Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?

In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.

By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury.

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.

From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.

A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?

The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency. If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up.

After Trump was elected in 2016, he was quickly surrounded by prominent and influential people who recognized that he was a lawless menace. They found ways to restrain a man they regarded as, to quote the reported words of Trump’s first secretary of state, “a fucking moron” and, to quote his second chief of staff, “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” whose “dishonesty is just astounding.” But there would be no Rex Tillerson in a second Trump term; no John Kelly; no Jeff Sessions, who as attorney general recused himself from the investigation into the president’s connections to Russia, leading to the appointment of an independent special counsel.

Since 2021, Trump-skeptical Republicans have been pushed out of politics. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger forfeited their seats in the House for defending election integrity. Representative Tom Emmer withdrew his bid for House speaker over the same offense. The Republican Senate caucus is less hospitable to Trump-style authoritarianism—but notice that the younger and newer Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance) tend to support Trump’s schemes, while his opponents in the Senate belong to the outgoing generation. Trump’s leading rivals for the 2024 nomination seldom dare criticize his abuse of power.

Most of the people who would staff a second Trump term would be servile tools who have absorbed the brutal realities of contemporary Republicanism: defend democracy; forfeit your career. Already, an array of technically competent opportunists has assembled itself—from within right-wing think tanks and elsewhere—and has begun to plan out exactly how to dismantle the institutional safeguards against Trump’s corrupt and vengeful impulses. Trump’s likely second-term advisers have made clear that they would share his agenda of legal impunity and the use of law enforcement against his perceived opponents—not only the Biden family, but Trump’s own former attorney general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its investments in the Trump family.

First-term Trump told aides that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. Second-term Trump would choose aides who would not talk him out of it. Other partners, too, would have to adjust to the authoritarianism and corruption of a second Trump term. Liberals in Israel and India would find themselves isolated as the U.S. turned toward reaction and authoritarianism at home; East Asian democracies would have to adjust to Trump protectionism and trade wars; Mexico’s antidemocratic Morena party would have scope to snuff out free institutions provided that it suppressed migration flows to the United States.

Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.

If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.

In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.

The outvoted would happily justify the twist of events in their favor. “We are a republic, not a democracy,” many said in 2016. Since that time, the outvoted have become more outspoken against democracy. As Senator Mike Lee tweeted a month before the 2020 election: “Democracy isn’t the objective.”

So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.

And what might follow that? In 2020, Trump’s advisers speculated about the possibility of using the Army to crush protests against Trump’s plans to overturn that year’s election. Now those in Trump’s circle are apparently thinking further ahead. Some reportedly want to prepare in advance to use the Insurrection Act to convert the military into a tool of Trump’s authoritarian project. It’s an astonishing possibility. But Trump is thinking about it, so everybody else must—including the senior command of the U.S. military.

If a president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer be free. There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.

That grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on. Stopping Trump would not represent progress on any of those agenda items. But stopping Trump would preserve the possibility of progress, by keeping alive the constitutional-democratic structure of the United States.

A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not expunged. The schemes and plots of a second Trump term may be defeated too. Yet every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.

As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. The leaders of his own party in Congress feared and hated him. The GOP’s deepest-pocketed donors have worked for three years to nominate somebody, anybody, else. Yet even so, Trump’s co-partisans are converging upon him. They are convincing themselves that something can justify forgiving Trump’s first attempted coup and enabling a second: taxes, border control, stupid comments by “woke” college students.

For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.

When Benjamin Franklin famously said of the then-new Constitution, “A republic, if you can keep it,” he was not suggesting that the republic might be misplaced absentmindedly. He foresaw that ambitious, ruthless characters would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal characters might assist them. Americans have faced Franklin’s challenge since 2016, in a story that has so far had some villains, many heroes—and just enough good luck to tip the balance. It would be dangerous to continue to count on luck to do the job.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Revenge Presidency.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

“I don’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” NATO, founded in 1949 and supported for three-quarters of a century by Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike, has long been a particular focus of Trump’s ire. As president, Trump threatened to withdraw from NATO many times—including, infamously, at the 2018 NATO summit.

But during Trump’s time in office, the withdrawal never happened. That was because someone was always there to talk him out of it. Bolton says he did; Jim Mattis, John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and even Mike Pence are thought to have done so too.

But they didn’t change his mind. And if Trump is reelected in 2024, none of those people will be in the White House. All of them have broken with the former president, in some cases dramatically, and there isn’t another pool of Republican analysts who understand Russia and Europe, because most of them either signed statements opposing him in 2016 or criticized him after 2020. In a second term, Trump would be surrounded by people who either share his dislike of American security alliances or don’t know anything about them and don’t care. This time, the ill will that Trump has always felt toward American allies would likely manifest itself in a clear policy change. “The damage he did in his first term was reparable,” Bolton told me. “The damage in the second term would be irreparable.”

Institutionally, and maybe even politically, leaving NATO could be difficult for Trump. As soon as he announced his intentions, a constitutional crisis would ensue. Senate approval is required for U.S. treaties—but the Constitution says nothing about congressional approval for withdrawal from treaties. Recognizing this gap in the law, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine and Republican Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation, which has already passed the Senate, designed to block any U.S. president from withdrawing from NATO without two-thirds Senate approval or an act of Congress. Kaine told me he feels “confident that the courts would uphold us on that and would not allow a president to unilaterally withdraw,” but there would certainly be a struggle. A public-relations crisis would unfold too. A wide range of people—former supreme allied commanders, former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former presidents, foreign heads of state—will surely rally to make the case for NATO, and very loudly.

But none of that would necessarily matter, because long before Congress convenes to discuss the treaty, the damage will have been done. That’s because NATO’s most important source of influence is not legal or institutional, but psychological: It creates an expectation of collective defense that exists in the mind of anyone who would threaten a member of the alliance. If the Soviet Union never attacked West Germany between 1949 and 1989, that was not because it feared a German response. If Russia has not attacked Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania over the past 18 months, that’s not because Russia fears Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania. The Soviet Union held back, and Russia continues to do so now, because of their firm belief in the American commitment to the defense of those countries.

