How Trump plans to wield power if he wins: Trade wars, crackdowns and revenge

Washington: Since beginning his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said the “termination” of the Constitution would have been justified to overturn the 2020 election; told followers, “I am your retribution”; and vowed to use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries – starting with US President Joe Biden and his family.

Beneath these public threats is a series of plans by Trump and his allies that would upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law if he regained the White House.

Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Nevada this month.Credit: Getty

Some of these themes trace back to the final period of Trump’s term in office. By that stage, his key advisers had learned how to more effectively wield power, and Trump had fired officials who resisted some of his impulses and replaced them with loyalists. Then he lost the 2020 election and was cast out of power.

Since leaving office, Trump’s advisers and allies at a network of well-funded groups have advanced policies, created lists of potential personnel and started shaping new legal scaffolding – laying the groundwork for a second Trump presidency they hope will commence on January 20, 2025.

In a vague statement, two top officials on Trump’s campaign have sought to distance his campaign team from some of the plans being developed by Trump’s outside allies, groups led by former senior Trump administration officials who remain in direct contact with him. The statement called news reports about the campaign’s personnel and policy intentions “purely speculative and theoretical”.

The plans described here generally derive from what Trump has trumpeted on the campaign trail, what has appeared on his campaign website and interviews with Trump advisers, including some who spoke with The New York Times at the request of the campaign.

Trump wants to use the Justice Department for vengeance

If he wins another term, Trump has said he would use the Justice Department to have his adversaries investigated and charged with crimes, including saying in June that he would appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” Biden and his family. He later declared in an interview with Univision that he could, if someone challenged him politically, have that person indicted.

Allies of Trump have also been developing an intellectual blueprint to cast aside the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigatory independence from White House political direction.

Foreshadowing such a move, Trump had already violated norms in his 2016 campaign by promising to “lock up” his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, over her use of a private email server. While president, he repeatedly told aides he wanted the Justice Department to indict his political enemies, including officials he had fired, such as James Comey, the former FBI director. The Justice Department opened various such investigations but did not bring charges – infuriating Trump and leading to a split in 2020 with his attorney general, Bill Barr.

Trump intends to carry out an extreme immigration crackdown

Trump is planning to revive and ramp up his first-term attempt to tighten the border with an assault on immigration at a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of immigrants who entered the US illegally would be banned from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Bolstered by agents reassigned from other law enforcement agencies, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement would carry out sweeping raids aimed at deporting millions of people each year – an order of magnitude more than previous administrations, including his own.

Under the plan, military funds would be used to erect sprawling camps to hold detainees. A public health emergency law would be invoked to shut down asylum requests by people arriving at the border. And the government would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born on US soil to parents without legal status.

Migrants cross through a gap in the US-Mexico border fence in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.Credit: Bloomberg

Trump plans to go far beyond his first-term trade wars

Trump is also planning to significantly escalate his efforts to upend America’s trade policies with new protectionist measures. While those measures would be aimed at eventually bolstering domestic manufacturing and factory jobs, they would also risk causing more immediate disruptions to the economy.

To make domestically produced goods more competitive in the US market, he is planning to impose a new so-called universal baseline tariff, meaning an import tax on “most imported goods”. That would raise costs for US consumers and for manufacturers that buy foreign goods. It would also risk alienating allies and could ignite a global trade war if other countries respond with retaliatory tariffs targeting US exports.

Trump started a trade war with China in 2018. While the Biden administration has kept in place the tariffs Trump imposed then, Trump now wants to go much further in spurring an economic conflict between the world’s two largest economies, which exchanged $758 billion in goods and services last year. He plans to “enact aggressive new restrictions on Chinese ownership” of assets in the United States, ban Americans from investing in China and phase in a ban on importing key categories of Chinese-made goods such as electronics, steel and pharmaceuticals.

Trump may undercut NATO and retreat from Europe

Trump has long made clear that he sees NATO, the country’s most important military alliance, not as a force multiplier with allies but as a drain on US resources by freeloaders.

While in office, he repeatedly threatened to withdraw from NATO, and his campaign website says he plans to “finish” the process of “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission”. He and his team have refused to elaborate on that cryptic line, fuelling widespread anxiety that his return to power could mean ending or gutting the alliance.

But Trump has clearer plans for using US military force closer to home. As president, he had mused about using the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, an idea that would violate international law unless Mexico consented. That idea has since taken on broader Republican backing, and Trump has said he intends to make the idea a reality if he returns to the Oval Office.

Trump wants to use US troops on domestic soil

Trump could also deploy federal troops inside the United States. While it is generally illegal to use the military for domestic law enforcement purposes, a law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. His top immigration adviser has said that in a second term, they would invoke the Insurrection Act at the southern border to use soldiers as immigration agents.

Anti-police-violence protests in Washington escalated into riots in 2020 following the death of George Floyd.Credit: Getty

After some anti-police-violence demonstrations in 2020 became riots, Trump had an order drafted to use troops to crack down on protesters in Washington. He never signed it. But the prospect of using federal troops to enforce order on domestic soil continues to entice him. Trump also suggested at a rally in Iowa this year that he intends to unilaterally send troops into Democratic-run cities.

“You look at any Democrat-run state, and it’s just not the same; it doesn’t work,” Trump said, calling cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco crime dens. “We cannot let it happen any longer. And one of the other things I’ll do – because you’re supposed to not be involved in that; you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in – the next time, I’m not waiting.”

Trump allies want fewer checks to restrain him

Forces that somewhat contained Trump’s autocratic tendencies in his first term – staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticise or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him – would all be weaker in a second term. As a result, his and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.

Perhaps the most important check on his presidency was internal administration resistance to some of his demands. The advisers who have stuck with him are determined that if he wins a new term, there will be no officials who intentionally stymie his agenda.

A coalition of think tanks run by people aligned with Trump has been compiling a database of thousands of ideologically vetted potential recruits to hand to a transition team if he wins the election.

Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Trump’s desires by raising legal objections to his and his top advisers’ ideas. In a potential new term, Trump’s allies are planning to systematically install more aggressive and ideologically aligned legal gatekeepers who will be more likely to bless contentious actions.

Trump and his 2024 campaign declined to answer a series of detailed questions about what limits, if any, he would recognise on his powers across a range of war, secrecy and law enforcement matters – many raised by his first term – in a Times 2024 presidential candidate survey.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.