health care to minors, and said he’ll ask Congress to pass a nationwide law barring the practice in “all 50 states.” He’s also vowed to sign a federal law that would only recognize two genders, and would ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.

Sorry, Ukraine

It’s not entirely clear how a potential Trump reelection would impact Russia’s war in Ukraine, but it would presumably not be good, given his deep and abiding admiration for Vladimir Putin. And the fact that he refused to commit to backing Ukraine during his CNN with town hall in May.

Abortion rights are on the line (again)

It’s also not entirely clear what Trump would do on abortion in a second term but just because he’s seemingly less antiabortion than, say, Ron DeSantis, does not mean he is not a direct threat to reproductive rights. For one thing, he not only set the wheels in motion for Roe v. Wade to be overturned, he brags about having done so all the time. For another, he’s suggested he’d restrict abortion at the federal level, and given his contributions to rolling the clock back some 50 years so far, we should obviously take that threat seriously. 

Burning the planet in a shallow grave

As Politico reported in July, conservative operatives have written a climate plan for Trump that “would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.” As a former EPA official told Newsweek, “I would expect as in his past term that any impediment to unbridled profit would be obliterated.”

Revenge prosecutions

After he was indicted over his handling of classified documents, Trump wrote on Truth Social in all caps: “I will appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!” A few months later, he was asked, “If you’re president again, will you lock people up?” He responded: “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”