This deterrent effect doesn’t come just from the NATO treaty, a bare-bones document whose signatories simply agree in Article 5 that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Deterrence comes from the Kremlin’s conviction that Americans really believe in collective defense, that the U.S. military really is prepared for collective defense, and that the U.S. president really is committed to act if collective security is challenged. Trump could end that conviction with a single speech, a single comment, even a single Truth Social post, and it won’t matter if Congress, the media, and the Republican Party are still arguing about the legality of withdrawing from NATO. Once the commander in chief says “I will not come to an ally’s aid if attacked,” why would anyone fear NATO, regardless of what obligations still exist on paper? And once the Russians, or anyone else, no longer fear a U.S. response to an attack, then the chances that they will carry one out grow higher. If such a scenario seems unlikely, it shouldn’t. Before February 2022, many refused to believe there could ever be a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

When I asked several people with deep links to NATO to imagine what would happen to Europe, to Ukraine, and even to Taiwan and South Korea if Trump declared his refusal to observe Article 5, all of them agreed that faith in collective defense could evaporate quickly. Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and a former deputy secretary-general of NATO, pointed out that Trump could pull the American ambassador from his post, prevent diplomats from attending meetings, or stop contributing to the cost of the Brussels headquarters, all before Congress was able to block him: “He wouldn’t be in any way legally constrained from doing that.” Closing American bases in Europe and transferring thousands of soldiers would take longer, of course, but all of the political bodies in the alliance would nevertheless have to change the way they operate overnight. James Goldgeier, an international-relations professor at American University and the author of several books on NATO, thinks the result would be chaotic. “It’s not like you can say, ‘Okay, now we have another plan for how to deal with this,’ ” he told me. There is no alternative leadership available, no alternative source of command-and-control systems, no alternative space weapons, not even an alternative supply of ammunition. Europe would immediately be exposed to a possible Russian attack for which it is not prepared, and for which it would not be prepared for many years.

Without NATO, and without an American commitment to European security, supplies for Ukraine would also dry up. The prospect of America leaving NATO would force many European countries to keep their military resources at home; after all, they might soon face invasion as well. The Ukrainians would begin to run out of ammunition quite quickly. The Russian conquest of all of Ukraine—still President Vladimir Putin’s goal—would become thinkable once again. Ukrainian military logistics would become much harder, because the Russians could bomb airports and other supply hubs in Poland and Romania. They have already come very close: At least one Russian missile accidentally struck Poland, and Russian strikes have hit the Romanian-Ukrainian border. Early in the war, the Russians deliberately attacked a base in western Ukraine, very near the Polish border, where foreign soldiers were known to be training. If the Russians begin to target bases inside Poland itself, the logistics of arming Ukraine become impossible.

This change would immediately reverberate beyond Europe. Once Trump has made clear that he no longer supports NATO, all of America’s other security alliances would be in jeopardy as well. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and even Israel would figure they can no longer count on automatic American support. The end of NATO might not affect them directly, but its demise would signal that everyone, everywhere, has to assume the United States is no longer a reliable ally.

Over time, all of America’s allies would begin to hedge. Many European countries would cozy up to Russia. Many Asian countries would calculate that, as Kaine puts it, “I guess we need to get closer to China, just as a matter of self-preservation.” To avoid invasion, pragmatic leaders near China or Russia might begin to take more seriously the commercial and political demands from the world’s second- and third-largest military powers, respectively. At the same time, many political parties and heads of state (both in and out of power) backed by Russia and China—or Iran, Venezuela, Cuba—would have a compelling new argument in favor of autocratic methods and tactics: America, a country whose image has already been severely damaged by Trump and Trumpism, would be seen to be retreating. Over time, American economic influence would decline too. Trade agreements and financial arrangements would change, which would have an impact on American companies and eventually the U.S. economy.

If Trump is reelected, Americans will be so consumed by the drama of their own failing institutions that, for a long while, most won’t note the problems caused by the shifting international order. Lithuania’s and South Korea’s troubles would seem distant, irrelevant. The end of American influence would probably unfold in relative obscurity. By the time people here realize how much has changed, it will be too late.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “America Will Abandon NATO.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

When Donald Trump first took office, he put a premium on what he called “central casting” hires—people with impressive résumés who matched his image of an ideal administration official. Yes, he brought along his share of Steve Bannons and Michael Flynns. But there was also James Mattis, the decorated four-star general who took over the Defense Department, and Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs chief operating officer who was appointed head of the National Economic Council, and Rex Tillerson, who left one of the world’s most profitable international conglomerates to become secretary of state.

Trump seemed positively giddy that all of these important people were suddenly willing to work for him. And although his populist supporters lamented the presence of so many swamp creatures in his administration, establishment Washington expressed pleasant surprise at the picks. A consensus had formed that what the incoming administration needed most was “adults in the room.” To save the country from ruin, the thinking went, reasonable Republicans had a patriotic duty to work for Trump if asked. Many of them did.

[From the December 2019 issue: James Mattis on the enemy within]

Don’t expect it to happen again. The available supply of serious, qualified people willing to serve in a Trump administration has dwindled since 2017. After all, the so-called adults didn’t fare so well in their respective rooms. Some quit in frustration or disgrace; others were publicly fired by the president. Several have spent their post–White House lives fielding congressional subpoenas and getting indicted. And after seeing one Trump term up close, vanishingly few of them are interested in a sequel: This past summer, NBC News reported that just four of Trump’s 44 Cabinet secretaries had endorsed his current bid.

Even if mainstream Republicans did want to work for him again, Trump is unlikely to want them. He’s made little secret of the fact that he felt burned by many in his first Cabinet. This time around, according to people in Trump’s orbit, he would prioritize obedience over credentials. “I think there’s going to be a very concerted, calculated effort to ensure that the people he puts in his next administration—they don’t have to share his worldview exactly, but they have to implement it,” Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesperson, told me.

What would this look like in practice? Predicting presidential appointments nearly a year before the election is a fool’s errand, especially with a candidate as mercurial as this one. And, whether for reasons of low public opinion or ongoing legal jeopardy, some of Trump’s likely picks might struggle to get confirmed (expect a series of contentious hearings). But the names currently circulating in MAGA world offer a glimpse at the kind of people Trump could gravitate toward.

One Trump-world figure with a record of deference to the boss is Stephen Miller. As a speechwriter and policy adviser, Miller managed to endure while so many of his colleagues flamed out in part because he was satisfied with being a staffer instead of a star. He was also fully aligned with the president on his signature issue: immigration. Inside the White House, Miller championed some of the administration’s most draconian measures, including the Muslim travel ban and the family-separation policy. In a second Trump term, some expect Miller to get a job that will give him significant influence over immigration policy—perhaps head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or even secretary of homeland security. Given Miller’s villainous reputation in Democratic circles, however, he might have a hard time getting confirmed by the Senate. If that happens, some think White House chief of staff might be a good consolation prize.

[From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy]

For secretary of state, one likely candidate is Richard Grenell. Before Trump appointed him ambassador to Germany in 2018, Grenell was best-known as a right-wing foreign-policy pundit and an inexhaustible Twitter troll. He brought his signature bellicosity to Berlin, hectoring journalists and government officials on Twitter, and telling a Breitbart London reporter early in his tenure that he planned to use his position to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe.” (He had to walk back the comment after some in Germany interpreted it as a call for far-right regime change.)

