Inside Trump’s ‘fascist’ dreams for a second term
His plans for the White House aren’t a secret. He spends hours on the stages of his campaign rallies outlining a violent agenda for a second term. His supporters applaud. His allies are even more explicit.
Donald Trump’s volatile campaign – calling his adversaries “vermin” and echoing the pages of Mein Kampf and white supremacist manifestos – has flooded news outlets and social media with so many appeals to authoritarianism and violence that they barely register as news. Republicans shrug. His surrogates laugh off criticism. Americans are told not to take him seriously while he’s also the subject of countless warnings about the country’s dissolution into autocracy.
Still lying about his loss in the 2020 presidential election, he would see his return to the White House as retribution for what he falsely believes he was denied over the previous four years. He tells his supporters that “they” stole that from them, too. He would then destroy everything in his way.
A Donald Trump presidency in 2025 would employ an army of loyalists to weaponise the federal government to let him seek political revenge. He could use the US military as his domestic law enforcement. Immigrants would face ideological tests, mass police violence and incarceration. Transgender Americans would be stripped of their civil rights. Public school curriculums would be dismantled, in favour of right-wing propaganda. Drug offenders could be sentenced to death.
The prosecutors and judges overseeing criminal cases against him would be fired or jailed. Those charges could disappear, along with institutional guardrails and first amendment protections that hold power to account.
The people who run the nation’s elections, and the election administration itself, would become the targets instead, while members of a mob that stormed the US Capitol to overturn Mr Trump’s loss in the 2020 election would be pardoned.
He repeats his campaign pledges at every rally, almost word for word.
Whether he can actually pull the trigger depends on the future of the criminal trials and the growing number of legal battles against him, threats to his eligibility for , elections that will determine the balance of power in Congress, elections to determine which GOP nominee will face Joe Biden in November, and if Mr Trump wins at
