Amid all his nonsensical ramblings, Donald Trump vows to impose three radical policies that are violent, antidemocratic and monumentally foolish. Do not dismiss these promises as “just Trump being Trump.” Believe the man when he tells you who he is and what he means to do if he is again elected president.
In virtually every campaign speech, Trump pledges to deport up to 12 million undocumented immigrants. It might sound impossible, but there is no reason to doubt he would try. Demonizing immigrants has been a consistent theme for Trump since his first campaign, and as president he punished asylum-seekers by deliberately separating families and housing children in cages.
On Saturday, at a rally in Wisconsin, Trump justified this plan by citing a false story about Venezuelan gang members having taken over an apartment complex in a Denver suburb. Police there say no such thing happened. But Trump trumpeted the lie and said that expelling migrants from the country “will be a bloody story.”
Imagine how bloody it would be to rip millions of men, women and children out of communities across the nation. Stephen Miller, the adviser most responsible for immigration policy during Trump’s presidency, has envisioned using the National Guard to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Miller’s fever dream goes on to imagine “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas” where migrants would await transport by air to their home countries.
Even if you put aside the inhumanity of such a program, imagine the impact on the economy. Trump tells audiences that undocumented migrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” but overall unemployment is near historic lows. Employers in cities and towns nationwide would be bereft.
Yes, this is madness. But experience teaches that Trump and his team, objectively, are mad.
Another promise Trump makes consistently, and that we should take seriously, is he will use presidential power to punish his political enemies. On Saturday, after the Wisconsin rally, Trump posted a screed on Truth Social renewing his false and disproven claims about losing the 2020 election only because of voter fraud.
“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Trump’s clear subtext is payback for the federal and state prosecutions he faces — trying to equate his own conduct with that of his political opponents. But there is a huge and obvious difference. Dozens of federal and state judges, including a number of Trump appointees, found no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election. But federal and state grand juries did find reason to indict Trump on felony charges for trying to overturn the election and absconding to Mar-a-Lago with a hoard of highly classified documents.
Trump’s anger might be unjustified, but it is real. He will surely take the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity as a green light to use the Justice Department as a weapon of vengeance.
Some might believe Trump’s boasts about mass deportations and political prosecutions are purely rhetorical, though I do not. But there is no room for doubt about one disastrous policy he swears to implement: There will be tariffs.
Trump’s all-purpose economic snake oil is imposing tariffs on imported goods. At various points, he has proposed a 10 percent tariff across the board, a tariff of up to 60 percent on Chinese imports specifically, and a 100 percent tariff on goods from countries that stop using the U.S. dollar as their reserve currency.
He seems sincerely, and incredibly, unable to understand how tariffs work. He portrays them as “taxes” on foreign countries, but actually it is U.S. importers who foot the bill, who will then pass those extra costs along to consumers. Trump’s tariffs would effectively be a huge tax increase on any American who buys anything made overseas.
Speaking last week to the Economic Club of New York — of all audiences — Trump defended this bad idea by praising the McKinley Tariff, an 1890 measure that raised import duties to nearly 50 percent and caused prices to soar. The tariff, named for Republican House member and future president William McKinley, ended up making Americans poorer and producing less revenue for the government, not more.
Anyone who wonders whether a second Trump term would really be so bad should listen to what he intends to do. It won’t just be bad. It will be much, much worse.
