The Patriot Post® · Trump: The Second-Term Agenda

It’ll be bad. Very bad. Very very bad.

That’s what The Atlantic wants you to believe about a prospective second term for Donald Trump. “America survived the first Trump term,” warns the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, “though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.”

To make their case, the magazine’s Chicken Littles have lined up 24 contributors to ponder and populate their upcoming January/February issue with all the bad things Trump could do if he were to return to the White House.

One of those articles, by Trump-hating RINO David Frum, said Trump would “bring a more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries.” We’ve got news for David, though: Trump will have bigger fish to fry. He’ll have a border to close and an energy sector to revitalize.

Another doomsayer, Anne Applebaum, says Trump will abandon NATO. Really? Not if its members pull their weight when it comes to defending their continent, Anne, and not if its members pay their agreed-upon share for the organization’s maintenance.

For Caitlin Dickerson, the specter of “family separation” looms large. But it won’t loom nearly as large when Trump closes the border on day one. And it won’t loom at all if these families would only respect our laws and our borders.

Meanwhile, Sophie Gilbert laments that a second Trump term would mean “four more years of unchecked misogyny,” and that “women would once again be targets.” This flies in the face of reality, though: Trump appointed hundreds of women to leading roles in his administration. His lead lawyer, Alina Habba, is, last we checked, a woman. As were his press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany; and his UN ambassador, Nikki Haley; and his CIA director, Gina Haspel, who was the first woman to ever hold that post.

We’ll make a prediction: None of these things will happen. And further, no one at The Atlantic will be held to account for their misplaced hysteria. Here, we’re reminded of how The Atlantic does progressivism so well. They think of conservatism, and then, as Jack Nicholson might put it, they take away reason and accountability.

Then there’s poor pathetic Trump-deranged Liz Cheney, voted out of House leadership by her Republican colleagues and then resoundingly voted out of office by the good people of Wyoming. “A vote for Donald Trump,” she hyperbolized to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in.”

The last election we ever get to vote in, huh? Man, how stupid does she think Democrats are?

What’s interesting about the Left’s apocalyptic hysteria is that Trump could’ve declared martial law after the 2020 election. Instead of telling his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, he could’ve thrown Joe Biden in prison for being on the take from Communist China. But he didn’t. So how plausible is it that he’d do those things in a second term?

Anyone who’s interested in Trump’s agenda for a second term need only check the Agenda47 page of his 2024 campaign website. It’s all there, in detail: undoing Biden’s regulatory onslaught; ending veteran homelessness; eliminating welfare for illegals; making a college education available for free without using federal funds; supporting homeschool families; revitalizing our energy industry; returning pharmaceutical manufacturing to American shores; rescinding Biden’s crippling green mandates on the auto industry; protecting our students from leftist indoctrination; enforcing fair trade via the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act; using impoundment to squeeze savings out of the bureaucracy; stopping Chinese espionage; ending birth tourism and birthright citizenship; and on and on.

He even has a detailed plan for dismantling the Deep State. On this front, we wish him well, but we’ll believe it when we see it.

The Wall Street Journal touches upon a few other agenda items of the second Trump term, such as a declaration that hospitals and healthcare providers that approve “medical interventions” for young transgender people will “no longer meet federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare.” Another item: mandating that law enforcement agencies receiving grants from the Justice Department would need to adhere to tougher policing standards, including stop-and-frisk and cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement “to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”

Last night, the once and perhaps future president was in Davenport, Iowa, for an hour-long interview and town hall with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. Even a cursory look at Trump shows just how differently age hits different people. At times, Biden seems like he can barely stand up, barely walk, barely carry on a coherent conversation. And then there’s Trump, sitting on a stool, on a stage, in front of a raucous crowd of voters, riffing for an hour about one issue after another. The contrast between the 77-year-old Trump and the 81-year-old Biden couldn’t be starker.

Asked by Hannity whether he thought Biden would be the Democrat nominee, Trump made news with his reply: “I personally don’t think he makes it. Okay? I haven’t said that [before]. I’m saving it for this big town hall. … I think he’s in bad shape physically. Do you remember when he said, ‘I’d like to take him behind the barn’? If he took me behind the barn, and I went like this [makes a blowing sound], I believe he’d fall over.”

Hannity noted that there’s a lot of fearmongering on the Left about how Trump’s second term will be all about payback, all about retaliation against the forces that have conspired against him since his election in 2016. Hannity asked him point-blank if that was his plan: “Under no circumstances, you are promising tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”

“Except for day one,” answered Trump. “I want to close the border. And I want to drill, drill, drill.”

Perhaps Trump thinks he ought to go through Congress to enact these measures in due time rather than on day one, and that doing so immediately and unilaterally is an abuse of power. But we get his point. “I am an environmentalist,” said Trump, “but we’re going to destroy our country with the Green New Deal stuff.” He vowed to make the U.S. an energy-dominant country, noting, “We have more energy wealth than anybody, but we don’t use it.”

As for Trump’s prospective 2024 opponent, he made news at a fundraising event in Boston yesterday when he said: “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running. But we cannot let him win.” To the best of our recollection, that’s the closest he’s come to admitting what’s become painfully obvious to everyone else: that he might not be up for another four years.