Grenell’s undiplomatic approach to diplomacy exasperated German officials and thrilled Trump, who reportedly described him as an ambassador who “gets it.” Grenell has spent recent years performing his loyalty as a Trump ally and, according to one source, privately building his case for the secretary-of-state role.

One job that Trump will be especially focused on getting right is attorney general. He believes that both of the men who held this position during his term—Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr—were guilty of grievous betrayal. Since then, Trump has been charged with 91 felony counts across four separate criminal cases—evidence, he claims, of a historic “political persecution.” (He has pleaded not guilty in all cases.) Trump has pledged to use the Justice Department to visit revenge on his persecutors if he returns to the White House.

“The notion of the so-called independence of the Department of Justice needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history,” says Paul Dans, who served in the Office of Personnel Management under Trump and now leads an effort by the Heritage Foundation to recruit conservative appointees for the next Republican administration. To that end, Trump allies have floated a range of loyalists for attorney general, including Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Josh Hawley; former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Jeffrey Clark, formerly one of Trump’s assistant attorneys general, who was indicted in Georgia on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election (the charges are still pending).

Vivek Ramaswamy—the fast-talking entrepreneur running in the Republican presidential primary as of this writing—is also expected to get a top post in the administration. Ramaswamy has praised Trump on the campaign trail and positioned himself as the natural heir to the former president. Trump has responded to the flattery in kind, publicly praising his opponent as a “very, very, very intelligent person.” Some have even speculated that Ramaswamy could be Trump’s pick for vice president.

One source close to Ramaswamy told me that a Trump adviser had recently asked him what job the candidate might want in a future administration. After thinking about it, the source suggested ambassador to the United Nations, reasoning that he’s a “good talker.” The Trump adviser said he’d keep it in mind, though it’s worth noting that Ramaswamy’s lack of support for Ukraine and his suggestion that Russia be allowed to keep some of the territory it has seized could lead to confirmation trouble.

Beyond the high-profile posts, the Trump team may have more jobs to fill in 2025 than a typical administration does. Dans and his colleagues at Heritage are laying the groundwork for a radical politicization of the federal civilian workforce. If they get their way, the next Republican president will sign an executive order eliminating civil-service protections for up to 50,000 federal workers, effectively making the people in these roles political appointees. Rank-and-file budget wonks, lawyers, and administrators working in dozens of agencies would be reclassified as Schedule F employees, and the president would be able to fire them at will, with or without cause. These fired civil servants’ former posts could be left empty—or filled with Trump loyalists. To that end, Heritage has begun to put together a roster of thousands of pre-vetted potential recruits. “What we’re really talking about is a major renovation to government,” Dans told me.

Trump actually signed an executive order along these lines in the final months of his presidency, but it was reversed by his successor. On the campaign trail, Trump has vowed to reinstate it with the goal of creating a more compliant federal workforce for himself. “Either the deep state destroys America,” he has declared, “or we destroy the deep state.”

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here—refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them. The administration drew up plans for erecting a border wall, as well as an approach to stripping away the due-process rights of noncitizens so they could be expelled faster. These changes to American immigration policy took place in the amount of time that it would take the average new hire to figure out how to use the office printer.

Within days of Trump’s election, his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was already gathering a group of loyal bureaucrats to start drafting executive orders. Civil servants who were veterans of the George W. Bush administration found the proposals to be so outlandishly impractical, if not also harmful to American interests and perhaps even illegal, that they assumed the ideas could never come to fruition. They were wrong. Over the next four years, lone children were loaded onto planes and sent back to the countries they had fled without so much as a notification to their families. Others were wrenched from their parents’ arms as a way of sending a message to other families abroad about what awaited them if they, too, tried to enter the United States.

[From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy]

If given another chance to realize his goals, Miller has essentially boasted in recent interviews that he would move even faster and more forcefully. And Trump, who’s been campaigning on the promise to finish the job he started on immigration policy, would fairly assume if he is reelected that harsh restrictions in that arena are precisely what the American people want. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he declared during a speech in Iowa in September, referring to 1954’s offensively titled Operation Wetback, under which hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry were deported, including some who were American citizens.

Trump and other key fixtures of his time in office have refused to rule out trying to reinstate family separations. They have been explicit about their plans to send ICE agents back into the streets to make arrests (with help from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the National Guard), and finish their work on the wall. They say that they will reimpose the pandemic-related expulsion policy known as Title 42, which all but shut off access to asylum, and that they will expand the use of military-style camps to house people who are caught in the enforcement dragnet. They have laid out plans and legal rationales for major policy changes that they didn’t get around to the first time, such as ending birthright citizenship, a long-held goal of Trump’s. They’ve floated ideas such as screening would-be immigrants for Marxist views before granting them entry, and using the Alien and Sedition Acts in service of deportations. Trump and his advisers have also made clear that they intend to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow them to deploy the U.S. military to the border, and to use an extensive naval blockade between the United States and Latin America to fight the drug trade. That most drug smuggling occurs at legal ports of entry doesn’t matter to Trump and his team: They seem to have reasonably concluded that immigration restrictions don’t have to be effective to be celebrated by their base.

The breakneck pace of work during Miller’s White House tour was periodically hampered by worried bureaucrats attempting end runs around him, or by his most powerful detractors, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, whispering reservations into the president’s ear. But Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have left politics altogether, and Miller used Trump’s term to perfect strategies for disempowering anyone else who dared to challenge him. As for job applicants to work in a second Trump administration, Miller told Axios that being in lockstep with him on immigration issues would be “non-negotiable.” Others need not apply.

Those who choose to join Trump in this mission to slash immigration would do so knowing that they would face few consequences, if any, for how they go about it: Almost all of the administration officials who pushed aggressively for the most controversial policies of Trump’s term continue to enjoy successful careers.

The speed of Trump’s work on immigration can obscure its impact in real time. This is why Lucas Guttentag, a law professor at Stanford and Yale and a senior counselor on immigration issues in the Obama and Biden administrations, created a database with his students to log and track the more than 1,000 immigration-policy changes made during Trump’s years in office. Most remain in place. This is worth dwelling on. Trump’s time in office already represents a resurgence of old, disproven ideas about the inherent threat—physical, cultural, and economic—posed by immigrants. And if Trump does return to office, this moment may qualify less as a blip than an era: a period like previous ones when such misconceptions prevailed, and laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and eugenics-based national-origins quotas ruled the day.

