Folks usually say to me that I wouldn’t personally be affected by a second Donald Trump presidency. In any case, I reside in a blue metropolis in a blue state, and I’m a married, heterosexual girl who isn’t trying to have any extra kids. I gained’t want medicine like mifepristone for a miscarriage (although I do have women in my household who I assume will sometime wish to have kids), and I don’t personally depend on the federal authorities for training, as a result of my children don’t go to public faculty.
So, once more, how would any of this have an effect on me? The almost certainly reply is that, as a public-facing individual, I’ll proceed to be subjected to threats, as many within the mainstream media already are. However assaults on the media might escalate if Trump returns to energy, provided that he doesn’t hesitate to demonize journalists and name them out earlier than his thousands and thousands of followers. And given what Trump says on tv, he might goal Americans for unfavorable speech.
“I believe the larger downside is the enemy from inside,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Information on Sunday. “Sick individuals, radical-left lunatics. And it ought to be very simply dealt with by, if mandatory, by the Nationwide Guard, or, if actually mandatory, by the army.” The “lunatics” in query may very well be anybody from protesters to opinion columnists—and even mainstream reporters—he doesn’t agree with. Trump has referred to CBS as a “A FAKE NEWS SCAM” whose operations are “completely unlawful,” and has equally suggested that ABC ought to lose its broadcast license.
What wouldn’t it imply to have a president who, on this trend, targets what little is left of the free press? It’s laborious to fathom, however there’s a world the place Trump imitates his strongman associates like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán or Kim Jong Un—all of whom take part in jailing or killing journalists in international locations with state-regulated media. He’s already taking a web page from Joe McCarthy this election cycle in focusing on the “enemies inside,” one thing my household is all too conversant in.
Few facets of Trump’s second-terms plans are extra overtly authoritarian than his immigration platform. On Friday, Trump traveled to Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, the place he’s shopping “Operation Aurora,” a coverage he stated would goal “each unlawful migrant felony community working on American soil” by use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. According to the Brennan Heart, the legislation is “a wartime authority that permits the president to detain or deport the natives and residents of an enemy nation. The legislation permits the president to focus on these immigrants with out a listening to and primarily based solely on their nation of beginning or citizenship.” The final time america used the Alien Enemies Act, it was to put Japanese and Japanese Individuals into internment camps throughout WWII.
What would internment camps really entail within the modern-day? Effectively, Trump has talked about deporting as much as 20 million undocumented immigrants—an operation of staggering scale that he freely admits will probably be “bloody.” (The Division of Homeland Safety, in 2018, estimated there have been 11.4 million undocumented immigrants; Pew put the quantity at roughly 11 million in 2022.) It’s unimaginable to think about what deporting that many individuals would actually appear like; possibly blue-state governors can be sturdy sufficient to stop deportation camps from being inbuilt states like California and New York. Perhaps the camps would solely be in pink states, or possibly they’d be erected on federal land, like nationwide parks. Then there’s the query of who would run these camps. Trump, for his half, has mused about utilizing the Nationwide Guard. Who would cease any of this, you may ask? Would a Republican Congress cease it? Who can be the grown-ups within the room.
