Would the US survive a second Trump presidency?
2023-12-15 00:24:21
Every Friday, Guardian columnist and former Washington correspondent, Jonathan Freedland, invites experts to help analyse the latest in American politics. From politicians to journalists covering the White House and beyond, Jonathan and his guests give listeners behind the scenes access to how the American political machine works.
This is The Guardian.
On Wednesday, House Republicans ramped up their attack on the White House voting to authorize an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. Despite presenting no real evidence yet that the president has done anything wrong.
Investigation is focused on the Biden family's business dealings over the years, especially that of the president's son, Hunter Biden.
But some Republicans, like former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, are less concerned with the current president than they are with the previous one, Donald Trump.
One of the things that we see happening today is sort of a sleepwalking into a dictatorship in the United States.
When Trump himself was asked about all this on Fox News, he hardly reassured those who were worried.
You would never abuse power as retribution against anybody, except for day one.
The presumptive Republican nominee apparently thinks it's comforting to say he'd only be a dictator on his first day back in the White House. But many worry that he'd play the unrestrained autocrat much longer than that. So what would a Trump presidency 2.0 look like? Would a second term really be as catastrophic as the critics believe? What would be the impact of a Trump sequel not only on the U.S but on the world?
I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly American.
What would be the impact of a Trump presidency? 2?
0 on the world.
Well, I mean, it's a fear that we're going to be in a 2020 type situation in all of the ways that 2020 manifested so strangely and often terribly.
Jeffrey Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and the most recent issue of their magazine is dedicated entirely to one topic if Trump wins.
24 pieces in all. And the goal was to have each person sort of take a slice of what the future might hold, and based on their own past reporting and analysis. And the things that Donald Trump and his people are saying have been saying up until now. Try to be a little bit predictive and say this is what this administration will look like. I mean, and it's to the point of, there's a level of specificity here. I have McKay Coppins, who, you know, is the biographer of Mitt Romney most recently.
McKay Coppins is literally talking about the bureaucrats and officials who will staff the next Trump administration, people like Stephen Miller, who was the immigration czar, for instance. And talking about some of the characters who will come in. I wanted to be able to show our readers and anybody who would pick this up, you know, to the best of our ability. This is what it's going to be like. Don't be surprised.
And you call your own piece a warning, and that's very much the thrust. And you mentioned McKay Coppins. Listeners to this podcast heard him talking about Mitt Romney just a few weeks back. Before we get into chapter by chapter, because it really is a 360 degree view of what a Trump presidency would look like. You make the point there that it is if Trump wins, rather than when. And the big obstacle that people see between him and a second term is, in part, the legal series of hurdles he has to clear. I mean, an extremely unusual situation where it's not just one or two, he has multiple cases ongoing.
You look at the calendar next year, there are primary elections, but there are just as many as it appears. Sort of trial dates and court dates for him. Whether it's deciding how much he has to pay out for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who he was found to have defamed by denying that he raped her. There's obviously the case about, you know, his fraud in his business, the keeping or withholding of government documents, paying hush money to a porn performer. On and on. How important are all of those in measuring whether the IF turns into a when for him?
My view is that it matters less than normal people might think. I mean, people who subscribe to belief in normal political physics would say, well, of course, he's not going to win. He's under federal indictment for God's sake, but no rules apply to Donald Trump, as we know.
You know, let's use this business of I want to be a dictator on day one. You know, you don't say that in a democracy, and if you do say that, you lose popularity. Except Donald Trump, Donald Trump says it, and then he doubles down on it and his followers love it.
Obviously there are a lot of people who don't love it, but they didn't love him already. There are people who say that we don't know how the American people are going to react. When he's actually a convicted felon. There's just something so embarrassing about that. Everything is baked in. That's the genius of Trump.
If you're an American politician who is not Donald Trump, you can't quite believe that he gets away with things that would end any other career. It's just remarkable.
Let's say then that somehow, because of the way that the norms of politics, the conventions are suspended. When it comes to him, that somehow he does make it back. And on January, the 20th, 2025, he takes the oath of office, he's back in. Let's go through the perils as the Atlantic has set them out, starting with the one about power itself. And this essay from David Frum, you know, former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a longtime writer for you. It seems to be the big sort of overarching danger, just the business of how he exercises power.
