Saturday, March 02, 2024
The GOP's False Narrative of Supporting Workers
There was a lot of breathless speculation before Tuesday’s presidential primaries in Michigan, but the actual results didn’t clarify the two most important questions: How many “uncommitted” voters angry about President Biden’s approach to the war in Gaza will abstain in November, even though Donald Trump would surely be much more supportive of Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden? And how many blue-collar workers will support Trump in the false belief that he’s on their side?
But we can at least say with certainty that Trump is not now and never has been pro-worker — while Biden is.
Naturally, that’s not the way Trump tells the story. In September, during an autoworkers’ strike, Trump, addressing workers at a nonunion Michigan auto parts factory, declared that he had saved an auto industry that was “on its knees, gasping its last breaths” when he took office. The day before, by contrast, Biden joined union workers on the picket line.
This is, however, pure self-aggrandizing fantasy. When Trump took office, the auto industry had already regained most of the ground it had lost during the Great Recession. This recovery was possible because in 2009, the Obama-Biden administration stepped in to rescue the major auto companies. At the time, many Republicans vehemently opposed that bailout.
What about Trump personally? He flip-flopped, first endorsing the bailout, then years later siding with the Republican right in denouncing it, saying, “You could have let it” — the auto industry — “go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself.” . . . . If you don’t quite get the meaning there, he was in effect suggesting busting the auto unions so that workers would be forced to accept pay cuts. Populism!
Once in office, Trump, who campaigned as a different kind of Republican, mostly governed as a standard conservative. His promises to rebuild America’s infrastructure — which drew pushback from Republicans in Congress — became a running joke. His biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut that was a big giveaway to corporations and high-income Americans. His attempt at health care “reform” would have gutted Obamacare without any workable replacement, causing millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage.
Trump did depart from G.O.P. orthodoxy by imposing substantial tariffs on imports, with the supposed goal of restoring manufacturing. But by imposing tariffs on industrial inputs like steel and aluminum, raising their price, Trump made U.S. manufacturing — auto production in particular — less competitive, and probably destroyed jobs on net.
[T]he Trump team still appears to believe that tariffs are paid by foreigners, when in fact their burden falls on U.S. workers and consumers. All indications are that a second Trump term would be marked by more tariffs, just as badly conceived as those of his first.
How does Biden’s record compare? He did preside over a burst of inflation, but so did the leaders of other advanced economies, pretty clearly indicating that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than policy, were responsible. And inflation has been subsiding, despite a few bumps along the way — without the high unemployment some economists asserted would be necessary.
In terms of policy, Biden has made a big break with Trump’s golf-course conservatism. He delivered on infrastructure. He enacted two major bills promoting manufacturing — one in semiconductors, the other focused on green energy. Manufacturing employment has fully recovered from the Covid shock; manufacturing investment has soared.
I don’t know how many Americans are even aware of these policy initiatives. Or how many realize that the Biden era has been really good for blue-collar wages. . . . most workers’ wages adjusted for inflation are higher than before the pandemic, and are actually above the prepandemic trend.
In short, there’s a reason the United Automobile Workers endorsed Biden, although many of its members will vote for Trump anyway, imagining that he’s on their side.
But Trump isn’t a populist, he’s a poseur. When making actual policy as opposed to speeches, he basically governed as Mitch McConnell with tariffs. Biden, on the other hand, really has pursued a pro-worker agenda — more so, arguably, than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt — and has presided over a significant reduction in inequality.
How many of us will vote based on this reality?
Friday, March 01, 2024
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Why America Lost Its Religion
The idea of American exceptionalism has become so dubious that much of its modern usage is merely sarcastic. But when it comes to religion, Americans really are exceptional. No rich country prays nearly as much as the U.S, and no country that prays as much as the U.S. is nearly as rich.
America’s unique synthesis of wealth and worship has puzzled international observers and foiled their grandest theories of a global secular takeover. In the late 19th century, an array of celebrity philosophers—the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud—proclaimed the death of God, and predicted that atheism would follow scientific discovery and modernity in the West, sure as smoke follows fire.
