What Trump’s First 100 Days Would Look Like
We can’t just think about what comes next week. We must imagine what comes next year.
The other day, Donald Trump made his closing pitch at Madison Square Garden; tonight, Kamala Harris will do the same on the National Mall. We’ll be pregaming the speech with a Bulwark+ stream at 6:30 p.m. ET; members can expect more details on that in your inbox later today.
And if you’re not a member yet—there’s no time like the present!
Happy Tuesday.
What Trump Will Do
by Andrew Egger
One week from today, the votes will be in. Eleven weeks after that, the Oval Office will have a new occupant.
Donald Trump surprised even himself when he won in 2016, and his preparations to take power were slapdash, chaotic, and reliant on tons of help from the GOP establishment. This time around, he expects to win, and he’s got an ultra-MAGA operation ready to charge ahead if he does. Here’s what we imagine the opening months of Trump 2.0 would look like.
Sending a Message
The chaos could start early. A second Trump win, like the first, would likely be met by widespread protests. And Trump has been clear how he would respond.
“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump told Fox News earlier this month, referring to potential Election Day protesters, which he described as “the enemy from within.” “I think it should be very easily handled by—if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Trump, of course, won’t be president on Election Day. If protesters take to the streets to protest his inauguration—or thereafter—that will be another matter.
‘On Day One’
Trump has other big plans for his first day in office. “Day one,” he’s repeatedly said, is the only day he plans to “be a dictator.”
“We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling,” he told voters ahead of the Iowa primary late last year. “After that, I’m not a dictator.”
Trump’s allies claimed this line was a joke. But it’s a fair enough description of Trump’s promised strategy for a day one, executive-policy bonanza: Shoot first, fight it out in the courts later.
Priority numero uno is immigration, where Trump has promised to launch “the largest deportation program in history” and begin a promised legal war against birthright citizenship—the constitutional rule contained in the 14th Amendment that children of immigrants are automatic citizens if born in America.
Both of these are long-term projects. There will be a lengthy legal fight if Trump suddenly declares a constitutional guarantee no longer operable. There will be logistical and legal challenges with attempting to uproot millions of people out of their communities. The first shots in each of these fights, however, will likely come in the form of day-one orders.
But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Day one is one thing. Trump has a specific plan for his opening seconds upon reentering the Oval Office:
‘Within Two Seconds’
Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week, that he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel currently prosecuting him for a bevy of 2020 election crimes, “within two seconds.”
During his first term, Trump openly ached to fire another special counsel: Robert Mueller, the lead investigator on the Russia investigation. But he was thwarted by Republican warnings—what a lifetime ago it seems!—that doing so could lead to his impeachment, and by an ultimatum from his White House counsel Donald McGahn, who threatened to resign.
No such difficulties will exist this time around: “I don’t think they’ll impeach me if I fire Jack Smith,” Trump told Hewitt. Even if they did, what’s a third impeachment when you’ve already beaten two?
And it’s not like firing Smith would open Trump to any new legal jeopardy: “We got immunity at the Supreme Court,” the former president noted. Whether firing him would be enough is another question: In another recent interview, Trump said that Smith “should be thrown out of the country.”
The Dark Jubilee
It’s anybody’s guess whether Trump would include among his “day one” actions the blanket pardons for January 6th rioters he has been pledging for years. Don’t get me wrong: The pardons are definitely coming. But why rush the logistics on such a joyous occasion?
Imagine it: Trump’s favorite insurrectionists, freed from bondage, invited to the Ellipse to receive their long-overdue thanks for their patriotism. They may not have managed to reinstall Trump in 2020, but wonder of wonders: The American people did it for them just four short years later! You’d want it to be tasteful. These things take time to plan.
On other matters, Trump wouldn’t want to leave the Justice Department with nothing to do. Going after Hunter Biden has lost some of its appeal. But there’s always the likes of Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff, whom Trump has suggested deserve to face “televised military tribunals” for treason. Wisely, Trump has set himself up with a win-win situation here: He can either order investigations against these longstanding foes, or—flushed with the grace of victory—he can say he isn’t going to do that, prompting a new round of chin-stroking from the credulous press: Is today the day Donald Trump finally decided to act presidential?
