Why the Second Trump Regime Will Be Far More Dangerous

This will be a much more radical regime – and it will operate under conditions that are vastly more favorable to its extremist cause

credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

What awaits America and the rest of the world in a second Trump presidency?

Calibrating our expectations is a crucial task. It will either help us focus our attention on the things that really matter – or obscure the threat and blunt our response. “We already had four years of Trump in power, and the Republic didn’t fall, did it?” In a vacuum, this might be a plausible approach: Trump was in the White House before – does it not make sense to expect mostly more of the same? But the idea that a second Trump presidency would basically just be a rerun of the first does not stand up to scrutiny. And it is politically dangerous.

I really hope I am wrong. I hope my assessment is off. Not just be a little bit, but completely, utterly off.

I think we are in for something qualitatively very different from the first Trump presidency, something far worse and far more consequential. I believe it is worth spelling out why I – and many other observers of American politics, of course – have arrived at this assessment. If you think I am wrong, please make your case. But let’s not indulge in “It won’t be THAT bad!” gut feelings. That’s not an argument. It’s just a coping mechanism.

The American Right has radicalized

First of all, this would simply not be the same Right that came to power in 2017 – or, to be more precise: The balance of power within the rightwing coalition has shifted dramatically, leading to a much more extreme threat. That starts with Trump himself. The notion that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Trump is coming off the most openly, aggressively racist campaign of a major party candidate in modern U.S. history. He explicitly promised a “bloody” mass deportation, the political persecution of his opponents, the purge of the “enemy within.” He declared he would use the military to suppress protests. His closing pitch to the American people was rage, intimidation, and vengeful violence. Trump wants to restore “order,” by whatever means necessary – an order not just of white Christian rule and unfettered self-enrichment for the wealthy, but also patriarchal domination. The man who will be Vice President in January is convinced women must accept their lesser place in a hierarchy that manifests the “natural” and/or divinely ordained order; he believes they have a duty to secure the nation’s future by giving the “homeland” children. Elon Musk, who acted as Trump’s main propagandist and one of his key surrogates, constantly fabulates about returning proper alpha males to their rightful place at the top of society. And Trump himself, the serial abuser-in-chief, vows to protect women – “whether the women like it or not.” The white Christian patriarch in his “natural” role as the protector who is not to be questioned, his authority sacrosanct.

If this was just Trump going off the rails, maybe it would make sense to largely discard all this as the ramblings of an old, angry man. But the forces around him, the factions that are in charge on the American Right and within the Republican Party, have radicalized too. The idea that far more drastic action is urgently needed has quickly taken over the power centers of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response.

The Right’s most influential intellectuals and activists no longer present their own project in the idiom of “conservatism.” As “the Left’s” assault on all that is good and true, on the moral fabric of the nation, on the “natural” order itself, has progressed so much already, there is supposedly nothing left to conserve and preserve. “Conservatism is no longer enough” has become the battle cry on the Right. Nothing short of a comprehensive counter-revolution will suffice. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts merely expressed the new rightwing consensus when he said, on the Fourth of July, that America was in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that may well turn bloody, depending on whether or not “the Left” will accept total defeat and destruction. Those the mainstream discourse insists on calling “conservatives” desire revolution. 

This time, they are ready

Ok, granted, these people are more ill-intentioned, more extreme than the last time around. But does that matter in practice? Won’t they just stumble over their own feet, much like last time?

It is true, Trump world was not ready in 2017. Non one understands this more clearly than the extreme Right. The conservative machine was late to endorse Trumpism and hadn’t been fully mobilized in time to provide the personnel or policy plans. They didn’t have any concrete strategies, not a clue how government worked. And the extremists didn’t have the personnel to bend the vast and powerful machine we call the state to their will and harness its powers.

“Malevolence tempered by incompetence” was a prominent dictum in the early months of Trump’s first presidency, and there was definitely something to that. In order to get anything done, the Trumpist Right had to rely on more establishment types. Remember the infamous “adults in the room,” people like John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff, Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and H. R. McMaster as National Security Advisor? There was a great deal of wishful thinking behind the idea that they would keep things from spiraling and prevent anything dangerous from happening. In some ways, they did as much to legitimize and normalize Trump’s start as president as they did to constrain and contain him. And yet, it is also true that they were not Trumpist radicals willing to do whatever necessary to implement authoritarian extremism. And certainly, the American Right now looks at them – and the many career civil servants, and lawyers, and bureaucrats in and around the executive who just continued to do their jobs – as a big reason why the first Trump presidency didn’t deliver what they had hoped for. They are determined to not let that happen again.