Stubbornly pious Americans threw a wrench in the secularization thesis. Deep into the 20th century, more than nine in 10 Americans said they believed in God and belonged to an organized religion, with the great majority of them calling themselves Christian. That number held steady—through the sexual-revolution ’60s, through the rootless and anxious ’70s, and through the “greed is good” ’80s.
But in the early 1990s, the historical tether between American identity and faith snapped. Religious non-affiliation in the U.S. started to rise—and rise, and rise. By the early 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t associate with any established religion (also known as “nones”) had doubled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of atheists, agnostics, and spiritual dabblers had tripled in size. . . . the rise of religious non-affiliation in America looks like one of those rare historical moments that is neither slow, nor subtle, nor cyclical. You might call it exceptional.
The obvious question for anybody who spends at least two seconds looking at the graph above is: What the hell happened around 1990?
According to Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at the University of Notre Dame, America’s nonreligious lurch has mostly been the result of three historical events: the association of the Republican Party with the Christian right, the end of the Cold War, and 9/11.
This story begins with the rise of the religious right in the 1970s. Alarmed by the spread of secular culture—including but not limited to the sexual revolution, the Roe v. Wade decision, the nationalization of no-fault divorce laws, and Bob Jones University losing its tax-exempt status over its ban on interracial dating—Christians became more politically active. The GOP welcomed them with open arms. The party, which was becoming more dependent on its exurban-white base, needed a grassroots strategy and a policy platform. Within the next decade, the religious right—including Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority—had become fundraising and organizing juggernauts for the Republican Party. In 1980, the GOP social platform was a facsimile of conservative Christian views on sexuality, abortion, and school prayer.
[I]t disgusted liberal Democrats, especially those with weak connections to the Church. It also shocked the conscience of moderates, who preferred a wide berth between their faith and their politics. Smith said it’s possible that young liberals and loosely affiliated Christians first registered their aversion to the Christian right in the early 1990s, after a decade of observing its powerful role in conservative politics.
As the U.S.S.R. dissolved, so did atheism’s association with America’s nemesis. After that, “nones” could be forthright about their religious indifference, without worrying that it made them sound like Soviet apologists.
Third, America’s next geopolitical foe wasn’t a godless state. It was a God-fearing, stateless movement: radical Islamic terrorism. A series of bombings and attempted bombings in the 1990s by fundamentalist organizations such as al-Qaeda culminated in the 9/11 attacks. It would be a terrible oversimplification to suggest that the fall of the Twin Towers encouraged millions to leave their church, Smith said. But over time, al-Qaeda became a useful referent for atheists who wanted to argue that all religions were inherently destructive.
Meanwhile, during George W. Bush’s presidency, Christianity’s association with unpopular Republican policies drove more young liberals and moderates away from both the party and the Church. . . . the 2006 best seller American Theocracy argued that evangelicals in the Republican coalition were staging a quiet coup that would plunge the country into disarray and financial ruin. Throughout the Bush presidency, liberal voters—especially white liberal voters— detached from organized religion in ever-higher numbers.
Religion has lost its halo effect in the past three decades, not because science drove God from the public square, but rather because politics did. In the 21st century, “not religious” has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right.
[S]candals in the Catholic Church have accelerated its particularly rapid loss of moral stature. According to Pew research, 13 percent of Americans today self-identify as “former Catholics,” and many of them leave organized religion altogether. And as the ranks of the nones have swelled, it’s become more socially acceptable for casual or rare churchgoers to tell pollsters that they don’t particularly identify with any faith. It’s also become easier for nones to meet, marry, and raise children who grow up without any real religious attachment.
Most important has been the dramatic changes in the American family. The past half century has dealt a series of body blows to American marriage. Divorce rates spiked in the ’70s through the ’90s, following the state-by-state spread of no-fault divorce laws. Just as divorce rates stabilized, the marriage rate started to plummet in the ’80s, due to both the decline of marriage within the working class and delayed marriage among college-educated couples.
