Dec.27

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

There Are No Secrets When It Comes to President Trump v2.0

Donald Trump has no sense of humor and does not make jokes. When he does seem to be "joking," what he's really doing is floating a trial balloon, so that he can soften things up a bit when he puts controversial stuff out there. More specifically, when he "jokes" that he plans to rule as a dictator on his first day in office, believe him (on the other hand, you should not believe that it will only last one day).

Trump, and his enablers, are serious enough about this that they've already prepped a detailed agenda for the early days and weeks of President Trump v2.0. We've already written a little bit about this, but it's worth repeating:

• Reinterpreting the Constitution: The most aggressive measure, and the "crown jewel" from the point of view of Trump and his team, is an executive order (read it here) that would supposedly bring an end to birthright citizenship. Obviously, a president cannot rewrite the Constitution AND Supreme Court precedent with an executive order, but the move will thrill the base nonetheless, and it will take some time for the courts to smack Trump down. Meanwhile, the XO will surely lead to an uptick in acts of anti-immigrant violence.
  
  
• Reinventing the Government: The other "highlight" is the order Trump has promised that would re-classify vast numbers of federal employees as Schedule F, and thus fireable by Trump. He would then stack the bureaucracy with sycophants.
  
  
• Fighting the Culture Wars: Anyone and everyone in conservative politics is champing at the bit to have Trump issue XOs that would strike back at those confounded diversity-loving liberal commie pinko sex pervert Democrats. Should he win another term, he might literally sign dozens of orders on Day One that would do things like ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory at any school that receives federal funds, ban federal funding for gender affirming treatments, and eliminate any Biden XOs meant to promote diversity.

A lot of these orders are meant to be complementary; for example, staffing the federal government with loyalists will make it much easier to use the bureaucracy to fight the culture wars.

The message, incidentally, is clearly being received. This week, The Daily Mail released the results of an interesting poll in which 1,000 respondents were asked to choose a single word that describes what Joe Biden wants from a second term and what Donald Trump wants from a second term. Here is the word cloud produced from the Biden responses:

And here is the Trump word cloud:

Neither is optimal for a would-be president, but the Trump cloud is outright scary.

Of course, there's no way to know the partisan ID of the respondents most responsible for "revenge," "power" and "dictatorship" figuring so prominently in Trump's cloud. Maybe it was Democrats and independents, maybe it was Republicans, maybe it was all of the above. In any event, just in case his base hasn't gotten the message, Trump promptly posted his word cloud to his failing boutique social media platform.

In short, we can't say we weren't warned. (Z)