Voters don’t have a clue about how much worse Trump’s second term would be

Gameli Fenuku, a 22-year-old Black college student in Richmond, Va., is exactly the demographic you’d think would never vote for Donald Trump in November — and indeed, he may not. But Fenuku told the New York Times he hasn’t ruled out supporting the presumptive GOP nominee, either. That’s because he remembers his teen years under Trump as a time when a lot of things were a lot better than he sees them now — especially the economy.

“I don’t want to say it was just because he was president, but everything was definitely cheaper,” Fenuku told a reporter. “We weren’t just handing out money to other countries.”

The Virginia college student is the face of a phenomenon that is shaping the 2024 rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden with less than eight months to go. The polls and interviews suggest a lot of voters are responding no to the ex-president’s borrowing of Ronald Reagan’s famous question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” This despite Trump’s army of detractors calling this “collective amnesia” about a twice-impeached president who nearly four years ago was wondering if Americans should be drinking bleach to tackle COVID-19.

Less than three-and-a-half years after the U.S. electorate made Trump the first 21st-century president to lose reelection — and by a solid, seven million vote margin — a poll taken by a liberal climate group found 52% of today’s voters now approve of Trump’s former presidency.

But here’s what millions of Americans seem to be getting wrong.

The truth is that whatever you think about the 45th presidency — whether you remember 2017-2021 as when lunch at Five Guys wasn’t $24 or whether you recall the Muslim ban or families ripped apart at the border — doesn’t really matter much. That’s because a Trump 47 presidency would look nothing like the first one, and nothing like anything most Americans have even seen before unless they’ve been hanging out in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

The reality of an American dictatorship is not some kind of MSNBC-watching Trump Resistance dystopian alarmist fantasy. Instead, we know Trump’s third run for the White House centers on plans to rule as an autocratic “Red Caesar” because he has told this to voters in rallies and interviews, again and again. What’s more, the specific blueprint is hardly secret but spelled out explicitly by the candidate’s advisers in reams upon reams of publicly available documents — especially the nearly 1,000-page Project 2025 plan drafted by the Heritage Foundation and other far-right think tanks.

What’s striking about Trump’s 2024 campaign has been an un-Trump-like willingness to learn something new: how to be a better authoritarian ruler. His team is studying both what did and didn’t happen during his chaotic presidency, and also gleaning insights from even closer ties with the world’s growing network of other right-wing populist strongmen — especially Orbán, who was feted by Trump at a lavish Mar-a-Lago banquet last week.

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” Trump declared in a toast. “He says, ‘This is the way it’s gonna be,’ and that’s the end of it. He’s the boss.” It was just the latest in a series of statements informing the American people about Trump’s intentions for authoritarian rule — most famously when he told friendly interviewer Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One,” when he said he’d rule by fiat over the border and oil-drilling policy.

» READ MORE: America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship | Will Bunch

But the paranoid style also fits a presidency he’s said would be motivated by “retribution” against both his own enemies and the leftist elites despised by his most rabid supporters. In an echo of his disgraced predecessor Richard Nixon, Trump has a growing “enemies list” of those he believes have slighted him — from high-level Democrats to Republicans deemed disloyal “RINOs” — who could be prosecuted by his next attorney general. On the other side of the coin, he’s been increasingly vocal about his plan to pardon most, if not all, of the jailed insurrectionists from Jan. 6, 2021 — convicted felons he and his allies now call “hostages.”

Experts on authoritarianism say anyone seeking insight into a second Trump presidency should study Orbán’s Hungary after he was elected to that nation’s highest office for a second time in 2010. The authoritarian policies Orbán perfected after his early years in and out of office center on overt Christian nationalism, enforced with an iron grip over his own political party. The second coming of Orbán crushed academic freedom at Hungary’s universities, stripped the LGBTQ community of its rights, weakened the judiciary and the legal system, cracked down on press freedom, and won popular support through demagoguery around immigration.

