American voters are too calm about their coming election. Many in the centre of the ideological spectrum, and particularly those swing state voters who will decide the winner, see this as a time of ordinary politics. They judge the two candidates on their policies, personalities and past records. If voters are upset about inflation, the southern border or high taxes they will vote for Donald Trump; if they care about making abortion legal once again or want to support Ukraine, they will choose Kamala Harris.
This is anything but a routine election. The true stakes are much higher than these policy questions. The future of democratic institutions and the larger liberal international order are at issue. The Republicans have chosen a singularly bad candidate who has neither a personal moral compass nor any true belief in American democracy. In 2020 he refused to accept his loss to Joe Biden and provoked a violent assault on the Capitol to stay in office. He spent the next four years pushing the lie that he was the true winner, all the while denigrating America’s justice system and the state of its society. His demagogic talents have created a movement that has normalised overt racism and misogyny, and a generation of politicians willing to lie, insult, cheat and steal to win. The pervasive distrust Trump has generated will survive long after he eventually leaves the scene.
Among the most complacent Americans are “normal” (that is to say non-Maga) Republicans. Many of them argue that Trump says distasteful and buffoonish things, but that the American system of checks and balances will keep him under control once in office. His election in 2016 raised extreme fears among his opponents, the argument goes, but his actual administration was successful in cutting taxes, deregulating, ending the right to abortion through his Supreme Court appointments, and accomplishing many traditional Republican objectives. In any case, they say, Trump is much less bad than Harris, who will raise taxes and continue the “woke” policies of the “failed” Biden administration.
There are several important reasons, however, to think that a second Trump term will be much worse than the first, and will do further long-term damage to the American democratic system. The most important one centres around personnel.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, he entered office with virtually no coteries of followers and no concrete plans other than general aspirations to “build that wall”. As a result, the first three years of his administration were staffed with reasonably competent Republican officeholders—defence secretary James Mattis; national security adviser HR McMaster; secretary of state Rex Tillerson; and director of the national economic council Gary Cohn.
As time went on, however, virtually every one of these individuals clashed with Trump and was either fired or quit in disgust. Trump went through 44 senior officials—including 26 cabinet secretaries—in four years. During the last few months of his term, he sought to replace departing officials with loyalists like Kash Patel at the Department of Defence or Jeffrey Clark at the Department of Justice. These loyalists would later follow Trump in prosecuting election fraud, and provoked widespread dismay and threats of mass resignations even among earlier Trump appointees. His final White House presidential personnel director was John McEntee, who was just 29 when appointed. He had started out as Trump’s bag carrier and distinguished himself by ferreting out “disloyal” staffers.
Many Trump supporters have recognised that he failed to achieve many of his objectives, such as repealing Obamacare or building a border wall, because of the opposition of the mainstream Republicans working for him. In response, the conservative Heritage Foundation, a thinktank, drafted a plan for the next administration entitled “Project 2025” that takes on the personnel problem directly.
In October 2020, the first Trump White House had issued an executive order, which created a new category of federal employees—“Schedule F”—who would be stripped of their civil service protections and could be fired at will. This order came too late in the administration to be carried out, and Biden rescinded it as one of his first acts after taking office in 2021. Project 2025 envisions reviving Schedule F in a second term, and the Heritage Foundation has been collecting lists of officials who could staff a new Trump administration. The major qualification would be personal loyalty to the president.
It is hard to overstate the extent to which a revived Schedule F would threaten the workings of the United States government. There are currently a number of senior officials with “for cause” removal protections, meaning that they cannot be arbitrarily fired by the president. They include the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It is all too easy to imagine Trump replacing the IRS director with a loyalist and then ordering that person to launch tax audits against journalists, CEOs, Democratic Party donors or other perceived enemies. A compliant head of BLS could simply make up false inflation statistics, as the Argentine statistical bureau did under the populist government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from 2007 to 2015.
More broadly, a revived Schedule F would constitute a wholesale attack on the principle of merit within the US bureaucracy, and would set the country back to the period before the 1883 Pendleton Act. Until then, virtually all federal officials were patronage appointments, put in their offices as a favour to a political supporter. The 1883 act, which some conservatives now argue is unconstitutional, created the US Civil Service Commission and for the first time established merit criteria for the hiring and promotion of bureaucrats. A new Schedule F would open up huge opportunities for graft and corruption, just as occurred under the 19th-century “spoils” system. It would also put Trump in a much better position to accomplish his ends.