Finally, the phenomenon of “delayed adulthood” might be another subtle contributor. More Americans, especially college graduates in big metro areas, are putting off marriage and childbearing until their 30s, and are using their 20s to establish a career, date around, and enjoy being young and single in a city. By the time they settle down, they have established a routine—work, brunch, gym, date, drink, football—that leaves little room for weekly Mass. “They know who they are by 30, and they don’t feel like they need a church to tell them,” Smith said.
The rise of the nones shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the religious identity that seems to be doing the best job at both retaining old members and attracting new ones is the newfangled American religion of Nothing Much at All.
But the liberal politics of young people brings us to the first big reason to care about rising non-affiliation. A gap has opened up between America’s two political parties. In a twist of fate, the Christian right entered politics to save religion, only to make the Christian-Republican nexus unacceptable to millions of young people—thus accelerating the country’s turn against religion.
[T]the left today has a higher share of religiously unaffiliated voters than anytime in modern history. At the same time, the average religiosity of white Christian Republicans has gone up, according to Robert P. Jones, the CEO of the polling firm PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America. Evangelicals feel so embattled that they’ve turned to a deeply immoral and authoritarian champion to protect them . . . . American politics is at risk of becoming a war of religiosity versus secularism by proxy, where both sides see the other as a catastrophic political force that must be destroyed at all costs.
American nones may well build successful secular systems of belief, purpose, and community. But imagine what a devout believer might think: Millions of Americans have abandoned religion, only to re-create it everywhere they look.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Trump Gave Dobbs to Evangelicals; They Want More
It is very clear that Republicans were caught off guard this month by a decision the Alabama Supreme Court issued that has jeopardized access to in vitro fertilization treatments in the state, on account of its conclusion that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” and that I.V.F. clinics can be held liable for their destruction.
When asked for his thoughts, Senator Tommy Tuberville, one of the state’s two Republican senators, struggled to give a coherent answer. “We need to have more kids. We need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” he said, seemingly unaware of how the decision might limit access to fertility treatments.
Facing the questions of I.V.F. and fetal personhood on Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas told CNN that it was a “complex” issue. “I’m not sure everybody has really thought about what all the potential problems are, and as a result no one really knows what the potential answers are,” he said.
One Republican who was not caught flat-footed was Donald Trump, who quickly declared his support for I.V.F. in a post on Truth Social. . . . . Later, during a rally in South Carolina, Trump called on the Alabama Legislature to find an “immediate solution to preserve the availability of I.V.F.” in the state.
One way to understand this move is that Trump wants to pivot to the center and distance himself from the most vocally anti-abortion Republicans. The question of in vitro fertilization gives him a chance to do so. But as he attempts to moderate his message, it is important to remember two facts. The first is that Trump is the reason that I.V.F. is now a contested issue. The second is that what Trump says is less important than what key parts of the Republican coalition want. And what key parts of the Republican coalition want is fetal personhood.
There’s no question that the Alabama decision would not have been possible without the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which revoked the constitutional right to an abortion. In doing so, the court gave states and state courts wide leeway to restrict the bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom of Americans, in the name of protecting life.
That the Dobbs decision would threaten I.V.F. was obvious from the moment the Supreme Court released its opinion in June 2022. That’s why, toward the end of 2022, Senate Democrats introduced a bill to protect the right to use in vitro fertilization.
If there is no Alabama decision without Dobbs, then there was no Dobbs with President Donald Trump. He nominated the three justices who formed the Dobbs majority along with three other Republican appointees. That is why Trump’s attempt to paint himself as a defender of I.V.F. rings hollow. He is essentially trying to position himself against his own record.
This raises a question. Why was Trump such an anti-abortion hard-liner? The answer is easy: because he was a Republican president specifically indebted to conservative evangelicals and anti-abortion activists for his victory in the 2016 presidential election. In particular, Trump’s promise to stack the federal judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, with anti-abortion jurists helped him consolidate conservative evangelical voters in the midst of scandal and controversy
Fifty-three percent of white evangelicals backed Trump in this year’s Iowa caucuses; 70 percent of white evangelicals backed him in the New Hampshire primary; and 71 percent backed him in the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday.
