Evan Osnos has written a piece for the upcoming issue of the New Yorker that is detailed, disturbing, and essential reading. President Trump’s First Term.
Please read it. Please.
He really goes there, trying to game out what a Trump presidency would be like in reality. What does Trump seem motivated to do, agenda-wise, and what would be the likely impact?
Stephen Moore, an official campaign adviser who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “We want to identify maybe twenty-five executive orders that Trump could sign literally the first day in office.” (…. )Trump’s transition team is identifying executive orders issued by Obama, which can be undone.
(…..) Trump’s advisers are weighing several options for the First Day Project: He can renounce the Paris Agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions, much as George W. Bush, in 2002, “unsigned” American support for the International Criminal Court. He can re-start exploration of the Keystone pipeline, suspend the Syrian refugee program, and direct the Commerce Department to bring trade cases against China. Or, to loosen restrictions on gun purchases, he can relax background checks.
But those are secondary issues; whatever else Trump would do on January 20th, he would begin with a step (“my first hour in office”) to fulfill his central promise of radical change in American immigration. “Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation,” he told a crowd in Phoenix in August.
A short list of just some of the other aspects of a potential Trump presidency covered in this excellent piece:
- Plans to ransack and fire an unprecedented number of gov’t officials
- SCOTUS appointments, and the impact on future generations
- Willingness to command that the US military commit war-crime actions
- Reckless beliefs re: our main foreign adversaries — and a temperament ill suited to the carefulness of foreign policy
- Couple that (above) with the fact of nuclear weapons capabilities— we have been so focused on non-nuclear terrorism, we forget this far greater threat
- On domestic issues… a look at the proposed US-Mexico concrete wall
- and the proposed ban on Muslims
- Trump’s reckless free-trade approaches (at least insofar as he has stated them) and their likely disastrous effects on the US economy
- His willingness to talk about reneging on international debt, and the impact that that could have on our economy as well
This is a long read, but it’s excellent and I encourage us all to read it. And for the love of all that is good in this nation, THIS kind of substance needs to be front and center during all three upcoming Clinton-vs-Trump debates:
Tell us, as President, what would you actually do? Specifically? How would you do it?
This election has unprecedentedly huge consequences. We have had past Republican candidates with some of Trump’s same values on *some* issues. But we have never had a US presidential candidate so ill-prepared, unqualified, ignorant of how our government actually works, and temperamentally disastrous as this man is. We must take this idea seriously and consider what a Donald Trump presidency might do to the United States of America.