This time around, they have initiated vast planning operations that have produced detailed policy plans, expertise, and an armada of ideological loyalists ready to go to work. Project 2025 is the best known among them, and in many ways the most important one, as it managed to unite much of the rightwing machinery in an effort to guarantee a more efficient, more ruthless regime. The result is a multi-level plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government. Broadly speaking, Project 2025 envisions a vast expansion of presidential power over the executive branch. It seeks to dismantle certain parts of government while simultaneously mobilizing and weaponizing others. And finally, Project 2025 is a promise to purge from government anyone who is not all in on the Trumpist project and replace them with loyalists and ideological conformists. Thereby, the Right seeks to transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: first, exacting revenge on what they call the “woke”, leftist, globalist enemy – and secondly, imposing a minoritarian reactionary vision of white Christian patriarchal order on society.

No serious observer believes they will be able to implement everything they have planned exactly as they have planned it. But there is no question that the Trumpist Right is far better prepared than it was in 2017. Last time, the Trumpists didn’t even know how to write a presidential executive order; this time, they have already drafted dozens, probably hundreds. Where last time they had so much catching-up to do and were constantly shooting themselves in the foot, they will have a proper base from which to start come January.

If you have been paying attention to who Trump is nominating to be part of his team, you might find it difficult to accept the idea of a more effective regime. Fox News extremist Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense; Matt Gaetz, one of the most buffoonish MAGA trolls in Congress, as Attorney General… doesn’t this sound more like “malevolence tempered by incompetence” on steroids? Surely, such personnel decisions must derail the Trumpist project?

I struggle to see much reason for optimism. While these people are manifestly unqualified, they are also extremely loyal to Trump. The most willing executioners of MAGA extremism. Don’t expect any kind of pushback from them. The competence won’t come from Hegseth or Gaetz, fair enough; but they may only have to serve as figureheads, as a cadre of more capable extremists around them and around Trump goes to work. With such personalities in the mix, there will undoubtedly be unforced errors. There will be chaos. But chaos is not the same as moderation. Chaos can also accelerate the harm. And in authoritarian movements, frustration and chaos are much more likely to lead to further radicalization. If the recent trajectory of the Right is any indication, that’s what we should be expecting. Every potential off-ramp, the Right has ignored; at every crossroads, they opted for ideological purity. The Trumpist worldview constantly privileges the more radical over the more “moderate” forces. Every crisis situation only heightens the sense of being under siege that’s animating so much of what is happening on the Right, legitimizing and amplifying calls to hit harder, more aggressively. There’s always permission to escalate, hardly ever to pull back.

The circumstances favor the Trumpists

Crucially, a new Trump regime would also operate under conditions that are vastly more favorable to its political cause. Almost all the factors that inhibited the extreme Right during the first Trump presidency are no longer present; all the guardrails that kept Trump and the more extreme rightwing factions in check after 2017 have been vastly weakened or destroyed entirely.

First of all, during Trump I, the courts played a key role in opposing the radical Right. But several federal courts are now in the hands of Trumpist judges. Jay Willis and Madiba Dennie over at Balls and Strikes expect that by the end of his term, Trump will have picked about half of the federal judges across the country. A judiciary remade in his image. And most importantly, Trump can now count on a hard-right 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. Let’s remember this was not the case until Amy Coney Barrett’s ascension in late October 2020, towards the very end of the Trump presidency. The 6-3 Court is a game changer. Not that we needed more evidence, but the Court’s almost unprecedentedly extreme ruling to declare Trump functionally immune from criminal prosecution should have erased any lingering hope that the Roberts Court “would not go THAT far.” And we have never even seen this Court operate with Trump in the White House, with a Republican trifecta.

Trump was also, secondly, hampered by resistance from within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. But the GOP has been purged of anyone daring to oppose Trump – certainly on the domestic front. There is slightly more room still, it seems, when it comes to foreign policy and the role of the United States in the World. Within the Republican Party, more traditional voices are still being heard, the GOP is not all on the same page when it comes to NATO or how to handle Russia and the war in Ukraine. This variety of opinion manifested most clearly in the fact that Project 2025’s policy agenda had two chapters on trade that demanded contradictory policies: free trade vs punitive tariffs. The nomination of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State seems to provide further evidence in this direction: Rubio is pretty hawkish, but well within what has been Republican mainstream for a long time. Compared to some of Trump’s other nominations, he seems rather tame. But on the domestic front, where the focus of the Trumpist movement lies, where everything is defined by the desire to reshape society and punish the “enemy within,” there is no such leeway, no tolerance for deviation. Elected leaders like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney who publicly held the line that nullifying the results of a democratic election and engaging in a violent insurrection was disqualifying have been ostracized. The Trumpist regime will be able to count on a fully Trumpified party. And the radical Right is now clearly in control of the power centers of conservatism as well – nowhere is this more obvious than at the Heritage Foundation, the nerve center of movement conservatism since the 1970s, now a thoroughly Trumpified outfit; or at the Claremont Institute, formerly a hub of conservative Straussian thought, now the center of the most aggressively Trumpist forces in the rightwing intellectual sphere.

