Trump promises to ‘save’ America with mix of lofty, vague, legally dubious policies – The Ukiah Daily Journal

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.