Critical for both Orbán and for Trump’s second-term blueprint is firing dedicated civil service employees throughout the government and replacing them with functionaries loyal to the party and its strongman. Trump proved this past week that his plans should be taken not just seriously but literally when he engineered a massive, Orbán-esque purge at the Republican National Committee, firing some 60 employees, many of them veterans.

The RNC coup offered a telling sneak peek into what another Trump presidency would really be like. Mimicking a banana republic-style dictator, Trump installed his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as cochair of the national party — seemingly to ensure its large coffers are drained for the ex-president’s campaign and maybe even his mounting legal bills, instead of on competitive down-ballot races. Another key RNC hire is attorney and former right-wing news anchor Christina Bobb, a major promoter of 2020’s Big Lie of election fraud, now tasked, in Orwellian fashion, with “election integrity.”

Under the Project 2025 blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency, the White House wouldn’t just fill the current 4,000 political posts in government with hard-core MAGA loyalists, but change classifications so that as many as 40,000 employees would now become “at-will.” This means they could be fired by the White House — much like the sacked RNC staffers — and replaced by minions similar to Bobb or Lara Trump. It would remove the web of nonpolitical public servants Trump claims was a “Deep State” that thwarted many of his first-term schemes. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts told the New York Times Magazine his goal is “destruction” in the government.

This is at the core of what voters aren’t getting about how different, and how radical, Trump’s second act would be. For example, Trump’s wildest demands — to abuse the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute his enemies, or fire the special counsel investigating him, or issue statements supporting his 2020 election interference — were thwarted by career attorneys. High-ranking DOJ lawyers even threatened to resign en masse right before Jan. 6.

Project 2025 aims to clear that kind of resistance. A new MAGA team might act on a GOP House referral to prosecute President Biden, or not object to a mass Jan. 6 pardon.

In many cases, the Project 2025 scheme would mean that the bad aspects of Trump’s first presidency would be many times worse the second time around. This is especially true for immigration. Trump’s border guru Stephen Miller spent much of his time in the White House yelling at bureaucrats to stop hindering his harsh edicts. But those obstacles would not exist in 2025, clearing the way for his stated plans for mass deportations starting on Day One of a new administration, and the creation of large detention camps along the border to house the overflow.

Trump 45 was very bad for climate change — scuttling, for a time, the Paris climate accords and lifting many regulatory curbs on polluters. But Trump 47 would be far worse. Project 2025 calls on its hoped-for next president to issue an executive order to reject any federal science tied to the National Climate Assessment, and to gut, if not altogether kill, key offices like those within the U.S. Energy Department tasked with the transition to clean power. Trump’s second election would all but ensure America will fall short of the carbon-reduction goals meant to stave off the worst climate disasters.

But then, a lot of Trump supporters seem eager for the apocalypse. One of the most misunderstood aspects of Trump’s blueprint is its deep roots in Orbán-style Christian nationalism. At the Bucks County Beacon, writer Jennifer Cohn recently reported that a key player in the Project 2025 team is the Center for Renewing America, which openly promotes “Christian nationalism” for Trump’s would-be presidency, working with advocates for ideas like the end of no-fault divorce or curbs on contraception.

Why aren’t voters rebelling against this with torches and pitchforks? Some of it is surely that “collective amnesia” about the worst of Trump’s time in the Oval Office, coupled with overfond memories of a stable economy in his first three years before it melted down amid COVID-19 in his fourth. And, of course, there’s a sizable minority of Americans, especially Christian fundamentalists, who want authoritarianism in a president who would smite their enemies.

But the biggest reason for the missing alarm about the prospect of Trump 47 might simply be a lack of information. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

You can call it voter apathy, but a lot of the blame belongs to a mainstream media that’s not banging the pots and pans like it should be and remains much more obsessed about the horse race odds of who wins the election than the stakes of an undemocratic presidency. One of the great tragedies of an American dictatorship will be when citizens claim they weren’t warned about this. Because the truth is out there.

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