July 31, 2023
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
What Would A Second
Trump Term Look Like
Friends,
In a column published at my blog site and elsewhere this past
June 24, “The Return of the ‘Great Disruptor’ – Donald Trump,” I offered
reasons why I believed Donald Trump would not only garner the Republican
nomination for president in 2024, but why much of the criticism directed
against him and his candidacy, mostly from other GOP candidates and various
“NeverTrumpers,” was largely ill-founded. I urged support for him because I
believe he would be the necessary radical tonic needed to dislodge the managerial
and administrative elites who now largely control the American nation, and thus
begin a painful, but required process—a veritable counter-revolution—to salvage
what is left of this country and just perhaps recover some of the guiding
principles and beliefs that once informed the republic.
Two of the major objections to my arguments—certainly the most
frequently repeated—I addressed briefly in that earlier column: First, that
Trump cannot win the 2024 presidential election, that is, he is unelectable. The
reasoning goes that he would lose college-educated voters and, particularly, upper-middle
class females, as well as independents, put off by his personal hijinks and
legal woes. And without them, in the general election, he would lose to Joe
Biden, despite Biden’s apparent weaknesses and the electoral shenanigans of the
Democratic Party. So, the argument goes, the GOP needs to select another
candidate, either a DeSantis, or a Mike Pence, or a Tim Scott, someone who
doesn’t bring that baggage to the table and could win in 2024.
Second, and perhaps a more substantial criticism is that Trump’s
record of appointments during his first term left much to be desired. Indeed,
that a number of crucial appointees named by him to positions within his
administration, including some high level policy advisers, actually undercut
and sabotaged his announced programs and initiatives. In some cases, not just
privately, but publicly they opposed an America First agenda. Nearly all of
them can be classified as “neoconservatives” and globalists. The list of those malefactors
is unfortunately fairly long, including such individuals as John Bolton, “Mad
Dog” Mattis, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams, Mike Pence, and Nikki
Haley, to name only a few in the upper echelon who occupied positions of
authority and direction (and not counting lower-level administrative personnel).
Certainly, most of those appointments were recommended by members of the
Republican DC establishment and found sinecures due to President Trump’s
initial desire to work with the GOP establishment and cement his surprisingly
successful candidacy with party regulars.
That strategy of inclusion and party “unity” was a disaster to
the Make America Great Again agenda, but, rather, produced various roadblocks
and the uncompletion of Trump’s promised agenda. The question, then, for many on
the Right this time round is: would a second Trump term resemble the first one,
with an ambitious agenda compromised by a dubiously loyal staff?
Just recently two reports have appeared that answer in large
part questions suscitated by these objections.
First, new extensive polling demonstrates that Donald Trump
enjoys increased support from college-educated and suburban voters, polling
better with those groups than Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis’s key argument
was that he was “Trump without the bravado,” a calmer and less
controversial—and thus more electable—version of the Donald. He could bring
over college-educated voters and independents, voters who Trump scared away.
But a report published by The
Washington Examiner (July 27, 2023), using June data from Echelon Insights
…shows
a significant increase in college-educated support for Trump, surpassing 50%
from people with bachelor's degrees. Trump's support surpassed the group's
support for DeSantis. While DeSantis is preferred by a notable percentage of
those with bachelor's (42%) and graduate (40%) degrees, Trump boasts a 10-point
lead among the latter. The former president is also preferred by 46% of those
with graduate degrees.
College-educated
voters have not historically been Trump's chief constituency. In fact, he was
able to beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election with just 29% of his support coming from
voters with college degrees.
While Trump
doesn't require significant backing from this demographic, expanding support
from them has allowed the former president to maintain his lead over GOP
competitors, even if they chip away at some of his base.
The second report, first published by Bloomberg
News (July 21) indicates that President Trump has taken significant steps
to avoid the personnel issues and unfinished or undercut agenda items left
incomplete from his first term. An analysis of his programmatic “Agenda47” plans
reveal that he apparently has learned from the mistakes made during his first
term, and he has now surrounded himself with solid, credentialed talent from
the populist, MAGA Right.
The Bloomberg report, despite its hostile tone, deserves to be
quoted at length:
If Donald Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he’ll bar
babies born in the US from automatically claiming citizenship, ban transgender
people from the military, hold elections for school principals and swiftly end
the war in Ukraine…. His plans, shaped by a group of firebrand allies from his
first term, also include ousting scores of civil servants in the
national-security and law-enforcement establishment and ordering the Justice
Department to criminally investigate his predecessor.
