January 1 will find us twenty days away from Donald Trump’s inauguration—a moment when we will begin to learn what happens when he is president, again. But we already know some of what to expect from his administration, much of which directly contradicts promises he made not so long ago.
As you may recall, Trump has consistently presented himself as a deficit hawk (despite all evidence). With this supposedly in mind, he enlisted Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to create a Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with examining federal spending and finding ways to cut large portions. In less time than it takes to say “entitlements, defense, and interest payments,” they estimated that $2 trillion could be slashed from a total budget of just over $6.75 trillion.
Entitlements, defense, and interest payments are worth noting because this spending is essentially locked into future budgets. For entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare for seniors (who vote in high numbers), the figure is $2.3 trillion. Think this can be cut? Think again. In the same budget, the Pentagon receives nearly $875 billion. This figure needs to rise as it is not even keeping up with inflation and growth in military salaries. And interest on the national debt? This consumes almost $1 Trillion annually (More than defense spending). Is Trump inclined to limit the debt that accrues this interest? Consider his recent demand to remove the debt ceiling entirely, and you have your answer.
Okay, you might say, Trump lied about his plan for deficits and federal spending. Every candidate overpromises. Surely, he’ll follow through on his most prominent campaign promise: limiting immigration, rounding up those here illegally, and deporting them by the millions. Right?
Well, maybe not.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric about criminal immigrants and their impact on American jobs, his administration faces significant practical hurdles. They would need to locate, apprehend, detain, process, and deport these individuals through the legal system. How many people are we talking about? Estimates suggest as many as 13 million—about 4% of the U.S. population.
The staggering logistical challenges, legal obstacles, and costs associated with this mass deportation plan have already prompted incoming officials to concede that Trump’s promise may not be feasible. Sure, they might double the number of people Biden deported last year—270,000—but millions every year for four years? That’s a pipe dream. The saying about pigs flying comes to mind.
In foreign affairs, Trump is also backing away from another bold promise: ending Russia’s war against Ukraine on his first day in office. In recent remarks, he admitted that stopping the war in Ukraine may actually be more difficult than ending Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. “I see that as more difficult,” he confessed. So much for his self-proclaimed brilliance in diplomacy or his “special relationship” with Vladimir Putin. In a way this maybe good, if it means Trump actually tries a fair negotiation instead of selling Ukraine out. Color me very skeptical.
Elsewhere, the man who vowed to keep the U.S. out of international conflicts seems intent on creating them. Trump has floated the idea of taking over the Panama Canal and purchasing Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory.
The Panama Canal was built by the United States and operated as an American facility in the U.S. Canal Zone from 1903 to 1979, when a treaty began transferring control to Panama. The process was completed in 1999. Trump now deems the transit fees Panama charges as exorbitant and has suggested “taking the canal back.” Since the treaty is inviolable, one must ask: is the man who promised to keep us out of war willing to start one over this issue?
The Greenland idea is even more outlandish. As Trump explained, during his first term, a wealthy GOP donor casually mentioned the notion. Trump, intrigued, looked at a world map through the lens of a real estate developer and began entertaining the idea of owning the largest island in the world. With Trump’s defeat in 2020, the concept faded away. Now it has returned, zombie-like, to haunt his agenda.Let’s be honest though, he is simply blustering to LOOK tough, since he is scared to death to confront America’s real enemies. Instead, he provokes wars of words with our friends as a strawman. It’s a move as old as government itself.
Of course, Greenland is not for sale, and even Trump is unlikely to send troops to Panama. However, like his troubles with deportations, his newfound pessimism about Ukraine, and his budget and deficit blunders, the absurdity of these ideas underscores one point: even before taking office, Trump is proving that his campaign promises were made to be broken. One wonders if his supporters have even noticed, or even care.
I have repressed so much of my desire to influence “the undecided” before this election with the great articles and authors I am reading. But today I feel the need to express some things through one of my favorite writers with whom I resonate.
She is the history professor, Heather Cox Richardson, an American historian born in Chicago. She is a baby-boomer and loves this country. Her Letters from an American have been among my favorite non-journalist writers for years. She is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She is a Harvard graduate and previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.
Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.
These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.
Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020.
But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, offered a message of unity, the expansion of the economic policies that have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and the creation of an “opportunity economy” that echoed many of the policies Republicans used to embrace. Trump vowed to take revenge on his enemies and to return the country to the neoliberal policies President Joe Biden had rejected in favor of investing in the middle class.
When he took office, Biden acknowledged that democracy was in danger around the globe, as authoritarians like Russian president Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping maintained that democracy was obsolete and must be replaced by autocracies. Russia set out to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that enforced the rules-based international order that stood against Russian expansion.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who overturned democracy in his own country, explained that the historical liberal democracy of the United States weakens a nation because the equality it champions means treating immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women as equal to men, thus ending traditionally patriarchal society.
In place of democracy, Orbán champions “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.
In order to strengthen democracy at home and abroad, Biden worked to show that it delivered for ordinary Americans. He and the Democrats passed groundbreaking legislation to invest in rebuilding roads and bridges and build new factories to usher in green energy. They defended unions and used the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies and return more economic power to consumers.
Their system worked. It created record low unemployment rates, lifted wages for the bottom 80% of Americans, and built the strongest economy in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, setting multiple stock market records. But that success turned out not to be enough to protect democracy.
In contrast, Trump promised he would return to the ideology of the era before 2021, when leaders believed in relying on markets to order the economy with the idea that wealthy individuals would invest more efficiently than if the government regulated business or skewed markets with targeted investment (in green energy, for example). Trump vowed to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and to make up lost revenue through tariffs, which he incorrectly insists are paid by foreign countries; tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers.
For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
That is what voters chose.
Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years.
As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.
U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs.
Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020.
This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”
This afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her alma mater, Howard University, to concede the election to Trump.
She thanked her supporters, her family, the Bidens, the Walz family, and her campaign staff and volunteers. She reiterated that she believes Americans have far more in common than separating us.
In what appeared to be a message to Trump, she noted: “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.
“My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”
Harris urged people “to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.” She told those feeling as if the world is dark indeed these days, to “fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service,” and to let “that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks, toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America.”
Ever Devoted 