[Caitlin Dickerson: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses]

Returning Trump to the presidency would reopen wounds that have barely healed in the communities he has said he would target immediately. Recently, I stood outside a church in the Northeast that caters mostly to undocumented farmworkers, with a Catholic sister who oversees the parish’s programming. As we stood in the autumn light, I remarked on the picturesque scene around her place of worship and work. She replied by pointing in one direction, then another, then another, at the places where she said ICE agents used to hide out on Sunday mornings during the Trump administration, waiting to capture her congregants as they left Mass to go about their weekly errands at the laundromat and the grocery store.

Beyond the emotional impact of Trump’s return, the economy could also face a pummeling if the number of immigrant workers, legal and otherwise, were to drop. In a November 2022 speech, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, detailed the harm from COVID-related dips in immigration, which left the country short an estimated 1 million workers.

America’s rightward shift on immigration is part of a global story in which Western countries are, in general, turning against immigrants. But the world tends to look to the United States as a guide for what sorts of checks on immigration are socially permissible. A new Trump administration would provide a pretty clear answer: just about any.

An anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement may indeed be what the country is left with if Trump succeeds in the next general election. “The first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss,” Stephen Miller told Axios, “followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable.”

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Specter of Family Separation.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. There may be no American leader less suited to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Constitution directs the president. But that authority comes with the office, including command of the Justice Department and the FBI.

We know what Trump would like to do with that power, because he’s said so out loud. He is driven by self-interest and revenge, in that order. He wants to squelch the criminal charges now pending against him, and he wants to redeploy federal prosecutors against his enemies, beginning with President Joe Biden. The important question is how much of that agenda he could actually carry out in a second term.

Trump tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs. Subordinates talked the former president out of many such schemes or passively resisted them by running out the clock. The whole second volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which documented 10 occasions on which Trump tried to obstruct justice, can be read as a compilation of thwarted directives.

[From the November 2023 issue: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump]

The institutional resistance Trump faced has reinforced his determination to place loyalists in key jobs should he win reelection. One example is Jeffrey Clark, who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Trump sought to appoint Clark as acting attorney general in early January 2021, but backed off after a mass-resignation threat at the DOJ. People who know him well suggest that he would not let that threat deter him a second time. Trump will also want to fire Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and replace him with someone more pliable. Only tradition, not binding law, prevents the president and his political appointees from issuing orders to the FBI about its investigations.

The top jobs at the DOJ require Senate confirmation, and even a Republican Senate might not confirm an indicted conspirator to overturn an election like Clark for attorney general. Under the Vacancies Reform Act, which regulates temporary appointments, Trump can appoint any currently serving Senate-confirmed official from anywhere in the executive branch as acting attorney general. Of course, all of the officials serving at the beginning of his new term would be holdovers from the Biden administration.

Trump’s allies are searching for loyalists among the Republicans currently serving on several dozen independent boards and commissions, such as the Federal Trade Commission, that have “party balancing” requirements for their appointees. Alternatively, Trump could choose any senior career official in the Justice Department who has served for at least 90 days in a position ranked GS-15 or higher on the federal pay scale—a cohort that includes, for example, senior trial attorneys, division counsels, and section chiefs. As Anne Joseph O’Connell, a Stanford law professor and an expert on the Vacancies Reform Act, reminded me, “This is how we got Matthew Whitaker,” the former attorney general’s chief of staff, as acting attorney general. (Whitaker was widely criticized as unqualified.)

Would some career officials, somewhere among the department’s 115,000 employees, do Trump’s bidding in exchange for an acting appointment? Trump’s team is looking.

Once Trump has installed loyalists in crucial posts, his first priority—an urgent one for a man facing 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions—would be to save himself from conviction and imprisonment.

Of the four indictments against him, two are federal: the Florida case, with charges of unlawful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice, and the Washington case, which charges Trump with unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those will be the easiest for him to dispose of.

To begin with, there is little to stop Trump from firing Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing both of the federal investigations. Justice Department regulations confer a measure of protection on a special counsel against arbitrary dismissal, but he may be removed for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” That last clause is a catchall that Trump could readily invoke.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide]

The regulations state that a special counsel may be fired “only by the personal action of the Attorney General,” but that would not stop Trump either. In the unlikely event that his handpicked attorney general were reluctant, he could fire the attorney general and keep on firing successors until he found one to do his bidding, as Richard Nixon did to get rid of Archibald Cox. Alternatively, Trump could claim—and probably prevail, if it came to a lawsuit—that the president is not bound by Justice Department regulations and can fire the special counsel himself.

Smith’s departure would still leave Trump’s federal criminal charges intact, but no law would prevent Trump from ordering that they be dropped. He could do so even with a trial in progress, right up to the moment before a jury returned a verdict. No legal expert I talked with expressed any doubt that he could get away with this.

Dismissing the charges would require the trial judges’ consent. But even if the judges were to object, Trump would almost certainly win on appeal: The Supreme Court is not likely to let a district judge decide whether or not the Justice Department has to prosecute a case.

Trump will be able to avoid going to prison even if he has already been convicted of federal charges before he is sworn in. Here again, a trial judge is unlikely to order Trump imprisoned, even after sentencing, before he exhausts his appeals. And there is no plausible scenario in which that happens before Inauguration Day.

At any time while Trump’s appeals are pending, his Justice Department may notify the appellate court that the prosecution no longer wishes to support his conviction. This is known as a confession of error on the government’s part; the effect, if the court grants the request, is to vacate a conviction. Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Trump administration did something to similar effect in a false-statements case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, moving to dismiss the charges after Flynn had pleaded guilty but before his sentencing. (Trump later pardoned Flynn.) According to the relevant rule of criminal procedure, dismissal during prosecution—including on appeal from a conviction—requires “leave of the court,” but it’s highly unlikely that an appellate court would refuse to grant such a motion to dismiss.

Trump might also invoke the pardon power on his own behalf. He has already asserted, as far back as 2018, that “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” No president has ever tried this, and whether he can is a contested question among legal scholars. Experts who agree with Trump say the Constitution frames the pardon power as total but for one exception, implicitly blessing all other uses. (The exception is that the president may not pardon an impeachment.) Those who disagree include the Justice Department itself, through its Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded in 1974 that a self-pardon would be invalid under “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

But the debate over self-pardons wouldn’t matter much to Trump in practice. If he pardoned himself of all criminal charges, there would be no one with standing to challenge the pardon in court—other than, perhaps, the Justice Department, which would be under Trump’s control.

Unlike the federal charges, Trump’s state criminal cases—for alleged racketeering and election interference in Georgia and hush-money payments to a porn star in New York—would not fall under his authority as president. Even so, the presidency would very likely protect him for at least the duration of his second term.