You've talked about this remark of saying, Dictator Day one, just unpack that a bit. What the dangers are in terms of the concentration of power in the hands of Donald Trump in a second term?
So you remember, obviously that when Trump became president in 2017, he appointed a large group of officials who we came to call the grownups, right? Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and Jim Mattis as secretary of Defense, John Kelly as his chief of staff. You know, these are retired generals, CEOs, etc. And you know, eventually, they all were driven, mad and driven out by Trump. But in the period that they were there, they kept the Trump administration. They kept Trump himself from doing outlandish or particularly outlandish things, right?
They even had deals with each other, where one of them would always be in Washington. In case the president went nuts on a particular thing. So they could rush over to the White House and try to stop it from happening. Trump has learned not to hire those kinds of establishment grownups he hires now only for loyalty, only for true believer. The thing about the Trump first term, or the Trump term, was that very often they did conform in some ways, to normative political behavior. Next time, no dice.
And again, it's, you know, what's funny about this is that, so we pull together this massive special issue, all these amazing writers, you know? Marshalling the best arguments that a Trump presidency would represent a level of unprecedented damage to the American Democratic project, right? We do all this work. And then a couple of weeks ago, he comes out and just says it, Yeah, he just says, I want to be a dictator on day one.
No, it is this sort of quiet part, loud bit, where even the accusations of his enemies, he then just validates them.
There's no consciousness there of what he's doing. But he has an animal genius to him. And he somehow knows that. If you're going to break norms, break them all the way.
Let's just talk about this, just this word dictator, because what the word means to other people outside is a dictator. Abolishes elections and shuts down the press. You know, is it fantastical to think he might even do those things?
He will, he has promised, to attack the press, to use the law in the hands of his loyalists, to persecute the press, to go after the press. Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness. So we're going to take a strong look at that. We want fairness.
Can't say things that are false. One of the big questions for me is how he will react, or how anybody with authoritarian tendencies will react to a Supreme Court decision that goes against him. Right? Our whole system is built, this is true for any democracy. our whole system is built on the idea that there are Supreme Courts.
There are highest courts in a country. A bunch of judges in robes sit there and say to the executive branch, in our case, in the executive branch. You can't do that because it's unconstitutional, or you can't do that for this reason or that reason, right? They're judging the constitutionality of a presidential decision. Our tradition is that the president, though he controls the world's most powerful military, that our president says, Okay, that's a respect for the system.
But you know what happens when the Supreme Court rules that he can't do anything, do a certain thing, and then he does it anyway. And that he has the loyalists placed throughout the government, in key positions where they can order. Let's say it's an immigration issue. And he has somebody who's running the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of, again, tens of thousands of law enforcement agents. And the Supreme Court says, you can't, whatever it is, round up these kind of people in this manner. And they said, No, we're going to do it anyway. Then we're in a constitutional crisis, he's a walking constitutional crisis.
Which begins, I mean, the magazine, you know, you say, in the magazine, it begins the minute. He's there, partly because one of his first acts might be to pardon himself. And we should, let's get onto a couple of the other issues that you raise. Because there is this thing about taking over the Justice Department and training it on his enemies and getting it to forgive himself. But I just want to go to some of the sort of policy things. This week. There is an agreement at COP in Dubai.
Negotiators work through the night on the deal, which for the first time ever calls for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
You know, it doesn't go as far as some climate activists would like, but it goes some distance. It's important. The last time Donald Trump was there, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords of 2015. Do you predict that a Trump 2.0 pulls the U.S. out of that again, for example?
Yes, I'll give you a one word answer, Yes, look, he said. Why does he want to be a dictator? because he wants to drill, drill, drill.
Drill, drill, drill is just, you know, the rallying cry of, you know, all restraints off on the utilization of fossil fuels. You know, I think Donald Trump's reelection would be the end of even the simulacrum, the performative aspect of world powers. Getting together and talking about ways to limit the damage that we're doing.
