Trump’s America already sounds like a nascent dictatorship

WASHINGTON, DC – Lest anyone is still in any doubt, each passing hour makes it clearer that the race for the Republican presidential nomination is already over.

Donald Trump is resurgent. He has the endorsements, the funding, and – most crucially – the momentum. He’s also got plans for a second term in the White House that the world must now take seriously.

Last month, he told Fox News that he will not be a dictator, “except for Day One” of his return to power. That day would dawn on 20 January, 2025, and in Iowa on Monday night he summarised his plans for the hours immediately after he takes the oath of office.

“We’re going to come together,” he told cheering Republicans gathered for his victory celebration.

“We’re going to ‘drill baby, drill’ right away,” he pledged, referring to his plan to steam-roller environmental protections that limit the development of new oil fields across the country.

Also on his first day back in the Oval Office, he vowed to address immigration. “We’re going to seal up the border, because right now we have an invasion of millions and millions of people who are coming into our country,” claimed Trump.

“I can’t imagine why they think that’s a good thing,” he said witheringly of the Biden administration.

Trump has not disclosed precisely how he would set about sealing America’s 1,954-mile border with Mexico. But he has pledged to force asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico, rather than be admitted to the United States to await the outcome of their applications, and he’s also pledged a muscular, costly border patrol crackdown to detain all migrants who cross the frontier illegally.

But to achieve his major Day One aims alone, more presidential muscle will be needed than the constitution permits. No constitutional mechanism permits a president simply to “seal the border”, any more than Trump was able to wall the United States off from Mexico during his first term. Similarly, any effort to clear the way for limitless oil production will spark legal action by environmentalists that could tie the White House up in knots for years.

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Disagreeable civil servants at both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Homeland Security would also seek to slow-walk the President’s agenda. Many of them bedevilled the White House during Trump’s first administration, and would make every effort to derail his programme again.

Trump’s team understands all of that, and is public about his plans to steamroller as many obstacles as possible. Trump aims to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants, and replace them with proven loyalists who are supportive of his “Make America Great Again” agenda.

“We need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy or … just want to keep their jobs,” Trump told supporters last summer. But government employees targeted by his crackdown – under current rules – could spend months appealing against their dismissal. And where he plans to find 50,000 loyalists to replace ousted “deep-state rogues” at the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, the State Department and other ministries remains entirely unknown.

Similarly, he plans no accommodations for Cabinet members who oppose his vision. Every member of his White House team, including the National Security Council, will have a proven track record of fealty to the Trumpian cause. “Experts” are no longer to be entertained, apart from those who evince ideological purity.

If that sounds like a nascent dictatorship, it should. Trump believes the only way to avoid the mistakes of his first term is to head off in a completely different direction, one that involves the distinct possibility of shredding America’s constitutional guardrails.

Trump loyalists make no bones about their plans. Kash Patel was chief of staff at the Pentagon in the first Trump administration. “The one thing we learned,” he said last month, “is that we’ve got to put in all-America patriots from top to bottom.”

He claimed the process of identifying suitable candidates was already under way, and said the new appointees will be empowered to “go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media … who lied about American citizens” who rioted on Capitol Hill on 6 January, 2021. He pledged to bring criminal cases against Trump’s enemies, targeting anyone “who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections … we’re putting you all on notice”.

To mobilise that kind of witch-hunt, Trump’s advisers are urging him to terminate the traditional independence of the Department of Justice. He would be entirely at liberty to do so. The Constitution is silent on the issue.

Trump already argues he’s the victim of political persecution at the hands of Biden’s Justice Department. Efforts to bring the Attorney General and his prosecuting staff under direct political control would roll back reforms introduced after the Watergate crisis, sparked by Richard Nixon’s efforts to interfere in ongoing investigations into his Presidency.

If Trump’s domestic policy veers dystopian, his foreign policy plans are worryingly undefined. He’s made grandiose claims about his ability to solve both the war in Ukraine and the crisis in the Middle East “in one day”.

His Ukraine plan involves Kyiv’s surrender of territory, and would delight Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow may also expect Trump to gut Nato, although the Republican front-runner has been opaque about his intentions towards the alliance.

On Monday night in Iowa, Trump’s language was conciliatory towards his Republican rivals, and even towards Democrats. At one point, he urged them to consider uniting around his candidacy, which is quite a stretch for a man who last month described immigrants as “vermin … poisoning the blood” of the United States.

But for now, this is Donald Trump’s election. If he wins in November, the world must brace for a much harsher, less compromising ride than the first time around.

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