The Office of Legal Counsel, which makes authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, has twice opined, in 1973 and again in 2000, that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.” That conclusion is binding for federal prosecutors, but state prosecutors are not obliged to follow it.

No one knows what would happen if Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, or Alvin Bragg, the DA in New York, decided to press ahead with their cases against Trump should he regain the presidency. Like so many outlandish questions pertaining to Trump, this one has no judicial precedent, because no sitting president has ever been charged with felony crimes. But legal scholars told me that Trump would have strong arguments, at least, to defer state criminal proceedings against him until he left the White House in 2029. By then, new prosecutors, with new priorities, may have replaced Willis and Bragg.

Trump has named a long list of people as deserving of criminal charges, or execution. Among them are Joe Biden, Mark Milley, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Arthur Engoron, the judge in his New York civil fraud case.

If he returns to office, Trump may not even have to order their prosecutions himself. He will be surrounded by allies who know what he wants. One likely DOJ appointee is Mike Davis, a Republican who has substantial government credentials: He was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations to Senator Charles Grassley when Grassley chaired the Judiciary Committee.

If Davis were acting attorney general, he said on a right-wing YouTube show, he would “rain hell on Washington.” First, “we’re gonna fire a lot of people in the executive branch, in the deep state.” He would also “indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden.” And “every January 6 defendant is gonna get a pardon.” Trump could not immediately appoint an outsider like Davis attorney general. But he could make him a Justice Department section chief, and then appoint him as acting attorney general after 90 days.

Trump could also appoint—or direct his attorney general to appoint—any lawyer, at any time, as special counsel to the Justice Department, with the authority to bring charges and prosecute a case. Trump might not be able to convict his political enemies of spurious charges, but he could immiserate them with years of investigations and require them to run up millions of dollars in legal fees.

Likewise, if he managed to place sufficiently zealous allies in the Office of Legal Counsel, Trump could obtain legal authority for any number of otherwise lawless transgressions. Vice President Dick Cheney did that in the George W. Bush administration, inducing the OLC to issue opinions that authorized torture and warrantless domestic surveillance. Those opinions were later repudiated, but they guided policy for years. Trump’s history suggests that he might seek comparable legal blessing for the use of lethal force at the southern border, deployment of federal troops against political demonstrators, federal seizure of state voting machines, or deferral of the next election in order to stay in power. He would be limited only by the willingness of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the career civil service to say no.

It occurred to me, as I interviewed government veterans and legal scholars, that they might be blinkered by their own expertise when they try to anticipate what Trump would do. All of the abuses they foresee are based on the ostensibly lawful powers of the president, even if they amount to gross ruptures of legal norms and boundaries. What transgressions could he commit, that is, within the law?

But Trump himself isn’t thinking that way. On Truth Social, in December 2022, he posted that righting a wrong of sufficient “magnitude” (in this case, his fictitious claim of election fraud) “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

The “take Care” clause of the Constitution calls for the president to see that laws are carried out faithfully. But what if a court rules against Trump and he simply refuses to comply? It’s not obvious who would—or could—enforce the ruling.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Get Away With It.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Strange as this might be to say of the only American president found legally liable for sexual abuse, the only leader of the free world accused of dangling a TV gig in front of a porn performer seemingly as an enticement for sex, the only commander in chief to publicly denigrate the sexual attractiveness of both Heidi Klum (“no longer a 10”) and Angelina Jolie (“not a great beauty”), I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway. “When it comes to the women who are not only dutifully but lovingly catering to his desires,” the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in her 2017 book, Down Girl, “what’s to hate?”

The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function. The more than 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct (which he has denied), and the countless more who have endured public vitriol and threats to their life after being targeted by him, have all been punished either for challenging him or for denying him what he fundamentally believed was his due.

[Read: What E. Jean Carroll means for #MeToo]

At the micro level, Trump’s misogyny can be almost comical, in an absurdist sort of way, like the time in 1994 when he fretted over whether his new infant daughter would inherit her mother’s breasts, or when he tweeted to Cher in 2012, “I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.” On a larger scale, the legislative and cultural shifts he fostered during his four years in the White House are so drastic that they’re hard to fully parse. Until 2022, women and pregnant people had the constitutional right to an abortion; now, thanks to Trump’s remade Supreme Court, abortion is unavailable or effectively banned in about a third of states. The MAGA Republican Party is ever more of a boy’s club: All 14 representatives who announced bids to become House speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy were men; the victor, Mike Johnson, has blamed Roe v. Wade in the past for depriving the country of “able-bodied workers” to prop up the American economy. Online and off, old-fashioned sexists and trollish provocateurs alike have been emboldened by Trump’s ability to say grotesque things without consequences.

Trump’s glee in smacking down women has filtered into every aspect of our culture. If, as the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air,” then Trump has helped radicalize swaths of a generation essentially through poisonous fumes. He didn’t create the manosphere, the fetid corner of the internet devoted to sending women back to the Stone Age. But he elevated some of its most noxious voices into the mainstream, and vindicated their worst prejudices. “I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1–10 scale in the same way that we do,” wrote the former self-described pickup artist Roosh V on his website shortly after the election.

By now, misogyny has bled into virtually every part of the internet. TikTok clips featuring Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker who has said that women should bear some personal responsibility for their sexual assaults and frequently derides women as “hoes,” have been viewed billions of times. (Tate has denied the charges against him.) In 2021, before Elon Musk bought Twitter and oversaw a spike in misogynistic and abusive content—not to mention reinstating the accounts of both Trump and Tate—the Tesla entrepreneur and men’s-rights icon tweeted that he was going to inaugurate a new college called the Texas Institute of Technology & Science (TITS). Boys on social media are being inundated with messaging that the only qualities worth prizing in women are sexual desirability and submission—a worldview that aligns perfectly with Trump’s. Misogyny, as my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in Slate in 2016, is the one ideology Trump has never changed, his one unwavering credo. Seeking to dominate others with his supposed sexual prowess and loudly professing disgust at women he doesn’t desire has been his modus operandi for decades. Any woman who challenges him is “a big, fat pig,” “a dog,” a “horseface.”

