lonnie 0077

Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby at Popular Information:

This is reality: Donald Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee for President for the third consecutive election. Given the United State's polarized political climate, either major party nominee has a realistic chance of winning a second term on November 5, 2024.  Trump is a deeply flawed candidate with some unique advantages. He has an energized base that will stick with him no matter what. Four serious criminal indictments — and a jury verdict finding him civilly liable for sexual assault — have not impacted his dominant standing in the Republican Party. Trump is also facing an opponent, President Joe Biden, with a historically low approval rating. Biden's popularity stands at just 37%, which is a lower rating than any elected president at this point since Gallup began tracking the data in 1955.  Over the next 330 days, media outlets will spend countless hours covering the anticipated matchup between Trump and Biden as if it's a sporting competition. Polls will be analyzed, dissected, and averaged. Predictions will be made. This kind of coverage is popular because people are anxious to know who will be the next president.  Here's the truth: No one will know who the next president will be until November 5, 2024. Save yourself some time and ignore the chatter.  Unlike a horse race, the outcome of the 2024 presidential election will impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and billions of people around the world. The presidential election will likely be decided by people who, today, have not made up their minds about who to support in 2024. For many of these swing voters, their decision will hinge on their expectation of what Trump will do in a second term. Of course, we don't know everything that will happen in a potential Trump second term. But Trump and his allies have made their intentions clear on a range of key issues. 

[...]

Trump says he will issue "full pardons" to January 6 insurrectionists

Trump has promised to issue pardons to those involved in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. In September 2022, in an interview with Wendy Bell, Trump said, “I will look very, very favorably about full pardons… with an apology to many.” In May 2023, during a town hall with CNN, Trump again said that he would likely pardon “a large portion of” insurrectionists, stating that “it’ll be very early on.” Trump said, “They’re living in hell… and they’re great people. Many of them are just great people.” Trump added that while he was “inclined to pardon many of them,” he couldn’t “say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.”  Among those convicted for their actions on January 6 are Thomas Webster, who was sentenced in September 2022 to “10 years in prison for assaulting police” during the Capitol attack, and Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, who was sentenced in September to 22 years in prison for “seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol.” 

Trump says he will cut funding to schools that cover subjects he believes are "inappropriate"

Trump has vowed to cut funding for schools that teach about aspects of race and gender. In a campaign video released in January, Trump promised to “cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children,” stating that “[w]e are not going to allow it to happen.”  Critical Race Theory is a complex legal theory that is not taught in K-12 schools. Despite this, the right has dubbed many books that simply discuss racism as Critical Race Theory. Because of this, if Trump is reelected, any school that does not implement an ideological purge of its curricular materials could be at risk of losing federal funding.

Trump says he will legally erase trans people and ban them from military service

In a video posted to his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said he would “ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth” if reelected in 2024. At the Turning Point Action conference in July, Trump additionally promised to “restore the Trump ban on transgender in the military.”  “No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender,” Trump said in the video. Trump falsely claimed that it is a concept “never heard of in all of human history” before “the radical left invented it just a few years ago.” According to the Human Rights Campaign, however, “transgender and non-binary communities” have existed for centuries.

[...]

Trump says he will investigate NBC and MSNBC for treason and potentially remove the company from public airwaves

Trump has proposed investigating media publications for treason. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that “Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC… should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason." Trump promised that when he “WIN[S] the Presidency of the United States” the media “will be thoroughly scrutinized.” Trump also questioned whether media companies should be potentially removed from the airwaves. “Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE?” Trump called NBC a “true threat to Democracy” and “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,” stating that the “Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great country.” 

Popular Information has a look at 10 alarming things that will be on the agenda if Donald Trump wins a 2nd term in 2024 and takes office in 2025.

Some of these include the following: erase trans people out of existence, cut funding to schools that teach about racial equity and LGBTQ+ existence, issue full pardons to the domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol on 01.06.2021, shut down and censor any outlet that reports the truth about his fascistic ways, and act as a dictator from day one.

Trump's six bankruptcies and 91 criminal charges, added to his two impeachments and mishandling of top secrets, paint a very obvious picture of a Trump future. This is who he is.

He delivers nothing. MAGA past is prologue.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property. But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.

