Trump’s Very Serious, Very Literal Plans for a Fascist Second Term
Further, unfulfilled promises from Trump’s first term—to repeal Obamacare or end birthright citizenship, for instance—by no means guarantee he couldn’t follow through on them should he secure a second. As Andrew Prokop explains in Vox, numerous institutional “guardrails” constraining the executive during Trump’s presidency have since been “weakened.” Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s now-notorious blueprint for a future Republican president to overhaul the federal government, would erode them further. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, if elected again, Trump would enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution, even, per the ACLU, for “turning the Armed Forces against political opponents, using the Justice Department to investigate or prosecute critics of the president, or worse,” so long as his actions constituted “official acts.”
The suggestion that we can assess Trump’s candidacy without regard for the literal content of his speech also assumes that clear and dependable communication is just incidental to the chief executive’s role. In reality, the actual language of the president is of immense consequence. Trump wielded the bully pulpit to incite an attempted insurrection; promote junk cures during the Covid-19 pandemic; pick Twitter fights with world leaders; and sow tension, confusion, and suffering in untold other ways. The barrage of destructive rhetoric he’s unleashed since leaving office—most recently his lies about noncitizen voting, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the government’s hurricane response—suggests he’d continue to do so if elected again, in which case his every remark (yes, his literal words) would once again carry the weight and clout of the presidency. Is it really so reasonable, then, for voters to factor Trump’s more erratic rhetoric out of their election decisions because of what’s supposedly “in his heart”?
As Election Day draws near and Republicans again push the notion of “taking Trump seriously, not literally” despite his plainly despotic vows, an alternative slogan from Kamala Harris’s campaign imparts a simpler and sounder message: “Listen to his words.”