What would four more years of Trump mean for women? It’s hard to conclude that Trump was moderated by the presence of his daughter in the West Wing, exactly—or, for that matter, by any of the advisers who thought they could temper his worst instincts before they ended up fleeing in droves. But what’s most chilling about a possible second Trump presidency is that he would certainly now be unchecked. The advisers who remain are the ones who bolster his darker impulses. It was Trump’s adviser Jason Miller, Axios’s Mike Allen reported, who psyched him up between segments of his 2023 CNN town hall as he became more and more aggressive toward the moderator, Kaitlan Collins. “Are you ready? Can I talk? Do you mind?” Trump jeered at her. Anyone who’s ever witnessed an abusive relationship could instantly recognize the tone.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Women Will Be Targets.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

On the last Saturday before Donald Trump took office, in January 2017, I watched the controlled chaos of a hackathon unfold in a library at the University of Pennsylvania. Volunteer archivists, librarians, and computer scientists were trawling government websites, looking for data sets about climate change to duplicate for safekeeping. Groups like this were meeting across the country. Flowcharts on whiteboards laid out this particular room’s priorities: copy decades of ice-core statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; scrape the Environmental Protection Agency’s entire library of local air-monitoring results from the previous four years; find a way to preserve a zoomable map of the factories and power plants emitting the most greenhouse gases.

The fear was that the incoming administration would pull information like this from public view—and within a week, it did. By noon on Inauguration Day, the Trump administration had scrubbed mentions of climate change from the White House website. By May, officials had taken down the EPA’s page laying out climate science for the general public, as well as 108 pages associated with the Clean Power Plan, the landmark Obama policy meant to curb emissions from power plants—months before the Trump administration tried to repeal the policy altogether.

The administration’s goal was to bury the issue of climate change. Nothing was done to address it; the very mention of it was knocked from the national agenda—and, by extension, the international agenda. If Trump returns to office, he will surely double down on this strategy.

First, the global implications: The United States would probably exit from the Paris Agreement again, Michael Gerrard, the founder and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told me. Despite its status as the wealthiest big emitter, the United States continues to express little to no interest in substantially funding global climate action, even during Democratic administrations. For now, though, at least the country is still at the table for international climate talks. Pulling out of Paris might be a largely symbolic move, but it could have a domino effect. “India, Indonesia, Brazil—if they see the U.S. is not acting, it’s easy for conservative politicians in those countries to say, ‘These big rich guys aren’t doing anything; why should we?’ ” Gerrard said.

Domestically, it would in some ways be harder now for Trump to meaningfully alter climate policy than it was when he first came to office. Electric vehicles have become popular, and solar power will likely be the cheapest source of electricity in basically every country by 2030. Heat pumps have proved to be fantastically efficient, and a bipartisan consortium of 25 governors just agreed to quadruple the number of them installed in homes in their states. One consequence of the Trump administration was the emergence of a new kind of subnational climate diplomacy: Mayors and governors began meeting with international leaders to discuss the issue on their own. During a second Trump term, these efforts would surely pick up again.

In addition, certain new climate-friendly policies are so good for Republican states that their representatives probably won’t want to touch them. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 promotes clean power by offering major tax credits to individuals and businesses that make or use renewable energy, and most of that money is likely to flow to red states.

[Read: Not even a single Republican voted for the climate bill]

But a second Trump administration could still do major damage. The fossil-fuel lobby would work to dismantle climate policies. Groups led by the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute are already making a “battle plan” to block electricity-grid updates that would allow for solar and wind expansion, to prevent states from adopting California’s car-pollution standards, and to gut clean-power divisions at the Department of Energy, among other things.

Under a second Trump term, the EPA would no doubt be threatened with budget cuts, as it was during the first. Staffers would likely retire en masse, as they did before, and enforcement of climate policy would slow or stop.

But the first thing to go will likely be the websites—again. The U.S. has no law against a government agency deleting pages from its own websites, even if the information on them is in the public interest. “We have been telling the Biden administration that this is a real vulnerability,” Gretchen Gehrke, a co-founder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, told me. For now, all of the data sets that those teams of hackers scraped the first time around are still housed on private servers, just in case.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Climate Denial Will Flourish.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters trading insults and throwing air punches at a weigh-in. The hostility is real, but the performance benefits both sides.

Trump claims to despise the journalists who cover him, calling them “the enemy of the American people,” suing them, and threatening unspecified reprisals for their transgressions against him. But his narcissism craves their constant attention, and as president he gave reporters far more access than his successor has, taking their late-night phone calls, then framing their cover stories in gold. Media organizations, including this one, have warned for years that Trump is a danger to the democracy that makes journalism possible, and that a vigorous press is essential to a free society. At the same time, the media became dependent on his vile words and scandalous deeds for their financial health, squeezing droplets of news from his every tweet even if the public had nothing to learn. Leslie Moonves, the disgraced former TV-network chair, said of Trump’s first candidacy: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

As soon as Trump left office, readers and viewers disappeared—within a month, The Washington Post lost a quarter of its unique visitors, and CNN lost 45 percent of its prime-time audience. From exile, Trump summoned one reporter after another to Mar-a-Lago and gave interviews for books that both sides knew would attack his presidency and become best sellers. When he returned as a presidential candidate and criminal defendant, cable-news-network ratings climbed again.

It’s impossible not to feel that Trump has gotten the better of this codependent clench. His endless stream of grievance and invective eroded his supporters’ trust in the news media to the point where 58 percent of Republicans now say they have none. If half the country believes most of what the mainstream media report and the other half thinks it’s mostly lies, this isn’t a partial win for journalists, whose purpose isn’t to strengthen the opposition but to give the public information it needs to exercise democratic power. Trump’s purpose is to destroy the very notion of objective truth. The match was rigged in his favor, and being compelled to fight it has not been good for journalism.

Though reporters did excellent work covering Trump’s presidency, his effect was to make the American media a little more like him: solipsistic (foreign reporting nearly disappeared), divisive, and self-righteous. Trump corrupts everyone who gets near him—spouses, children, followers, accomplices, flunkies. He corrupts the press by obsessing it; by flooding it with so much shit that news becomes almost indistinguishable from fluff and lies; by baiting it into abandoning independence for activism; by demoralizing it with the recognition that much of the public doesn’t care.

Trump wants power again for two reasons, and a policy agenda isn’t one of them: to remove the humiliating stain of defeat, including the prospect of prison, and to exact revenge on his enemies. In a speech in Michigan last June, he named them one by one and promised to destroy them all: “the deep state”; “the warmongers”; “the globalists”; “the communists, Marxists, and fascists”; “the sick political class that hates our country”; and finally—he pointed at reporters in the room—“the fake-news media.”

The first time around, Trump’s attempts to use presidential power against the media were desultory. He was accused of trying to deny a large Pentagon contract to Amazon in order to damage Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post. To hurt CNN, he pushed his Justice Department to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, which owned the network. He talked about weakening journalists’ legal protections and even having them arrested. He created a threatening atmosphere by singling out individuals and organizations. All of it put the media under constant pressure and made their work more difficult. None of it was very effective.

