A Second Trump Term: What Are Trump’s Plans if He Wins Reelection?

On the climate front, Trump has promised to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act to dismantle Biden-era advancements in clean energy and renewables. He’s also promising to further increase oil and gas drilling, a move a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told The Guardian “would roll back progress made over decades to protect public health and safety” and “destroy everything.” Trump has also vowed to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement (again).

Regarding foreign policy, Trump has generally considered himself to be an isolationist. Though he has perhaps been strategically quiet on the Israel-Hamas war, he told Fox & Friends in March that he was “on board” with Israel’s assault on Gaza, and that Israel needed to “finish the problem.”

Given that Trump adapted much of the Heritage Foundation’s agenda the last time around, it’s worth taking a close look at Project 2025, a 900-page plan funded by the conservative think tank to completely reshape the executive branch if a Republican wins the presidency in 2024. Whether or not Project 2025 comes to fruition in a second Trump term, the future it lays out is startling. The plan, presented as a conservative “Mandate for Leadership,” is a right-wing dream, pushing massive corporate tax cuts, abortion rights rollbacks (including the revival of the 19th-century Comstock Act, which would essentially ban abortion nationwide), and the demise of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

This plan would also give immense power to Christian nationalism and the concept of “natural” families, with an emphasis on hampering access to hormonal birth control and even no-fault divorce. In wildly transphobic language, it uses fearmongering in regard to the “sexualization of children,” proposes destroying “the Biden administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity, subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,’ replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”

Project 2025 aims to accomplish these Christo-fascist goals by reshaping the federal government, practically giving the president absolute power over the executive branch. The plan further proposes dismantling government organizations like the Federal Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and ousting as many as 50,000 federal workers in favor of political appointees who are loyal to the president. It provides, in short, a harrowing vision for a GOP presidency that would be unrestrained by any forces that could block the president’s agenda.

. This is the kind of presidency Trump is trying to craft if he wins reelection. The TIME article reiterated that Trump would stack his second term with loyalists, both within his administration and beyond. (His daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is already the new chair of the Republican National Committee.) Trump made it clear to TIME that he would fire any members of his administration who disagree with him, and would not appoint anyone who believed Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. He said he would consider firing U.S. Attorneys who refused his prosecution orders, and when asked if he would support his team’s efforts to give him the power to fire civil servants, he responded, “You have some people that are protected that shouldn’t be protected.” He confirmed that he would consider pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, who he has called “hostages” and “political prisoners”; he even plays a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sung by a choir of January 6 prisoners, at campaign events.

There’s no question that even “just” another four years of Trump would have a significant negative impact on this country for generations to come, as his first term did — and that’s assuming we only get one more term. As presidential historian David Brinkley told TIME, a second Trump term could spell “the end of our democracy, and the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.”

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