Dismantling the ‘deep state’ has become a key part of the agenda of virtually every Republican
Project 2025 is a massive tome outlining far-right conservative policies on issues from abortion to guns, in addition to the personnel question. It became an effective talking point for the Democrats, and the Trump campaign later distanced itself from the document. Nonetheless, it is very likely that something like Schedule F and the personnel policies related to it will be retained as part of the second-term plan. Dismantling the “deep state” has become a key part of the agenda of virtually every Republican; having the right people in place is indeed a precondition for a new administration to accomplish almost any of its objectives and is one of the reasons to expect that a second Trump term will be quite different from the first.
As the 6th January uprising indicated, Trump has never felt particularly constrained by the law, and will be strongly tempted to skirt or openly defy it in a second term. In this he has been greatly helped by the Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority he helped to create. In July the Court issued an extraordinary ruling on presidential immunity which took aim at Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the president for seeking to overturn the election.
The Court ruled that actions taken within the scope of the president’s official duties were immune from criminal prosecution; as critics noted, this would allow a future president to order the assassination of a political rival. The Court also issued rulings seeking to weaken the power of the administrative state. Until then, this power had been protected by decisions such as the 1984 Chevron deference precedent, which said that the courts did not have the expertise to overrule agency judgments that met a certain standard. The more recent rulings changed that, and would concentrate power back in the hands of a unitary executive.
Many policies that Trump has been pushing in this election cycle are far more extreme than those on his agenda in 2016. Back then, he wanted to build a border wall to keep migrants out; now, he wants to arrest massive numbers of undocumented immigrants, house them in camps and then expel them from the country. He has used overtly racist rhetoric to describe immigrants, portraying them as “vicious, violent criminals” who are “invading our towns” and will “cut your throat and won’t even think about it the next morning”.
The scale of his proposed actions is mind-boggling. There are upwards of 11m undocumented immigrants in the country today. His plans would entail breaking up immigrant families—around 4.4m under-18s who are American citizens because they were born in the US live with a parent who is undocumented. Since many such migrants live in big cities, this would require sending agents into jurisdictions controlled by Democrats, who can be expected to vigorously resist such an effort; Trump has suggested he will use the military to carry his orders out. To reduce violent crime (which has been falling under Biden) he recommends the police using “maximum violence” to intimidate law breakers.
Trump’s 2024 economic policies are equally radical. His first-term tariffs on Chinese exports, aluminium, steel and other goods did not do too much damage; indeed, the Biden administration kept many of them in place and actually increased duties against Chinese electric cars. This time around, Trump has suggested not just banning Chinese imports altogether, but imposing tariffs on imports from all countries, friend or foe. He has reportedly argued that such tariffs would raise so much revenue that they could replace income taxes altogether. He falsely believes that tariffs are paid by foreign exporters, and therefore will not add to inflation. They are ultimately paid by American consumers.
Many economists think that this new policy will be hugely damaging to the US economy. Contrary to Trump’s claims, it will raise prices immediately and put heavy burdens directly on those working-class voters he claims to want to support, for whom imports make up a larger share of their family budgets. This scheme doesn’t take into account the retaliatory tariffs that can be expected if the US were to follow such a course, which would replicate the downward spiral of global trade following the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s that raised import duties across the board and provoked other countries to follow suit. Coupled with the tax cuts Trump has dangled in front of his wealthy donors, he would add substantially more to the federal deficit than he did during his first term.
Of further concern to American allies would be the effects of a second term on US foreign policy and role in the world. Insiders such as former national security adviser John Bolton have recounted that Trump hoped to withdraw from Nato if he had won a second term in 2020. Trump continues to articulate an admiration for dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and has doubled down on his criticisms of democratic allies whom he blames for not “paying their dues” to Nato. Indeed, he has invited Russia to attack allies in this category.
On Ukraine specifically, a Trump administration would be a disaster. Trump repeatedly asserts that he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours by making a couple of telephone calls. His vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has outlined how this might work: in September he laid out a “peace plan” that largely involved Ukrainian territorial concessions to Russia, coupled with a Ukrainian commitment not to seek Nato membership or security guarantees from the West. It is, in short, Putin’s peace plan. Ukraine would never agree to such a negotiation, at which point a Trump administration would simply choke off its supply of weapons, as the Republican House did for six months in 2023.