[From the November 2023 issue: Martin Baron on how we got ‘Democracy dies in darkness’]

Last April, Trump’s campaign website posted a video on deregulation in which the candidate vowed to bring the Federal Communications Commission “back under presidential authority as the Constitution demands”—giving himself direct control over broadcast licenses and other regulatory matters. It’s hard to imagine that at the start of his presidency, he knew what the initials FCC stood for. “One general nightmare is he will be more competent at undermining a free press in a second term, either through advisers or lessons learned,” John Langford, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to combatting authoritarianism, told me.

“People who actually believe are going to do a better job,” a conservative who served in the Trump administration and is now involved in efforts by the Heritage Foundation to build a loyal cadre of political appointees for a second term told me. In its approach to the media, he said, the biggest mistake of Trump’s presidency was appointing officials who wanted to be liked by journalists. Second-term hires would welcome being the subject of a hit piece in Politico.

A second Trump White House would give important policy scoops to friendly publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon rather than to supposedly unfair outlets like The New York Times, which would report them unfavorably. “The White House press corps could be shaken up,” the former Trump official said, explaining that the administration’s director of communications could say to the White House press corps, “I know you have your rules, but we’re not going to play by those rules. Give these people”—administration allies—“press credentials, or we’ll have briefings with only people we invite, in a different room.”

It’s not hard to imagine Trump breaking laws to go after journalists, seeking embarrassing personal information on his most effective pursuers. At the start of his term, he floated to James Comey, the FBI director, the possibility of jailing journalists who published classified information. Comey laughed off the idea; with fanatic loyalists in the bureau, a second-term Trump could carry it out. In a 900-page manual on how to bring the administrative state under the president’s complete control, Heritage advises that “the Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks,” including seizing reporters’ email and phone records, a practice that Attorney General Merrick Garland ruled out in 2021. The conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court might be less likely to defend press freedom during a second Trump term than the Court has been in the past. Joel Simon, the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, has urged colleagues to prepare, practically and psychologically, for legal assaults, economic pressure, “a toxic online environment,” and dangerous streets with violence from both police and demonstrators.

President Richard Nixon put his critics in the press on an enemies list, illegally wiretapped and surveilled them, discussed siccing his IRS on them. Nixon’s henchmen even proposed various ways to kill the columnist Jack Anderson (they postponed the plot, instead bugging the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, and never got back to it). Trump doesn’t need to have journalists poisoned. He doesn’t even need to have them investigated. His most powerful weapon is his ability to convince large numbers of Americans that the press has no particular value for democracy and deserves no special protection; that it’s just another racket of corrupt, self-serving elites; that its hard-won exposés and running fact-checks are all fake news; that the evidence of the senses can be vaporized by a Truth Social post. His epistemological nihilism drives journalists half-mad, unable to counter him or escape his hall of mirrors.

The worst fate for the press in a second Trump term would be neither legal jeopardy nor financial ruin. It would be irrelevance.

Other democracies have reached this point. “Political leaders discredit the press and plant in the minds of the public that they’re just another political actor,” Simon told me. “The public doesn’t see attacks on the press as threats to their own interests, and that opens the door to consolidation of power.” Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist in Budapest, worries that Americans haven’t paid enough attention to the decline of freedom in other countries to prevent it from happening here. “The American public doesn’t recognize that the same could happen to them,” he told me. “They’re not even aware that democracies can be turned in just a matter of years—two election cycles—into hybrid regimes.”

Starting in 2014, Hungary’s leading media companies were acquired by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s cronies and turned into regime mouthpieces or shut down. (For seven months in 2019, Panyi’s phone was surveilled.) Journalists haven’t disappeared into Hungarian prisons. Orbán has crushed independent media with a combination of economic pressure, Kremlin-inspired disinformation, and the “fake news” label. “They killed the news outlets—they don’t have to kill the journalists,” Panyi said. But the key to Orbán’s success has been public opinion. As he neutralized the press, Hungarian voters gave him four election victories in a row. Power creates more power; once the process starts, it can be unstoppable. “Probably the job that we journalists were doing was not good enough,” Panyi said, “or we didn’t make enough efforts to describe to our readers why it’s important what we’re doing.”

Sheila Coronel, an acclaimed Philippine journalist and a professor at Columbia Journalism School, began her career on the eve of the “People Power” revolt that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. “We took our freedom for granted,” she told me. “Looking back, maybe we weren’t such good caretakers of that freedom to really serve the public good, as opposed to building profitable media businesses.” As the country’s elected leaders became more corrupt, Coronel said, media companies made fortunes from “entertainment and sensationalism, feeding off political scandals without looking at the underlying causes.”

When the demagogic President Rodrigo Duterte came to power in 2016, he was able to “emasculate” the media, Coronel said. His successor, Bongbong Marcos, the dictator’s son, feeds the public an information diet of “sheer inanity,” undiluted by a critical press. “It’s death by cotton candy.” Like Panyi, Coronel watched her profession lose popular trust, partly through state pressure, partly through its own isolation and carelessness. “We contributed to the erosion of the allure and attraction of democracy,” she said.

[Read: Maria Ressa on how to fight fascism before it’s too late]

How can the American media prevent their own irrelevance in a second Trump term? First, by getting rid of a few illusions. The press can do little, if anything, to drain the sea of disinformation in which Americans are drowning. The Washington Post’s running tally of Trump’s false statements in office—there were 30,573, or about 21 a day—was a worthy project, but did the recording of all those lies change a single mind? Political beliefs are rarely based on demonstrable facts. Information of any kind only reinforces voters’ views and deepens polarization. The Post and other outlets should continue to hold public figures accountable for their lies, but none of us should expect it to make much difference.

Nor will there be any Watergate for Trump. Nixon was brought down by the work of aggressive journalists, along with a federal judge, a unanimous Supreme Court, and a bipartisan Congress—by strong democratic institutions. But they worked only because Americans still believed in them—because two-thirds of the public, which had just given Nixon a landslide victory, could not abide a criminal in office. That was a different public. Today, almost half the country is prepared to reelect Trump in spite of his two impeachments and 91 criminal charges. What scandal could investigative reporters possibly uncover that would reduce Trump’s support to Nixon’s 24 percent?

In a second Trump presidency, the press would be torn between what’s good for its narrow interests and what’s good for its broader mission of “public interest or public service,” in Joel Simon’s words—that is, democracy. For 25 years, journalists have been scrambling to survive the damage done to their business model by the internet. Venerable outlets perish or self-mutilate; newer ones come and go in a flash; mountains of bait are thrown into the water to see what rises to the surface, producing trillions of bits of data to be collected and examined for financial clues. This exhausting effort consumes so much time and talent that it’s difficult to face the obvious truth: The for-profit model of journalism shows signs of being broken.

