My Biggest Trump 2.0 Concerns

And why others should share them.

On this week’s No BS Zone with Bernie Goldberg, I touched on some of my concerns with a second Trump term, but with limited time and the conversation taking some unexpected twist and turns, I didn’t get to spend as much time on the topic as I’d hoped to. So, I figured I pick up things here.

Staffing

As I told Bernie, I do have big worries about the type of people Trump will fill his administration with, and I think those worries are warranted.

When Trump first took office in 2017, following a surprise election outcome that even he wasn’t expecting, he naturally hadn’t a clue how to govern in public office, nor did he understand governmental procedures, hierarchies, and how the branches of government worked together. Thus he relied heavily on the GOP establishment to guide him through staffing choices (among other things), and install a number of reasonably qualified people who would ultimately (I believe to the benefit of the country) steer him away from his worst impulses.

This was a full-time job according to some of Trump’s highest-ranking advisors (including distinguished U.S. generals), several of whom later shared a number of disturbing stories along with their view that Trump was (and remains) manifestly unfit for office. Trump has very publicly labeled such people as losers and lowlifes, and even suggested not all that long ago that Mark Milley, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

The good news is that I don’t think Trump, in his second term, plans on having Milley or anyone else killed. The bad news is that I think his approach to personnel will be very different this time around. I think he’ll avoid any perceived acts of insubordination or disloyalty by mostly surrounding himself with slobbering sycophants committed to nurturing his ego and egging on his autocratic tendencies. I’m talking about people in the mold of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman, who disgraced themselves and their country by serving as foot soldiers in Trump’s corrupt campaign to overturn the 2020 election. As heavy of a personal, professional, and legal price those three (and others) have paid in service to Donald Trump, I’m certain there are many more willing and eager to step up and do the same. I mean, when your own vice president-elect openly says he wouldn’t have certified your election loss, and condemns your former vice president for following the Constitution when he was in that predicament, the sky is the limit.

I’m also concerned that Trump will fulfill whatever transactional agreements he made with people like Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for their political support… and not just because those guys are fellow conspiracy theorists and disinformation artists. With Musk, I worry about his stronghold on government contracts and possible conflicts of interest in his dealings with other countries (including Russia). With Kennedy, a crackpot anti-vaxxer who thinks we should rid drinking-water of fluoride, I worry about the future of public health.

Tariffs and Spending

During the campaign, I wrote (and talked) a lot about the economically illiterate policies Trump was running on. They relied heavily on imposing huge tariffs that would neither be paid by who Trump says they will, nor address the problems Trump claims they would fix. Every independent score revealed that they would instead drive consumer prices through the roof and hurt the U.S. economy; companies and markets are already preparing for it. Trump’s policies would also broadly expand government (as they did last time), and add several trillions more to the national debt (which we know the $7.8 trillion man has no qualms with).

A fiscally conservative Republican party would find ways to keep such disastrous ambitions in check (as they would with a Democratic president), but fiscal conservatives have largely been ejected from the GOP over insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump. His key economic-policy minds from his first term, including Paul Ryan and Gary Cohn, are gone. Furthermore, Trump can enact most tariffs unilaterally, without Congress, as he did the first time. As economist Brian Riedl pointed out in my recent conversation with him, even the far more selective tariffs Trump imposed in his first term produced terrible results, but because the former and future president maintains his longtime love affair with idea, I think we can look forward to a far more expansive and disastrous trade wars in the second term.

And don’t even get me started on Trump’s astronomically dangerous stance of letting out entitlement programs run insolvent.

Ukraine

I recently wrote:

A Trump/Vance administration should very much concern those who believe it’s vitally important that Putin’s war-crime-ridden invasion of Ukraine ultimately ends in defeat. Trump’s well-documented man-crush on the Russian president, his history of playing games with Ukraine defense-funding (and accusing them of U.S. election interference), and his invitation to Putin to attack our Nato allies are far from the only suggestions that Trump will abandon our ally.

Trump couldn’t even bring himself to say at last month’s presidential debate that it would be good if Ukraine won. Last week, he parroted Russian talking points, declaring that “Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore,” and that “any deal, even the worst deal, would be better than what we have right now.”

In JD Vance, Trump picked a running mate that is nothing short of hostile to Ukraine and the country’s plight against its Russian assailants. Just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Vance famously declared, “I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” and the senator has been affirming and reaffirming that stance ever since. He routinely trashes Zelenskyy, attacks his supporters (in and out of the United States) as warmongers and neocons, and falsely attributes America’s domestic problems to the Ukraine defense-funding he has adamantly opposed (despite it amounting to less than one percent of our federal budget). Vance, as a U.S. Senator, even refused to meet with Zelenskyy out of pure spite.

There are lots of other countries (mainly in Europe) supporting the defense of Ukraine, but the United States has perhaps been the country’s most consequential ally. If we stop funding Ukraine, or condition our support of the country on Ukraine making unfathomable concessions to the war-criminal who invaded them (and killed tens of thousands of its citizens), other allies across the world would come under increasing threat from their neighbors, which would likely lead to far greater conflicts.

Character and Hostility Toward the Constitution

No election result will ever negate Trump’s profound character problems and the chaos he has created within our country’s institutions and constitutional order.

Granting him the Oval Office again, in my view, is the political equivalent of if American society had re-embraced and elevated O.J. Simpson after he was acquitted of double murder. Escaping institutional accountability for a heinous act shouldn’t be moral or ethical vindication of the person who committed the act. And when it comes to elected public office (the presidency of the United States in this case), it doesn’t get much more heinous than trying to overturn your country’s very system of democracy to stay in power. And that’s before we even get to the matter of provoking a violent attack on the country’s legislative branch of government with two months of lies, and then refusing for hours to do anything to stop it.

When Simpson skated, society didn’t try to rehabilitate his image. Everyone knew what he had done (despite his repeated denials and vow to deliver the “real” perpetrator). This included the jurors in his trial — some of whom later admitted that they freed Simpson out of spite for the institution that had tried to hold him accountable.

Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it?

Anyway, with Simpson… society got it right. He wasn’t denied his rights as a citizen, nor did he face unlawful retribution over what he had done. But the O.J. Simpson that many Americans had previously celebrated for his work on the football field, lighthearted sports commentary, memorable commercials, and silly antics in the Naked Gun films effectively ceased to exist. He was a social pariah, and appropriately so.

Donald Trump didn’t murder anyone, of course (if you think I’m suggesting otherwise, I’d recommend going back to the top of this section and starting over). The point I’m making is about societal acceptance and public trust. What Trump did in his last two months in office alone was so dangerous, immoral, unethical, unpatriotic, and entirely worthy of societal pariahdom, that a civically responsible public would have never considered him again for even local public office, let alone the highest office in the land.

Yet, less than four years later, last Tuesday night, he was once again elected President of the United States. He is already being absolved of serious criminal activity, and he will soon enjoy an additional layer of legal protection that he didn’t have the first time he was in power.

People can “binary choice” the predicament all they want, but no such predicament existed when over 17 million Americans handed Trump the Republican nomination, nor was there an obligation of several million more to exempt the man from even our most basic civic standards.

I believe what’s happened says something about our nation’s character, and not in a good way. But to close out this piece, let’s get back to Trump’s character (or lack thereof). From his perspective, he is now completely untouchable. And with his ego, lack of moral compass, and past willingness to strike at the heart of our nation’s founding principles, institutions, and rule of law, that should concern many more people than it does.