…Trump has started to go deep in his own policy weeds. Many of
his proposals would likely face court challenges; others would be difficult to
pass through Congress. “He is throwing down a lot of policy and nobody is picking
it up,” Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, who is once again advising him,
said in an interview. “There’s a bunch of think tanks, three or four working
groups, and a number of other vectors all coming together. The second term is
being put together right now.”
A
coterie of aides and informal advisers from the fringe [sic!] of the Republican
Party are advising Trump on his policies. They include Roger Stone, who
recently traveled on Trump’s plane with him to Iowa; Michael Flynn, the retired
general who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser; Stephen Miller, the
former Trump adviser who championed his most aggressive and controversial
anti-immigrant measures; and Bannon….
If
he wins in 2024, Trump is expected to end all federal prosecutions of himself
and his supporters and advisers. At the heart of the Trump policy-development
process are two aides and former White House speech writers, Vince Haley and
Ross Worthington. They are assisted by think tanks formed by Trump
administration alums including the America First Policy Institute — stacked
with former officials including Larry Kudlow, Kellyanne Conway, Brooke Rollins
and Keith Kellogg — and the Center for Renewing America, helmed by former top
budget official Russ Vought.
One
of the former president’s allies called AFPI the Trump world’s shadow
government…. [A]lso involved, including John McEntee, Trump’s former body man
turned head of White House personnel. McEntee spent his final months of the
administration trying to root out officials deemed insufficiently loyal.
The
policies Trump and his team are drawing from the former president’s own anger
toward so-called “deep state” bureaucrats he believes stymied his first-term
ambitions, as well as [from] hostility among White conservatives toward
education and social movements intended to support racial diversity and gender
identity.
Trump
recently told a conference of far-right moms that he’d do away with the
Department of Education entirely and have parents elect principals. Trump says
he’d ask Congress to pass a law recognizing only male and female genders.
He
also wants to increase tariffs on China by the billions, deploy the US Navy to
help fight drug cartels and build more of the wall between the US and Mexico
that his first administration couldn’t finish.
Former
Trump economic adviser Steve Moore said he’s scheduled to meet Trump soon to
brainstorm ideas for contrasting his economic record with Biden’s. Moore says
Trump should zero in on how much middle-class families’ bills have risen under
Biden due to inflation.
Trump
says he would immediately “settle” Russia’s war in Ukraine, without
elaborating. In one video, he calls it a “lie”
that “Russia represents our greatest threat.”
Trump’s
2016 campaign was guided more by his own instincts, but his 2024 run is a
better-managed affair, including professionally produced, presidential-looking
policy videos, shot at his golf clubs, that are catalogued in a section of his
campaign website called “Agenda47.” Trump would be the 45th and 47th US
president if he’s returned to the White House.
“Never
before in the modern era have you had someone looking to take the White House
that has such a firm set of policy objectives,” his senior campaign adviser
Jason Miller said in an interview. Former Trump officials say he’d issue a
fresh executive order taking aim at bureaucrats believed to be so opposed to
his policies that they would quietly thwart his directives. Trump signed an
order in October 2020 creating a class of federal employees called “Schedule F”
that would have no civil service or union protections, making them easier to
fire. President Joe Biden rescinded it.
“I would be shocked if two-thirds of non-political appointees in the Justice Department are not forced out in the first 100 days” after Trump returns to office, Bannon said. “There’s going to be a purge of this corrupt apparatus. These radicals inside Justice, FBI, and CIA are going to be gone.”
Reading the Bloomberg report one can fully understand the
abject terror, fear and horror of the Left and establishment
Republican/conservative elites, as well as their determination to “get Trump”
by any and all means—"lawfare,” election manipulation, use of the 14th
Amendment to disqualify him as having engaged in sedition, rebellion, and
treason…any method, any action, including very possibly outrageous
imprisonment, and if President Trump should emerge as a real threat to Deep
State dominance, could we see an attempted assassination?
It’s happened before.
After all the virulent, hysterical and unbridled hatred of the
45th president knows no bounds, and nothing is off the table. All
the more reason to become informed and to be vitally involved in efforts to
assure election integrity.
2024 may well be the year that determines if the American
republic can survive, much less recover.