Trump now nurses deep grudges against these officers and civilians, who slow-rolled and smothered his various illegal and autocratic impulses, including his enraged demand to kill the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and his desire to deploy America’s military against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

The 2020 election, of course, is the source of Trump’s chief grudge against senior military leaders. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was especially determined to keep the armed forces out of the various schemes to stay in office devised by the Trump team and its allies, including a delusional plan, proposed by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, to have the military go into swing states and seize voting machines. Trump has since implied (in response to a profile of Milley by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) that Milley should get the death penalty. Milley reportedly believes that Trump, if reelected, will try to jail him and other senior national-security figures, a concern shared by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law. Publicly, Trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.

On November 9, 2020, Trump dumped Esper and named Christopher Miller, a retired colonel and Pentagon bureaucrat, as acting secretary of defense. Miller took along Kash Patel, a Trump sycophant, as his chief of staff. Trump sent Douglas Macgregor, another retired colonel and a pro-Russia Fox News regular, to Miller as a senior adviser. (Earlier, Trump had attempted and failed to make Macgregor the ambassador to Germany.) Trump installed Anthony Tata—a retired one-star Army general who has claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that a former CIA director was trying to have Trump assassinated—in the third-most-senior job at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, the Senate had wisely declined to confirm Tata’s appointment to that position, but in November, Trump gave him the job in an acting capacity anyway. These moves, among others, led all 10 living former secretaries of defense to issue a startling and unprecedented joint statement. On January 3, 2021, they directly enjoined Miller and his subordinates to uphold their constitutional duty and “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” The letter pointedly reminded Miller and his team that they were “bound by oath, law and precedent,” and called upon them, “in the strongest terms,” to honor “the history of democratic transition in our great country.”

If reelected, Trump would attempt to gain authoritarian control of the Defense Department’s uppermost levels from the very beginning. There are more Anthony Tatas and Douglas Macgregors out there, and Trump’s allies are likely already seeking to identify them. If the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s appointees, it wouldn’t matter much: Trump has learned that he can keep rotating people through acting positions, daring the Senate to stop him. The career civil servants underneath these appointees—who work on everything from recruiting to nuclear planning—would disobey Trump if he attacked the constitutional order. These civilians, by law, cannot be fired at will, a problem Trump tried to remedy in the last months of his administration by proposing a new category of government appointments (Schedule F) that would have converted some of the most important civil-service positions into political appointments directly controlled by the White House. President Joe Biden immediately repealed this move after taking office, but Trump has vowed to reinstate it.

In his two-pronged offensive to capture the military establishment while eviscerating the civil service, Trump would likely rely on former officers such as Miller and fringe-dwelling civilians such as Patel, but he would also almost certainly find at least a few serving senior officers—he would not need many—who would accept his offer to abandon their oath. Together, they would make a run at changing the nature of the armed forces. This is not abstract theorizing. The Heritage Foundation recently released “Project 2025,” a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican president’s administration. The Defense Department chapter was written by none other than former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. It is mostly a rationalization for more spending, but it includes a clear call for a purge of the military’s senior ranks to clean out “Marxist indoctrination”—an accusation he does not define—along with demands for expelling trans service members and reinstating those service members who were dismissed for refusing COVID vaccinations.

[...] Even if only some of the actions I’ve described here succeed, any number of disasters might follow. Trump could jeopardize national security by surrounding himself with military and defense officials who would help him dissolve our alliances (especially NATO), weaken our military readiness, undermine our intelligence services, and abandon our friends around the world, all while he seeks closer relations with authoritarian regimes—especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He could issue illegal orders to engage in torture or to commit other war crimes overseas. And he could bring the entire planet to disaster should senior military leaders obey his unhinged orders to kill foreign leaders, start a war, or even use nuclear weapons. At home, Trump could order unconstitutional shows of military support for his administration to intimidate his opponents. He could order American soldiers into the streets against protesters. (Trump’s allies are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day to quell any demonstrations against his return to office.) Officers refusing such orders could be dismissed or reassigned, which in turn could provoke a political confrontation between the Trump loyalists in the high command and the rest of the armed forces, itself a frightening and previously unthinkable prospect.

And if Trump succeeds in simultaneously capturing the U.S. military while gutting the other key institutions that protect democracy—especially the courts and the Justice Department—nothing will stop him from using force to put down opposition and stay in power. Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism. The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment. But Trump and his allies understand that by leaving the military outside their political control the last time around, they also left intact a crucial bulwark against their plans. They will not make the same mistake twice.