And here lies the dilemma: that model works better with Trump. Covering him brought CNN, the Times, the Post, The Atlantic, and other outlets larger audiences. But much of that profitable coverage takes place in a glass booth that seals out a hostile or indifferent public. Claiming a higher purpose, the media flood the zone with their own shit—talking heads, hot takes, angry jeremiads—to stay afloat, and in doing so, they trade long-term credibility for short-term gain. Social-media platforms, far richer and more powerful than the mainstream press, don’t even have to feign a higher purpose. “This is the existential question that we have to ask ourselves,” Simon told me: Carry out a public service at the risk of economic ruin, or give in to incentives to cover Trump in ways that serve him better than the public?

Panyi, the Hungarian journalist, who has lived through what might await us here, spoke of “the tragedy of real journalism,” by which he meant the imperative to “stick to the good old rules of free, fair journalism even if we’re taking the punches and it’s a battle we’re about to lose.” That would be my hope for the press in a second Trump term: to investigate his presidency relentlessly, burrowing deep into every obscure corner where power might be abused, for the record and the future if not for now, and leave the cotton candy aside. Journalists can give the public what it needs to govern itself, but they can’t save democracy. That will be up to the American people.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Is Journalism Ready?”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”

I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?

That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.

Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”

“For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”

Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged]

There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.

And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.

This editor’s note appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Warning.”

The Supreme Court rarely hears tax cases, and tax cases rarely threaten to affect the public at large. Moore v. United States, to be argued tomorrow, is that rare exception. The case raises an issue at once beguilingly simple and oddly difficult: What does income mean? This is a question with ramifications for virtually every area of American taxation; depending on how the Court answers it, Moore could produce a chaotic ruling that casts constitutional doubt on huge swaths of the tax system. But it’s also a question that the Court doesn’t need to answer, and one that it shouldn’t. The issue teed up in Moore may be so intellectually stimulating that nobody seems to have noticed that the case has been fundamentally misframed.

The story of Moore starts in 2017, when President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law aimed to minimize the incentive for U.S. corporations to hoard money overseas by reducing certain taxes on foreign earnings. But, in exchange, U.S. investors would have to pay a onetime tax on accumulated foreign profits going back several decades—the so-called transition tax. Charles and Kathleen Moore are among the Americans affected by the change. In 2006, they invested $40,000 in KisanKraft, an Indian company owned by a friend. They allege that they never received any payments from the company because all of its profits were reinvested. The transition tax nevertheless stuck the Moores with a $15,000 tax bill based on the company’s retained earnings. The Moores countered that the transition tax is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s power under the Sixteenth Amendment. That amendment, ratified in 1913, explicitly empowers Congress to tax incomes. But the Moores argue that unrealized gains aren’t income at all.

The Sixteenth Amendment itself was a response to a constitutional controversy. The original text of the Constitution requires that “direct taxes” be “apportioned” among the states. If you’re wondering what “direct tax” means, you’re in good company: James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention suggest that the drafters didn’t know what those words meant, and Alexander Hamilton later considered it “a matter of regret that terms so uncertain and vague in so important a point are to be found in the Constitution.” But “apportioned” is clear. It means that the burden of a tax must be proportional to each state’s population, in the same manner that congressional representatives are apportioned. A state with a quarter of the national population should pay no more and no less than a quarter of the national burden of any “direct” tax. In 1895, in a case called Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company, the Supreme Court held that the federal income tax was, in fact, direct—and, because it wasn’t apportioned, unconstitutional. Indeed, an apportioned income tax is hard to imagine: It would require higher tax rates in poorer states. (Just think of two states with exactly the same population—so they must pay exactly the same aggregate amount—but with hugely unequal incomes. To produce the same amount of revenue, the percent rate would have to be higher in the state where incomes are lower.)   

[Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier: The Supreme Court seems poised to decide an imaginary case]

The Sixteenth Amendment effectively overruled Pollock by giving Congress the power to collect income taxes “without apportionment.” But the Moores contend that the transition tax isn’t really a tax on “income” at all, because they personally never realized any income from KisanKraft. The company might have become more valuable over time, but the cash was retained and reinvested in the firm. If there’s no income, they argue, the Sixteenth Amendment doesn’t apply, and the tax can’t be imposed unless it’s apportioned among the states. The potential sweep of this claim is hard to overstate. The United States already taxes a great deal of business profits, regardless of whether those dollars are distributed to individuals. Partnerships and S corporations are taxed this way, and such businesses now earn trillions of dollars each year. None of those tax regimes is, or plausibly could be, apportioned. So a victory for the Moores could suddenly jeopardize much of the federal government’s ability to raise revenue.

Luckily, the Court can easily avoid that result without even touching the income question. This is because the Constitution gives Congress a separate power to enact unapportioned taxes: It can impose “duties” and “excises” under Article I Section 8. The duty-and-excise power is far less famous than the Sixteenth Amendment, but it has long been the unsung workhorse of American taxation. The gift tax, estate tax, and corporate tax, for example, were all upheld by the Supreme Court not as taxes on income but as a duty or excise. And that is by far the best way to frame the transition tax at issue in Moore. The Supreme Court has long held that the duty-and-excise power extends to cases in which the government taxes the “doing of business in a certain way,” and the transition tax is fundamentally a tax on a certain kind of business activity—namely, doing business through a foreign firm.

This isn’t some 21st-century rationalization guaranteed to alienate originalists on the Supreme Court. In 1794, for example, Congress imposed a special duty on retailers of “foreign distilled spirituous liquors.” Our economy has come a long way since the Whiskey Rebellion, but the principle remains the same. Long before the great legal showdown over the personal-income tax, Congress had been taxing business owners and operators in all sorts of ways, largely without controversy. Even in Pollock, the Supreme Court blessed the many cases in which “taxation on business, privileges, or employments has assumed the guise of an excise tax and been sustained as such.” (I explore this argument at greater length in a forthcoming article in the journal Tax Notes.)

And yet the government has barely mentioned this history in its defense of the transition tax. It devoted only one paragraph to an “excise” theory in its court-of-appeals brief and a few short pages at the very end of its Supreme Court brief, almost as an afterthought. This has created the unsettling impression that the Court needs to say something about the income question. But the Court shouldn’t decide a more difficult constitutional question with sweeping and unpredictable consequences when a narrower and more solid path is available. Rather than upset the applecart, the Court should send the case back for the lower court to consider the transition tax as akin to every other federal tax on business activities: justified not since 1913 as a tax on income but since 1789 as a commercial duty or excise.