Tuesday, May 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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How catastrophic would a second Trump presidency be? Worse than you think. Worse, even, than I had feared — before I read his recent Time magazine interview in which Donald Trump lays out his plans. They are, in a word, insane.
Imagine the National Guard, perhaps aided by active-duty military units, fanning out across the country to round up and deport all undocumented migrants, believed to number roughly 11 million. Imagine these men, women and children being held pending deportation in vast detention camps.
That’s what Trump told Time he would do. He said he would ask local police departments to help in this nationwide pogrom, adding that jurisdictions that refuse to participate would be denied federal funding. As he phrased it, “they won’t partake in the riches.”
Imagine the National Guard also being sent into cities to fight crime, whether or not governors request such assistance. When Time correspondent Eric Cortellessa noted that violent crime is declining across the country — homicides fell by 13% last year, according to the FBI — Trump insisted, without evidence, that the data is rigged. “It’s a lie,” he claimed.
Think about what our lives would be like if Trump even tries to do those two things. This is not the kind of country where troops in military gear set up highway checkpoints and raid residential neighborhoods, demanding to see everyone’s papers. This is not a country where camo-clad soldiers patrol shopping malls and nightlife districts. Not yet, that is.
Do you like the rule of law? If so, you probably won’t like Trump’s pledge that “yes, absolutely” he would consider pardoning all the defendants charged with or convicted of crimes stemming from participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “I call them the J-6 patriots,” he told Time.
Those “patriots” smashed through police lines and into the seat of U.S. democracy, injuring 140 officers and forcing members of Congress first to cower in fear for their lives and then to flee the building. “Hang Mike Pence,” they shouted, as they sought Trump’s vice president for the stated purpose of lynching him. Trump, meanwhile, sat passively in the White House for hours and watched all of this unfold on television. Now, since the insurrectionists believed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he would consider absolving them all of any wrongdoing.
In fact, upholding the “big lie” appears to be a prerequisite for serving in a second Trump administration. Asked about hiring anyone who acknowledges that Joe Biden legitimately won, Trump told Time: “I wouldn’t feel good about it.”
That means Trump would not be constrained by “mature adults” like those who served in some key White House posts during his first term. The non-MAGA Republican establishment has been vanquished and obliterated. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, runs the Republican National Committee alongside another stolen-election Trump loyalist. GOP-aligned think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have fallen in line and are developing detailed plans for shrinking the federal workforce and forcing what’s left of it to bend to Trump’s imperial will.
“When I first got to Washington, I knew very few people,” Trump said in the interview, which was published last week. Now, he knows lots of people who know how to get things done — Lord help us all.
Having created the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, Trump said that as president he would stick to his latest campaign position, which is trying to have the abortion issue both ways: He says the question is now entirely up to the states, but he refuses to say whether he would veto federal abortion restrictions if they reached his desk. Would he be comfortable if states decided to monitor pregnancies? Or even prosecute women for having abortions? “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not,” he said — which means no woman, in any state, should be comfortable.
On foreign affairs, Trump reiterated his threat not to honor our commitment to defend a NATO ally that does not, in his opinion, spend enough on collective defense. “If you’re not going to pay, then you’re on your own,” he said. Asked specifically about continued U.S. aid to Ukraine (not a NATO member), Trump said, “I wouldn’t give unless Europe starts equalizing.”
Europe actually gives about as much aid to Ukraine as the United States does, but who cares about facts? Judging by Trump’s record, his election would be calamitous for the freedom fighters of Ukraine — and also for the Palestinians, since Trump told Time that a two-state solution, the long-standing goal of U.S. policy, “is going to be very, very tough.”
Think about all of this when you decide whether and how to vote in November. Read the interview. And don’t say Trump didn’t warn us.
Eugene Robinson is a columnist for The Washington Post.