And so that's obviously huge for the world. Let's stay with what matters to the rest of the world. You have a lead piece. She's been on our podcast a couple of times from Ann Applebaum. Headline Trump will abandon NATO. I mean, that is huge.
And it seems like it's not just it's not a fear, that's a that's a judgment call that's going to happen.
Yeah, and he can. Let's think this doesn't require a referendum, it doesn't require a vote, it doesn't require anything.
President of the United States can say I'm not doing this anymore. And by the way, and this when I come back to this point about the grownups. As an inexperienced president. In 2017, Jim Mattis, secretary of Defense, sitting there in the White House, says, No, no, no. Here's why we can't pull out of NATO, Here's why NATO is important. Here's the, I mean, you know, and remember, stunningly ignorant man Donald Trump.
So Jim Mattis and others would sit there and say, So, okay. So in 1945, the United States and its allies, which weirdly included Soviet Union at the time, won against Japan and Germany. And then we built a post-war war international rules-based order. And he, like, explains the whole thing, Trump goes okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he doesn't have the confidence of his own bad judgments.
So that changes in a second term.
Oh yeah, yeah, like, that's, that's the whole. The whole point is that what you saw from 2017 to 2021 is not what you're going to see. If Trump is president again, you know, it's going to be all restraints off.
Let's say in that first week, he orders, you know, the end of all restraints on drilling. Let's say he repositions, you know, billions of dollars to build his border wall. He pulls out of NATO, he pulls out of climate agreements.
He could do all these things at once. And this is, you know, a very kind of Steve Bannon idea, you know, Steve Bannon said. Flood the zone, flood the zone, yeah, and it's going to be, it's going to overwhelm everyone.
You know, one of our great mistakes is to not listen to people when they tell you what they want to do. Listen to Donald Trump, listen to him. He has the bureaucratic and organizational capability to execute the ideas that he's articulating. He will do that.
And in terms of direct impact on the world, Joe Biden is out there as a big supporter of Ukraine and a big supporter of Israel. Political opponents are from the Republican side, on the one, from his own side in a way, on the other, on both issues. The United States support for Ukraine and for Israel. Does that change massively if Trump is there?
On Ukraine, Yes, this is going to be an end to support for Ukraine. And a kind of, at the very least, neutrality on the Ukraine-Russia issue, which, of course, benefits Russia. So Ukraine will be on its own. And one imagines, or hopes, that European powers are preparing for that day on Israel. I cannot predict to you what will happen.
He is obviously hawkish in a way that the Republican Party is hawkish, but he's also isolationist, and he's also completely unpredictable. And he's an unstable platform. So one never knows. He moved the Embassy of America from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
That was a very pro-Israel move. he assassinated Soleimani, the Iranian chief, that was obviously benefited Israel, among others. But I don't know, I literally don't know.
There's no possible way to predict his actions because he has no stable ideologies. It's not as if Putin and Xi won't be sitting there for months before plotting and planning. How do we ourselves respond? And secondary actors, the North Koreans, the Iranians, how are we going to respond when this happens? So, you know, you could see the Russians, in reaction to Donald Trump's election, pulling off all restraints on, you know, bombing Kiev.
You know the Russians going for it. You could see the Chinese start being incredibly aggressive, especially in the period between, in a transitional period, you know, in the South China, Sea, Taiwan. I mean, you could see all kinds of nightmare scenarios. I'm not predicting them, I'm just saying that it would be a much more dramatic period than the first time Trump entered the White House.
Let's move to the domestic sphere. Plenty of people feel the first term was impactful or bad enough. And I'm thinking particularly of something like the Supreme Court and what it did to abortion rights with the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights. I mean, the impact of that is already being felt by women across the United States. Case in Texas this week, a woman called Kate Cox, who had to flee Texas in order to get to have an abortion after the state Supreme Court there ruled. She would be denied one, even though doctors said that her fetus would not survive long after birth and her future fertility would be at risk.
What do you imagine him? You know? If one of those judges dies or steps down, that's another appointment. What's his agenda there, do you think?