There are nonetheless some major uncertainties about Trump’s foreign policy. He likes to castigate countries such as China and Iran for their aggressions, but also attacks Biden and the Democrats for being “warmongers” who are likely to get us into a third world war. In his first term, he demonstrated reluctance to use force abroad, and it is unclear whether he would use the US military to defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack, or support Israel in an all-out war with Iran. These very uncertainties are in themselves destabilising: neither America’s allies nor its enemies will know how a Trump-led White House will act.
If re-elected, Trump would likely focus on revenge against his perceived enemies
A final reason why a second Trump term will differ from the first is Trump himself. With Biden out of the way, Trump at 78 would be the oldest person ever elected president (beating Biden by a few months). He has shown clear evidence of mental deterioration. Over time, his interminable, meandering rants at rallies have grown less coherent and even more toxic. He has always been a narcissist focused on his own self-interest, and today believes himself to be the victim of a worldwide conspiracy. If re-elected, he would likely focus on revenge against his perceived enemies and the organisations he feels are persecuting him. This is why he has vowed to go after the “Biden crime family”, to try Barack Obama in military courts, purge the FBI and pardon the 6th January insurrectionists.
In a way, speculating about how bad a second Trump term will be is beside the point, because so much damage has already been done. In a tradition going all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville, the US has been thought of as a high-trust society, in which citizens readily work together in groups, creating a strong civil society that prepared them for democratic political life. They continue to display a strong “art of association”, but that art has increasingly been turned towards forming tightly bonded groups that display high levels of distrust or outright hatred for one another, and for the government.
This distrust has been driven by the country’s deepening polarisation, and the rise of Trump’s populist movement. Populism is driven by a conspiratorial belief that the apparent reality of most people is in fact a façade created by shadowy elites working to benefit themselves. Americans are told by right-wing conspiracy theorists that their government was not simply incompetent, but actively working against them: falsifying election outcomes; lying about statistics; engaging in politicised prosecutions; manipulating the public health system; and conspiring to change the country’s demographics by opening the southern border to illegal immigrants.
Trump has always trafficked in conspiracy theories; it began with his insinuation that Obama was not born in the US. But these theories have escalated in their content and extent. During his debate with Harris, Trump falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating the pets of local residents. After southern states were hit this autumn by two large hurricanes, Helene and Milton, right-wing conspiracists immediately spread lies that the Biden administration had ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to withhold disaster aid from Republican-dominated counties in North Carolina, and that Fema was diverting funds away from hurricane relief to support illegal immigrants.
While former mainstream Republicans and undecided voters appear complacent about the consequences of the coming election, those on the far right are not. Maga Republicans routinely assert that America’s survival hinges on the contest’s outcome, that Democrats hate the country and will do everything they can to undermine it. The journalist Tim Alberta reports that many evangelicals believe that liberals want to end Christianity in the US, and that blue state governors locked down their churches during Covid as an opening shot in a war against religion.
The internet and social media have contributed to the collapse of trust. The internet has undermined the credible intermediaries—legacy media, statistical agencies, public health authorities, universities and the like—that in the past certified facts and supported the reliability of public information. Today, anyone can say anything they want on social media. They can reach enormous audiences formerly available only to established newsrooms. The large social media platforms are interested in protecting their bottom lines and are therefore willing to promote inflammatory content or lies which generate user engagement. Their content moderation policies have been sucked into the broader political polarisation: early efforts to tamp down vaccine or election disinformation generated conservative charges of censorship and led certain red state legislators to seek greater government control over what’s said online. All of this has contributed to the broader collapse of public trust.
Donald Trump has already done much damage to the United States. If voters elect Harris on 5th November, the US could still avoid certain outcomes like an immediate end of support for Ukraine or a mass purge of the federal bureaucracy. But, short of a Democratic Party blowout (which is unlikely), a future Harris administration would be dogged by a huge right-wing disinformation machine that would castigate her for a wide variety of sins, many of which would be fabricated.
It is most distressing that just under 50 per cent of voters say they are willing to support Trump in this election. Eight years after he was first elected, there is a huge amount of information out there about who Trump is and what he stands for. Perhaps half the Republican electorate love what they see passionately, or regard him as a God-sent redeemer of American society. Another group of Republicans understand his faults, but still think that Harris would be much worse. And a small sliver of Americans are voters who haven’t made up their minds and haven’t until now paid much attention to politics. The election’s outcome will depend on what they decide in the last few days before 5th November.
That’s a depressing statement about the condition of American democracy today.
