For the most part, television coverage of Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign seems focused on his attacks on rivals, his poll standings and the status of pending legal probes.
Coverage of his recent CNN town hall centered on the atmospherics: his clashes with moderator Kaitlan Collins, the presence of a supportive audience that turned it into a virtual rally, the size of the viewing audience.
At the same time, however, in the town hall and other appearances, Trump has been laying out a radical agenda for a prospective return to the presidency that is more extreme and promises even greater controversy than his tumultuous first four years in the White House.
“We are going to finish what we started,” Trump vowed last March at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “We’re going to complete the mission…we will demolish the deep state.”
Some details have been reported at length in The Washington Post, Axios and The New York Times. But they have generally received less attention than they deserve, given the prospect that the norm-shattering 45th president could become the even more norm-shattering 47th chief executive.
Here are some promises Trump has made if he regains the presidency next year:
— He would reinstate an executive order, suspended by President Joe Biden, allowing him to reclassify 50,000 career federal employees and then replace them with political appointees who favor his policies.
That would totally destroy the 150-year-old civil service system under which all but the top federal policymakers are considered non-political career employees who support whomever wins the presidency.
— He would reduce U.S. support for Ukraine and seek a prompt peace agreement between its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “We’ll be stopping the slide into costly and never-ending wars,” Trump vowed at CPAC, declaring, we “can’t keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars protecting people that don’t even like us.”
This means reversing Biden’s policy of protecting democracies abroad and reinstituting closer ties with prominent autocrats like Putin. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton said Trump talked privately of withdrawing from NATO if re-elected.
— He has vowed vengeance against his political enemies. “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he told CPAC. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
He has called for defunding the FBI and the Department of Justice “until they come to their senses,” vowing to remove all officials he considers disloyal to him. That could include career intelligence and justice officials who investigated or prosecuted him, and FBI Director Chris Wray, whom he appointed after ousting James Comey.
— Trump promises a first day executive order limiting the current guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States, regardless of parentage, though he almost certainly lacks the power to do that.
— He plans to name only officials loyal to him, unlike his first term, when he governed with a cross-section of Republicans. As an example, Axios cited former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, the only top Justice Department official who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 results.
According to Axios, Trump’s operatives have complied lists of loyalists to appoint and opponents to remove. The loyalists include Republican lawyers who could become departmental general counsels and inspectors general.
In his CPAC speech, Trump listed an array of proposals that go far beyond the president’s powers or even those of the federal government. They included:
— Asking Congress to “create a restitution fund for Americans who have been unjustly discriminated against by these Biden policies.” He didn’t define the criteria.
— Revamping the nation’s education system, traditionally a function of local and state government, to have “the school principal to be appointed and elected by parents.” He said, “If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should be able to fire that principal immediately and select someone new.”
— In a crude reference to ongoing efforts to curb medical treatments for transgender youth, Trump vowed to “revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states.”
— A constitutional amendment imposing term limits on Congress, something Congress itself rejected the last time it was seriously proposed in 1995.
Some GOP rivals have endorsed such controversial Trump ideas as his promise to pardon supporters who staged the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to prevent counting the electoral votes certifying his defeat.
“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said on the CNN town hall. “And it’ll be very early on. And they’re living in hell right now,” he added.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on a conservative radio talk show that he would order a review of the convictions on his first day in office and be “aggressive’ in issuing pardons.
“We will use the pardon power — and I will do that at the front end,” DeSantis said, claiming the Justice Department and the FBI had been “weaponized” to unevenly punish people from “disfavored groups.”
One GOP hopeful, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, said he would pardon Trump, who faces multiple prospective criminal investigations. DeSantis said he would consider pardoning any victim of “political targeting.”
Clearly, any new GOP administration will seek dramatic changes from Biden’s. But no one has thought that through – or promised more – than Donald Trump.
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