Avengers Assemble
As he goes about reshaping the federal government in his own image, Trump will need lots of sycophantic hands on deck.
How many true believers he gets in his cabinet may depend on how the Senate map shakes out. A simple Republican majority is likely, but won’t be enough with GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins in office, who have shot down Trump nominees in the past.
To neutralize these two and give Trump carte blanche on his cabinet of suckups, Republicans will need to get to 52 Senate seats. Every reputable forecaster currently puts the Senate GOP’s likely floor at 51. Whether Democrats can run the table on the handful of tossup seats remaining could prove the difference between, say, Secretary of Health and Human Services Bobby Jindal—or Secretary RFK Jr.
Trump has a particular interest in the post of attorney general, where he is determined to find someone with a particular eye toward his personal interests. His last two, he thinks, were no good—Jeff Sessions failed to protect him from the Mueller investigation, and William Barr failed to help him steal the 2020 election.
Someone who actively helped him try in 2020 will be a good start: perhaps Jeff Clark, who as assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Division worked harder than anyone to help Trump prevent the transfer of power. Clark has since had an ethics panel recommend his law license be suspended and has been indicted alongside Trump in Georgia. He’s perfect. But in the event of a tougher Senate landscape, someone like Sen. Mike Lee would also do.
Here, however, is something to ponder: What if Trump dispenses with the entire Senate confirmation process entirely. He could lean on acting cabinet members. It’s a legally questionable practice that comes with limitations. But Trump’s on the record as being partial to it. “I like acting. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that?” he declared as president.
The Purge
The rest of the federal government, beyond the cabinet secretaries, is in for some serious disruption in Trump’ first 100 days.
“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a hidden-camera video released earlier this year. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence . . . whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”
It remains to be seen whether Vought—a top architect of the Project 2025 blueprint that Trump stresses he had absolutely nothing to do with—will make it into Trump’s cabinet. Either way, Trump is unlikely to consider appointing loyal heads to various parts of the federal government sufficient: He plans to purge the rank-and-file of dissenters, too.
Trump already tried this once before. Back in October 2020, he released an executive order known as “Schedule F,” which would have stripped employment protections from a broad number of positions across the federal government—though how broadly Trump would have tried to apply the order remains unknown, since he was swept from office shortly thereafter.
Like many of his orders, this one will face a long legal battle. But there’s no reason to think he won’t get started early.
There’s so much more, of course. Elon Musk as “secretary of cost-cutting!” A shiny new trade war! But you’re already on your fourth cup of coffee by this point, so we’ll call it for now.
All this is obviously an exercise in speculation: The opening period of a second Trump term would be an insanely turbulent time, and we don’t know what we don’t know. But Trump has been explicit about what he plans to do, and very little of what we’ve discussed here will rely on anyone else’s approval or permission—at least in the short term. As the New York Times put it the other day: We would do well to believe him.
No Joke
by William Kristol
“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
I take no pleasure in reproducing this stupid and offensive comment, made at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally Sunday. But it is sometimes right to confront the ugliness around us rather than look away.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, chooses to look away. He was asked yesterday about the remark. Vance was present at the Garden on Sunday, and in any case presumably followed subsequent news coverage of the event. But asked about Tony Hinchcliffe’s “comedy” set, Vance had this to say: “I’ve heard about the joke, I haven’t actually seen the joke that you mentioned. . . . Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke as you said, maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it. I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke.”
Just so we’re all clear: Vance knows what was said. He chooses not to condemn it.
Yesterday, Donald Trump had a rally in Atlanta at which he spoke at length. He also chose not to address the ‘joke.’
This is no surprise, I suppose, but it’s still worth noting: Neither Trump nor Vance has directly or personally repudiated this statement made at the signature rally of their campaign.
By the way, about this statement: Is it a joke, as Vance calls it? Sure, a comedian uttered it. But there’s no humor, no irony, no punch line to it. It wasn’t funny or comical. It’s just an expression of bigotry. Those who enjoyed it—I gather there were some who did—did so because they enjoyed sharing in the bigotry.
