Trump's Plans for a Second Term Are So Bad That They Almost Make the First One Look Good

[Celerity]

Given how the first one went, you can probably guess why that's a bad thing.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/donald-trump-second-term-plans

https://archive.ph/sRxYL



In a reasonable society, an ex-president who's been indicted a whopping four times on a total of 91 felony counts—with charges ranging from obstruction of justice to conspiracy to defraud the United States—would not have a snowball's chance in hell of ever being president again. It simply would not be a thing, full stop. You try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, or ask state officials things like “Just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me,” and you don’t get to be president again!

Obviously, though, we very much do not live in a reasonable society; we live in one in which Donald Trump is beating the next closest contender for the GOP nomination by a logic-defying 43 points. And one in which a guy who allegedly stored classified government documents next to the toilet—right there, where experts say they were potentially getting sprayed with shit particles!—and allegedly tried to “delete” Mar-a-Lago security camera footage requested by the Justice Department, is edging out the guy who did neither of those things in a general election matchup.

All of this means that Donald Trump has significantly better than a snowball’s chance in hell of getting reelected, and anyone who lived through his first term knows why that’s a legitimately terrifying prospect. But, of course, a second term for Trump wouldn’t be simply a repeat of the last time around when it comes to how many times a day you’d find yourself asking, “Oh, God what did he do now?" No, a second term for Trump would be so, so much worse. The following is just a small sampling of why:

Career civil servants are out, die-hard loyalists are in

Shortly before the 2020 election, Trump signed an executive order known as Schedule F, allowing his administration to gut employment protections for thousands of career federal employees whose jobs—which range from making sure the air is clean to ensuring food and drugs are safe—are not supposed to be subject to the whims of whomever is in the White House at the time. Stripped of such protections, the move would have given Trump the power to fire whoever he wanted, and replace them with individuals whose chief qualifications were unflagging loyalty. Trump, of course, was not able to stick around to see this plan out, and after Joe Biden was inaugurated, he canceled Trump’s executive order. But, with a possible second term on the horizon, Trump and his allies have made it clearer than ever that they would pick up exactly where they left off.

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