Trump vows to ‘save’ America with mix of lofty, vague, legally dubious policies – Longmont Times-Call

Kevin Rector | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

In the way former President Donald Trump tells it, the United States is a “crime-ridden mess” with “the worst border in the history of the world,” and simultaneously headed toward the next Great Depression and World War III.

Trump also says his second term will change all that almost immediately. Foreign wars will end abruptly as millions of undocumented immigrants are deported. The U.S. will “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!” and the resulting revenues will “rapidly” transform a weak U.S. economy into one where “incomes will skyrocket, inflation will disappear, jobs will roar back, and the middle class will thrive like never before.”

Trump’s critics say it’s all a bluff. They say he’s a showman who speaks in lofty, populist rhetoric but whose policies predict the opposite of his promises. Instead of being America’s savior, they say, he’s been its destroyer.

They note that Trump has admitted he would act like a “dictator on day one” and warn that several conservative playbooks for his next term — including Project 2025 but also Trump’s own Agenda 47 — point to a full-blown acceptance of authoritarianism.

They believe Trump would dismantle social safety nets for the poor and middle class, illegally discriminate against vulnerable groups like LGBTQ+ people, and curtail women’s rights, including reproductive health. Buoyed by a recent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents sweeping immunity, they fear the twice-impeached, criminally convicted former president who helped incite an insurrection when he lost an election last time out would be unleashed — and thrown off balance — if he wins.

The one thing Trump loyalists and critics agree on is that the candidate has said quite a bit about what he plans to do. How they feel about him often depends on what they make of those promises — many of them high-flown, vague, or legally dubious — and whether they take him at his word or believe he’s lying.

About immigration

Trump has focused heavily on immigration, claiming there has been an “invasion” of murderers, terrorists, patients in “madhouses” and gang members smuggling fentanyl across the Mexican border.

Trump has said he will “seal off” the border with a physical wall, completing a task he prioritized during his first term, and “carrying out the largest deportation operation in American history.” He has pledged to punish sanctuary cities that fail to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and deport immigrants without considering asylum claims.

Trump has said he will order his military to attack foreign drug cartels and seek the death penalty for “drug dealers, drug lords and human traffickers.” He has also said he will issue an executive order on his first day in office abolishing birthright citizenship — defying long-standing constitutional precedent by simply declaring that the “correct interpretation” of the law is that U.S. citizenship is not granted to anyone born on U.S. soil.

Chris Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy, Chicana/o studies, and political science at UCLA, is co-author of “Walls, Cages, and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era.”

His research found that most Americans did not support Trump’s immigration policies in his first term, particularly those that separated children from their families, and did not believe a border wall would be effective. Zepeda-Millán said those who supported Trump’s policies — sometimes despite believing they were ineffective — also held the “most racist views,” including a general discomfort with the growing Latino population.

Trump’s hyperfocus on immigrants today is a “symbolic anti-Latino move” targeting those same people, Zepeda-Millán said — his way of “getting the most racist white Americans to vote.” Trump has trailed Vice President Kamala Harris in recent polls on who would do a better job of addressing immigration, 51 percent to 46 percent in a New York Times/Sienna College poll of key swing states.

Trump can be counted on to continue using racism to win political points, Zepeda-Millán said, but he doubts Trump will actually try to deport millions of people, many of whom would be farm workers. “Everyone knows — including Trump — that significant parts of our economy are completely dependent on not just immigrants, but undocumented immigrants,” he said.

About abortion

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he campaigned on overturning federal abortion rights under Roe v. Wade. As president, Trump appointed three of the six conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe in 2022, ushering in a wave of state restrictions and bans on abortion.

Reproductive health advocates accuse Trump of undermining rights that most Americans support. Harris campaigned on restoring them.

In response, Trump has attempted to walk a fine line on the issue, in part by dodging questions or answering them vaguely. He has taken credit for overturning Roe and returning the power to restrict abortion to individual states, but has resisted calls for a nationwide abortion ban. He has said he personally supports abortion exceptions in cases of rape and incest and when a woman’s life is in danger, but he has also left the door open to further restrictions on widely used abortion pills.

Arneta Rogers, director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law School, said Trump paved the way for extreme anti-abortion laws that disproportionately harm people living “on the margins” — including people of color and the young, poor and queer — and that he must acknowledge that legacy because “the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

“When people show you who they are, you have to believe them,” Rogers said.

About the economy

Trump has promised to stop taxing Social Security income for seniors and to stop taxing tips that service providers receive. Both promises would cost the government billions, though the exact price tag is unknown without more details. Harris has also promised to work to end the federal tax on tips.

Trump has said he wants to pay for his agenda by increasing domestic energy production through drilling and lowering fuel costs, negotiating better trade deals with foreign countries and imposing tariffs on countries that don’t comply, and eliminating waste in the federal bureaucracy.

Trump has blamed inflation in part on “unnecessary spending” by President Joe Biden and said he would use special “seizure” authority — which presidents do not have by law — to withhold “large chunks” of the budget from every federal agency, regardless of how Congress appropriates the funding. He has pledged to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education entirely.

Susan Minato, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, a union representing service workers in Southern California and Arizona, called Trump’s promise to repeal the tip tax a “red herring.” Workers see it as a distraction from his long history of attacking union workers and the Affordable Care Act, which provides essential health care to many wage earners.

“Our members see it right away,” she said — and they are spreading out across Arizona, a key swing state, to knock on doors and talk to working-class voters about Harris as a better option for the working class.

About the climate

Trump has promised to dismantle environmental programs and increase oil and gas drilling.

Trump has ridiculed wind power as “weak” and electric vehicles as too expensive, and has suggested that a return to fossil fuels will quickly lower energy costs. He has promised to defund clean energy initiatives under the so-called Green New Deal, ridiculing it as the “Green New Hoax.”

Project 2025 has outright rejected the threat of global warming, calling for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, as “one of the primary drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

About Ukraine and Gaza

During his speech at the Republican convention last month, Trump said, “I have no wars,” that he could “stop wars with just a phone call” and that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would never have started if he had been president.

The US was at war in Afghanistan when Trump was president.

After a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month, Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine by convincing Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who ordered the 2022 invasion of Ukraine — to “negotiate a deal.”

Trump has repeatedly voiced support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has devastated civilians, and has said that any Jewish person considering voting for Harris “needs to get their head checked.” Agenda 47 says Trump will deport “pro-Hamas radicals” from the US and make college campuses — the site of many pro-Palestinian demonstrations — “safe and patriotic again.”

Trump has also said he would build an “Iron Dome” over the entire US, referring to Israel’s short-range anti-missile defense system. Experts have said that building such a system in the US would not make sense given the country’s size, geography and existing defense capabilities, but conceded that Trump may be using Israel’s familiar name as a “metaphor” for a more complex anti-missile defense system in the US.

According to Tom Karako, a missile defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the U.S. is threatened by unmanned aircraft, cruise missiles and other weapons systems. The U.S. is already building out its defenses.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from the Los Angeles Times about the above policies.

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Originally published: August 16, 2024 at 11:24 am