What would be funny, in an ironic sort of way, would be if this comment makes a difference. After everything else over the last nine years, everything said and done by Trump, it would be a nice joke if a surrogate’s remark at the last moment made a difference.
It’s happened before. On October 29, 1884, Rev. Samuel Burchard introduced the Republican presidential candidate, James G. Blaine, at a New York City meeting of several hundred pro-Blaine Protestant clergymen. Burchard proclaimed, “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”
Blaine did nothing when he spoke or right after to disavow this anti-Catholic slur. The comment spread everywhere in New York over the next few days, and Blaine reportedly lost thousands of Irish-American votes as a consequence. The next week, he ended up losing New York State by just over one thousand votes out of more than a million cast, which tipped the Electoral College to the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland.
Could this be the second time a surrogate’s remark at a New York City rally a week before Election Day turns the outcome of a presidential election, this time tipping Pennsylvania rather than New York? Who knows? We do know that “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.”
One last point: Hinchcliffe’s comment may hurt Trump among voters of Puerto Rican descent in Pennsylvania. But it should hurt Trump among all voters, of any descent, everywhere. The hate fest at Madison Square Garden was one last reminder of the bigotry, the cruelty, the stupidity, and the vulgarity that are the beating heart of Trumpism. Accepting or rejecting such a future is the choice before us next Tuesday.
Quick Hits
TAKE THE W: Podcast behemoth Joe Rogan revealed in the early hours this morning that he is still in talks with Harris’s campaign about an interview. The hold-up: The campaign wants Rogan to come to them and to keep the interview to an hour. These are totally acceptable asks for a campaign in the closing days of the election. Any other interviewer on the planet would jump at this opportunity. And yet, Rogan seems torn. Do the interview, bud. You can leave Austin. It will be alright.
A SWING AND A MISS: The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins is one of our best chroniclers of the Trump era and of Mormonism in U.S. politics, so his latest piece on the rollout of the “Latter-day Saints for Trump” group, which immediately “devolved into a Veep-like comedy of errors, is a smash click.
The group uploaded a picture of LDS president Russell M. Nelson—then deleted it when asked if they’d gotten the church’s permission. They started selling “Latter-day Saints for Trump” coffee mugs and koozies—then hastily stopped when social-media wags started reminding them Mormons don’t drink coffee or alcohol.
“The latest hitch in Trump’s Mormon outreach came yesterday, when the Deseret News reported that Doug Quezada, a founding co-chair of Latter-day Saints for Trump, is being sued for fraud over an alleged scheme involving a cannabis company,” Coppins writes. “Such allegations may be somewhat commonplace in the Republican nominees orbit, but the words cannabis company and fraud will not reassure Trump-skeptical Mormons.”
TAKING A BREATH: “As we approach election day,” David French writes for the New York Times, “I’m cautiously optimistic—not so much about the outcome of the election (it’s way too close for either side to feel confident), but rather about the durability and integrity of the process itself. The legal arguments Donald Trump used to try to reverse the election outcome in 2020 have been decisively rejected, and the legal loopholes he tried to open have been closed.”
If Harris wins, French says, a blizzard of extralegal efforts from Trump to overturn that win is sure to follow. But legislative reforms to the Electoral Count Act and a recent court smackdown of the “independent state legislature” doctrine will make shenanigans more difficult.
We’re doomers by nature and David’s a Pollyanna; nevertheless, it’s a somewhat reassuring read.
Cheap Shots
***ATTENTION***
Can we please take a moment to acknowledge the efforts of our Bulwark team these last couple of months of the campaign? If you haven't noticed....they've been EVERYWHERE...geographically, as well as, media-wise...on cable news, podcasts, events, etc. They have intentionally placed many events in the swing states. No matter how the election turns out...the Bulwark team has put their time/money/energy where their mouths have been. They are leaving it all on the field. Anyway...I thought they deserved a shout out down the stretch.
Cats are playing an outsized part in this election. I love them but really....first they make us grumpy uninvolved childless voters, then they get eaten in Ohio, now they keep us running frantically back and forth trying to make up our minds when, really, the choice is an easy one. Forward vs backward - just keep going forward with Kamala and forget the stupid laser light!! And Pussies!! Let's not forget the grabbing thereof. /s