What’s important, for thinking about a second Trump presidency, is that fetal personhood is the next battlefield in the anti-abortion movement’s war on reproductive rights, and conservative evangelicals are among those groups waving the standard. As one such activist, Jason Rapert of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, told The New York Times regarding the Alabama court decision, “It further affirms that life begins at conception.”
At least 11 states, The Washington Post notes, have “broadly defined personhood as beginning at fertilization in their state laws.”
It does not matter whether Trump rhetorically supports access to I.V.F. treatments. What matters is whether he would buck the priorities of his most steadfast supporters and veto a bill establishing fetal personhood across the United States. Given his record — he’ll sign pretty much anything his Republican allies send to the White House — we can be relatively sure that he wouldn’t.
Presidents are shaped as much by their political parties as they shape them. Trump’s enormous influence on the direction of the Republican Party should not occlude the extent to which he will act on behalf of his coalition if given another term of office. And when it comes to actually making laws, what a coalition wants is often more important than what a president says.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Trump's History of Racism and the GOP Base
During his presidency, Trump often claimed he had done more for Black Americans than any other president — or, he sometimes might concede, since Abraham Lincoln. Historians scorned his claim. Many cited Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was Johnson, the historians said, who after Lincoln was the president who made the most lasting impact on the lives of African Americans.
To make his case, Trump would cite achievements like a low Black unemployment rate, increased funding for historically Black colleges and universities (a congressional initiative, not an executive branch one) or passage of an opportunity zone program. “Trump’s so-called accomplishments will not even be noticed by historians five years from now,” said H.W. Brands, historian at the University of Texas at Austin, in 2020.
Trump recited those claims yet again when he addressed a group of Black conservatives last week, even if the talking points have become woefully out of date.
Black unemployment under Biden has fallen even further. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate under Trump hit a low of 5.3 percent in August 2019, but had inched up to 6.1 percent before the pandemic struck in March 2020. Under Biden, the Black unemployment rate dipped to as low as 4.8 percent in April 2023; it was 5.3 percent in January.
Trump’s reference to his career as a real estate builder who supported Black people prompted us to take a walk down memory lane. Trump’s troubled history with Black people was covered when he first ran for president in 2016, but it’s time for a refresher course now that he is seeking the presidency again.
You could begin the story in the 1950s, when Trump’s father, Fred, became the subject of a protest song, “Old Man Trump,” written by one of his tenants, folk singer Woody Guthrie, who objected to the all-White environs of his apartment complex.
Trump’s first appearance in the New York Times was under the headline “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.” The front-page article detailed how the Justice Department had brought suit in federal court against Trump and his father, charging them with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act (another LBJ bill that helped Black people) in the operation of 39 buildings through their Trump Management Corporation. . . . White people could easily get a rental but Black people were told nothing was available. A DOJ subpoena revealed that Black applications were marked with a “C,” for “colored.”
Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer who brought the suit, recalled in 2019 that Trump remarked to her during a coffee break: “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”
Two years later, in 1975, Trump settled the suit without admitting wrongdoing. Under the settlement, the company was required to furnish the New York Urban League with a list of all apartment vacancies, every week, for two years and advertise in the Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper.
Two weeks after five Black and Latino teenagers were implicated in a brutal attack on a White woman jogging in New York’s Central Park on April 19, 1989, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for “criminals of every age.” While the ad did not explicitly say the youths should be executed, the implication was clear.
All five initially confessed after long interrogations, but they later recanted their statements, saying they had been coerced by police. The suspects were convicted of violent offenses including assault, robbery, rape, sodomy and attempted murder — and they received sentences that ranged from five to 15 years in prison.
But in 2002, they were exonerated by DNA evidence. Trump then told the New York Daily News that their $41 million wrongful-conviction settlement was a “disgrace.” He added that “settling doesn’t mean innocence.”
Former Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino president John R. O’Donnell, in the 1991 book “Trumped,” alleged that Trump once said that “laziness is a trait in blacks.” He also claimed Trump said of his accountants: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
There’s also this Trump observation, from 1989: “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market … If I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.''