This is where presidents have their longest term impact. It's in the construction of the Supreme Court. Obviously, the Supreme Court now leans heavily conservative because Trump was president and appointed justices who articulated his his views. So you can expect a doubling down of this. What's interesting about Trump on this abortion question is that he actually is part of him, is like, kind of a New York liberal on these questions.
You know, he has different views. I'm I'm very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion, I hate it, I hate everything it stands for.
I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject, but you still, I just believe in choice. But he's obviously completely captured by right wing, more religious factions of American politics, who want the hardest core enforcement of existing laws, and they want new laws. So the minority view of abortion will continue to dominate and possibly intensify. Unless, of course, you know, there is a counter reaction at the state level and on the Congress level, and then it's more of a fight.
So we've talked about the impact he's likely to have domestically, we talked before about his impact on the wider world. One of the most eye catching pieces to my mind in the magazine was this essay by Jennifer Senior, who we've enjoyed having on the podcast before. And she wrote about the impact of a second term for Trump on the American psyche and the stress that a second term Trump would bring. Just just tell us a little bit about that and what you think that that effect is likely to be.
The dominant emotions across the American spectrum, if Trump wins, will be anxiety, depression, exaltation on the part of his people. A deep desire for revenge. And again, these are articulated. I'm not predicting it. This is the revenge presidency that we'd be looking at. I just feel like, and Jen Senior obviously feels this way that we're heading toward some kind of, you know, national emotional breakdown.
The genius of the American system to date has been that it forces people to the center right, forces, forces people into big tent political parties. And that, traditionally, issues of compromise and understanding of imperfection have ruled the day. But this is going to be a very different America. If Donald Trump wins, it's already a different America.
The thing that's fatal for America is when we lose affection for each other and don't see every other American as related to us in some kind of way. And that's what this anger and anxiety and desire for revenge are creating in people. And it's not going to get better if Trump is elected.
Jeff We always like to ask our guests on the podcast a what else? question something different. In this case, it's related. It's. Donald Trump is not the only one who's staring down the barrel of court cases next year. Rudy Giuliani, his former lawyer, got a taste of that earlier this week.
The former New York City mayor and former attorney for Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers after accusing them of rigging the 2020 election.
He was in court to witness two women, Shea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, describe how their lives were basically upended. After Giuliani falsely accused them of fraudulently counting mail-in ballots in Georgia in the 2020 election, the judge in that case has already found Giuliani liable for defamation. So the question now in front of the jury is how much he should pay, how much the financial penalty should be? The two women have asked for $43 million in damages. I'm just in general. In this case, but also beyond, is Giuliani in even more of a vulnerable position than Donald Trump is?
Giuliani is approximately $43 million short of being able to pay, if that's the number. Look, I remember, as you do, that shining moment right after 9-11, when he seemed to be America's mayor. The great grown-up, right? And by the way, before that, a controversial but very effective prosecutor kind of dismantled the mafia in New York, which is quite an achievement. Right? You're asking the wrong guy what you need in order to understand Giuliani as a great novelist, right? You need a novelist, slash psychiatrist, slash metaphysician.
I don't understand what happened to Rudy Giuliani, and I don't know what all of this bodes for court cases against Donald Trump. I don't know how desperate Rudy Giuliani gets. But I can't explain it because I'm not a psychiatrist or a theologian.
Jeff Goldberg, The issue is if Trump wins. Your editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, thanks so much for joining me on Politics Weekly America.
Thank you for having me.
And that is all from me. For this week, and indeed this year, we are taking a two-week break before kicking off a busy 2024. I'll be heading to New Hampshire at the end of January to report on what could be the consequential primary. As Republican candidates there and in Iowa hope to draw at least some support away from Donald Trump. So make sure to come back to us on Friday, January the 5th. It should be quite a year.
But for now, it's goodbye. The producer is Daniel Stevens, the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj and I'm Jonathan Friedland. Whatever your plans over the holidays, I do hope it's a fun, peaceful and relaxing time.
And, of course, thank you, as always, for listening.
This is The Guardian.
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