The first Trump presidency, finally, encountered a lot of resistance in the form of a mobilizing civil society. Waves of people subscribed to liberal-ish newspapers and magazines (who saw what the audience desired and quickly declared themselves the guardians of democracy! – eight years later, we know how that turned out…). Millions of Americans donated to pro-democracy causes. And they went out into the streets. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the so-called Women’s March drew up to five million people across the United States – half a million in the nation’s capital alone. It was, at the time, the largest single-day protest in American history. And it was evidently intended as a show of defiance in the face of Trump’s ascension. Then, in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the nation-wide protests against racist police violence even surpassed the dimensions of the 2017 Women’s March. Once again, most people clearly understood these to be anti-Trump protests. He was the face of a racial grievance campaign to restore white dominance, he embodied the promise to mobilize the coercive powers of the state to squash any attempt to topple white supremacy. In the summer of 2020, Trump forced Americans to make a choice: Support the protests – or the white nationalist regime that sought to suppress them. Marching in the BLM-led protests was a way to oppose Trumpism – a way for Americans to signal maximal distance from Trump.

Where is the Resistance now? I want to be careful not to put too much emphasis on subjectively felt vibes right after the election. But I’d be very surprised if we saw the same level of mobilization. In 2016/17, millions of people rallied around institutions that have proven utterly incapable and/or unwilling to hold Trump accountable. The mood this time is more frustrated and defeated than defiant. That may well change by the time the inauguration rolls around. There might also be other sources of resistance: Some blue states and communities have already declared that they will not collaborate with the Trump regime to make mass deportation happen. And after retired General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came out forcefully against Trump, who he called “fascist to the core,” many people may put their hopes in the armed forces playing a key role in defending constitutional self-government against the Trumpist assault.

Is that realistic? Maybe. But just to be clear: If blue states and communities or military leadership would truly move to open revolt against the federal government – a massive If! – we would already look at an acute constitutional crisis and an incredibly dangerous, volatile situation.

Most importantly, the main reason to be skeptical about the chances of the resistance, regardless of where it emanates or what form it might take, is that it will encounter a rightwing regime that is far better prepared to handle opposition forces. Trump has already boasted about using an executive order to purge the military, the Trumpists seem to be planning mass firings of high-ranking officers. And any kind of resistance to the rightwing regime will face a level of violent threat that is far beyond anything the country experienced during the first Trump presidency. Lawmakers, election officials, judges – anyone who dares to defy Trump knows their normal lives and those of their families are over, as they will be subjected to a never-ending avalanche of intimidation and threat, they will need protection and pull back from public life. We saw glimpses of this during Trump’s first presidency, but nothing of this quality.

All strands of the Right – Republican politicians, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly open and aggressive fashion. In May, for instance, Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. This all sends a clear message: It encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma. In August 2020, Rittenhouse killed two men and wounded a third during the protests after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. For his actions, he was widely celebrated on the Right as a patriotic hero. He was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, met with Donald Trump, far-right extremists inside Congress were dreaming about welcoming Rittenhouse as one of their own, jostling for the opportunity to have him as an intern, to promote and encourage his rise to political stardom. On the state level, Republicans seek to outlaw “left”-coded protests by declaring them “riots” – and pass legislation that explicitly condones vigilante violence against the “rioters.” In Oklahoma, for instance, you are now free to run over “rioters” in your car, as long as you claim you are “fleeing from a riot.” And the problem certainly isn’t confined to GOP politicians. The percentage of people on the Right, of Republican voters, who see political violence as necessary has drastically increased. The majority of Americans may want to resist again. But it would be far harder and far more dangerous this time.

For all these reasons, no one should indulge the idea that a second Trump presidency will merely be a repeat of the first. It will be qualitatively something very different. Again, if it turns out that I’m wrong about what’s to come, I’ll be delighted, relieved, ecstatic even. But the response to Trumpism in power must be based on an unflinching assessment of where we are, and why the situation is so significantly different than eight years ago. That is no reason to despair, no justification to give up (what would that even mean? Collaborate? Go into exile?). Make the hard choice to be hopeful. But fight with open eyes and a clear mind.