Why anyone, but especially blacks and other racial minorities, believes Trump is mind numbing.
Monday, February 26, 2024
The Roots and Mystery of White Rural Rage
Ironically, rural medical care would be far worse in Virginia's rural areas but for Medicaid expansion pushed through by Democrats and opposed by Republicans and the rural voters who comprise their base. Indeed, numerous rural hospitals in Virginia would have closed but for Medicaid expansion, damaging rural economies in the process. Yet, the rural areas continue to view the urban areas with contempt despite the transfer of tax funds from Virginia's urban areas to rural areas to support access social programs that lend financial support to the rural regions. At the national level, there are parallels between blue states with large urban based economies and rural red states akin to the dichotomy in Virginia. Yet, rural areas continue to vote for Republicans who pander to rural voter hatreds and grievances but offer nothing else. Indeed, in order to cling to power, Republicans sow division and increasing show a willingness to over throw democracy. A column in the New York Times looks at tis rural rage, its roots and the task of changing rural voters' mindsets. Here are excerpts:
Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.
This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.
This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy, and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.
Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.
The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.
Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — while many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.
So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans, but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.
While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.
This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities. . . .
In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.
Prime working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy, but because the jobs just aren’t there.
Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.
Draw attention to some of these realities and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist. . . . The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes while rural America is the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.
Schaller and Waldman do offer some suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Trump 2.0 Would Unleash Christian Nationalsm
An increasingly detailed picture of former President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda is emerging — one that would make the near-daily shocks of his norm-shattering first White House tenure look tame.
Some of the particulars have already blown up into campaign furors, thanks to Trump’s public remarks about abandoning NATO allies and serving as a “dictator” on “day one,” as well as leaks of his private musings on a 16-week abortion ban. His supporters’ policy manifestos have yielded headlines predicting that Trump 2.0 would bring mass deportations of immigrants, overt use of the Justice Department to punish his political enemies, and — as POLITICO reported Tuesday — an embrace of “Christian nationalism” to guide federal policies.
Other items on the potential Trump second-term agenda would be more granular but also far-reaching, from publishing federal science reports that dispute the reality of global warming, to launching new and wider trade wars, cracking down on liberal school districts’ transgender policies and freeing the crypto industry from the threat of regulation.
President Joe Biden’s campaign said voters need to be informed about proposals that would “undermine democracy, rip away rights and freedoms, and make Americans’ lives as miserable as humanly possible if Trump is reelected.”
“Americans should know the stakes of this election,” Biden campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster said in a statement to POLITICO, “and Trump has made them as clear as day.”
These are among the policy changes that both fans and foes of the former president say people can expect if Trump wins in November:
Banning abortions in red and blue states
As a candidate, Trump has both claimed credit for the demise of Roe v. Wade and cast himself as a moderate on abortion rights — and he has frustrated anti-abortion groups by refusing to openly embrace or rule out a national ban.
Yet those same groups, in collaboration with veterans of Trump’s previous administration, are drafting plans for a sprawling anti-abortion agenda that would all but outlaw the procedure from coast to coast, including in states whose laws or constitutions guarantee reproductive rights.
“I have no doubt that they would try to impose a federal abortion ban, restrict birth control, and do lots of things that are way out of step with what people in this country want.”
The Project 2025 manifesto includes plans, for example, for Trump to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone — a drug used in most abortions. The groups are also counting on Trump enforcing a long-dormant law from the 1870s to punish anyone who sends or receives either mifepristone or medical equipment used for abortions through the mail. Taken together, those two policies could amount to a de facto national abortion ban.
Neutering climate science
Trump spent his first term shredding the Obama administration’s environmental regulations, put fossil fuel lobbyists in charge of key agencies and withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement — making the U.S. the only nation in the world to reject the landmark pact.
Project 2025 lays out proposals for the next conservative administration to reject the decades of research that show the increasingly dire consequences of rising carbon dioxide levels. It would turn key government agencies such as the EPA toward increasing fossil fuel production rather than public health protections.
