2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

So began “The Flight 93 Election,” one of the most trenchant and insightful political essays in recent years. Its author, Hillsdale College lecturer and Claremont Institute senior fellow Michael Anton, followed up with a 2020 book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, which delivered more hard and grim truths. Essentially: No, a single Trump term hasn’t vanquished the Left. The barbarians are still at the gates, and things aren’t going back to “normal” anytime soon.

Each election cycle, a predictable crew of pundits will breathlessly tell us that this coming election will be — wait for it! — “the most important one of our lifetimes.” Perhaps the only presidential election in the past 20 years that hasn’t carried that billing was the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and John McCain — and that contest, ironically, may indeed have been the most important election of our lifetimes. Two terms of Barack Obama put our nation on a ruinous course, but Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016 proved that the American people could still pull themselves back from the abyss, if only by the slimmest of margins.

2020 ushered in a new era of elections — one in which a woefully old, inept, and unpopular backslapper could be dragged across the presidential finish line through the miracles of bulk-mail balloting and multi-institutional election-rigging.

Which brings us to the 2024 contest — a contest that affords a historically unique view of how both candidates will behave as president. Trump’s record was, as our Nate Jackson put it a week after he left the White House, one of political impact and putting America first. He concluded: “Donald Trump permanently changed the course and makeup of the GOP, and perhaps Democrats too. But if Republicans don’t take a lesson from Trump about how to fight the Left, then they may as well fold up the tents and go home.”

And here we are today, with three and a half years of the Biden presidency in our rearview mirrors. And what a smoldering mess it is. Trump, though, is once again on the ballot, and he once again heralds a Flight 93 moment. What might another Trump term bring? We wrote on that topic recently, and one need only check the Agenda47 page of Trump’s 2024 campaign website to get the details. But a lengthy new Time magazine profile by Eric Cortellessa ponders this question from a Trump-hating Democrat’s perspective, and he leads off with a predictably ominous marker: “Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.”

“Six months from the 2024 presidential election,” writes Cortellessa, “Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome.” So what will Trump do if he wins? Why, he’ll embark on an “imperial presidency,” the likes of which will “reshape America and its role in the world.” Here’s how Cortellessa describes it:

To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.

I know what you’re thinking: What’s not to like?

Not surprisingly, Cortellessa tried to bait Trump into some racially inflammatory bulletin board material on behalf of the Democrats. “Trump’s preoccupation with crime is a racial dog whistle,” he says falsely. In fact, Trump’s “preoccupation” with crime stems from a belief that law and order are fundamental to the American experiment. It has nothing to do with race.

When he asked Trump whether he believes, as many Americans do, that anti-white racism now represents a greater problem in the U.S. than anti-black racism, Trump said this: “Oh, I think that there is a lot to be said about that. If you look at the Biden Administration, they’re sort of against anybody depending on certain views. They’re against Catholics. … But no, I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.” Cortellessa then laments that a second Trump term would see the rescission of Biden’s executive orders “designed to boost diversity and racial equity.” This is another good thing since diversity, equity, and inclusion are, like affirmative action, mere euphemisms for race-based discrimination.

Execution was a sticking point in Trump’s first term, and this time he has a team focused on getting things done right out of the gate. “The President never had a policy process that was designed to give him what he actually wanted and campaigned on,” says Trump’s former OMB director, Russell Vought, who adds that he and others are “sorting through the legal authorities, the mechanics, and providing the momentum for a future Administration.”

As Cortellessa warns, “That includes a litany of boundary-pushing right-wing policies, including slashing Department of Justice funding and cutting climate and environmental regulations.”

Again, we ask: What’s not to like?