What Trump Is Likely To Do In A Second Term
In an unusual move, the Republican Party didn’t release a formal platform this year. Trump hasn’t said a ton about his second-term plans, either. But that doesn’t mean we have no idea what a second Trump term might look like. It’s likely Trump will move the government in these four ways in a second term:
Making the executive branch more loyal to him. Trump has spent his entire first term complaining that federal workers and agencies — the “deep state” in the president’s language — won’t carry out his agenda. (In many cases, that’s because Trump’s edicts are legally questionable.) But when Trump has tried to wrest more control of federal agencies, most notably when he fired then-FBI Director James Comey, there has often been a political backlash.
Such backlashes would likely matter less to Trump if he were elected to a second term. Indeed, according to reporting by Axios, Trump would look to replace CIA Chief Gina Haspel, FBI Director Chris Wray and Defense Secretary Mike Esper if he is reelected. Expect to see these sorts of moves throughout the executive branch if Trump is reelected — the president filling key jobs with people who will pursue his agenda and removing people who won’t, even if the rationales for these changes are essentially replacing someone who won’t violate core democratic values with someone who will. (Wray, for example, has said that there is no widespread fraud in vote-by-mail programs, a stance that is factually correct but in contradiction to the president’s rhetoric; Esper declared this summer that he was uncomfortable using the U.S. military to limit protests, a view not held by the president; Haspel hasn’t downplayed Russian attempts to interfere in the 2020 election and boost Trump electorally, even as the president has.)
A new executive order from the White House has laid out a path for the administration to designate thousands of government jobs as political posts rather than civil service ones, meaning that the president could then remove people from those posts who don’t agree with him ideologically and replace them with people who do. This might be a way for Trump to get rid of high-profile nonpartisan officials that he has clashed with, such as infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Promoting his core constituencies (white people, Christians) and diminishing others (Black people, Latinos, immigrants). White identity politics largely defined Trump’s first term, and a second term would be unlikely to stray from those goals. The administration is already trying to curtail immigration, drop policies that encourage colleges and universities to use admissions policies that help increase the number Black and Latino students, and limit diversity trainings that highlight racial disparities that Black Americans in particular face. Expect more policies in this vein in a second Trump term. One major potential change: The Trump administration might issue an executive order saying that children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented immigrants are not automatically considered citizens — in effect rolling back the concept of birthright citizenship.
Reducing regulations. The Trump administration rolled back a lot of regulations on businesses when the GOP controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018. I would expect the administration to both roll back more regulations through executive power and not enforce others.
Boosting red America and weakening blue America. The administration is trying to conduct the U.S. Census in a way that results in fewer undocumented immigrants being counted as part of the population, a move that would likely result in fewer congressional seats in Democratic-leaning areas, particularly California. In a second Trump term, I would expect more moves that empower conservative-leaning areas, states and industries and weaken Democratic-leaning ones. For example, the administration might tell Twitter that it must either allow Trump to tweet whatever he wants, even if his tweets include falsehoods, or face intense federal investigations if the company tries to remove his tweets that violate Twitter’s policies.