Expanding trade fights against rivals — and allies
Trump has made no secret that he intends to pursue a dramatic escalation of his “America First” trade agenda if reelected, ratcheting up tariffs and other trade barriers against both U.S. enemies and allies — far higher than the levels he enacted during his first term.
Trump has also said he would impose a “four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods — everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals,” and create new rules to block U.S. companies from making investments in China.
The proposals, which would likely violate global trading rules, face fierce pushback from industry and would lead to higher prices for consumers on a wide range of goods, economic experts warn.
Waging classroom culture wars
Efforts by Republican governors and school boards to restrict teaching on subjects like race, sexuality and gender identity have mushroomed since Trump left the White House, as have GOP attempts to roll back protections for transgender students. And Trump is promising that he and his Education Department would expand that fight.
His latest education plan calls for cutting federal funding for any school or program that includes “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights could also dismantle discrimination protections for transgender students and reinstate its regulation on how schools must respond to sexual misconduct — which would be the third regulatory change to Title IX in three administrations.
Deploying U.S. troops against Americans
Four years ago, Trump held back from invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops to inner cities where protesters took to the streets after the police killing of George Floyd.
He has said he won’t hold back again.
“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,” Trump told an Iowa audience in November. “The next time, I’m not waiting.”
Abandoning NATO
Trump stirred up a transatlantic storm this month when he said he would “encourage” Russian attacks on NATO allies that fail to spend enough on defense.
But it was far from the first time that he had expressed derision for one of the alliance’s most solemn obligations — that its nations come to the aid of another member facing military assault.
If reelected, he might really pull out this time, his former national security adviser John Bolton said on MSNBC amid the furor over Trump’s most recent remarks.
“When he says he wants to get out of NATO, I think it’s a very real threat, and it will have dramatically negative implications for the United States, not just in the North Atlantic, but worldwide,” Bolton said. A U.S. withdrawal would increase Russian leverage in Europe, where Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has brought Moscow’s troops nearly to NATO’s doorstep.
A second piece takes a further look at some of the specifics of the white Christian nationalist agenda. Here are highlights:
An influential think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power, according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and has remained close to him.
Christian nationalists in America believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life. As the country has become less religious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.
One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era.
The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”
Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.
Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term.
Trump formed a political alliance with evangelicals during his first run for office, delivered them a six to three conservative majority on the Supreme Court and is now espousing the Christian right’s long-running argument that Christians are so severely persecuted that it necessitates a federal response.
In 2019, Trump’s then-secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, set up a federal commission to define human rights based on the precepts Vought describes, specifically “natural law and natural rights.” Natural law is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that can’t be superseded by government or judges. While it is a core pillar of Catholicism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception.
Vought sees his and his organization’s mission as “renew[ing] a consensus of America as a nation under God,” per a statement on CRA’s website, and reshaping the government’s contract with the governed. Freedom of religion would remain a protected right, but Vought and his ideological brethren would not shy from using their administration positions to promote Christian doctrine and imbue public policy with it, according to both people familiar with the matter, granted anonymity to avoid retaliation. He makes clear reference to human rights being defined by God, not man.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers more visibility into what policy agenda a future Trump administration might pursue. It says policies that support LGBTQ+ rights, subsidize “single-motherhood” and penalize marriage should be repealed because subjective notions of “gender identity” threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”
It also proposes increasing surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting in the states, compelling the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of “chemical abortion drugs” and protecting “religious and moral” objections for employers who decline contraception coverage for employees. One of the groups that partners with Project 2025, Turning Point USA, is among conservative influencers that health professionals have criticized for targeting young women with misleading health concerns about hormonal birth control. Another priority is defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides reproductive health care to low-income women.
Wolfe, who has deleted several posts on X that detail his views, has a more extreme outlook of what a government led by Christian nationalists should propose. In a December post, he called for ending sex education in schools, surrogacy and no-fault divorce throughout the country, . . . .
The effort to imbue laws with biblical principles is already underway in some states. In Texas, Christian conservative supporters have pressured the legislature to require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom; targeted prohibitions on churches against direct policy advocacy and organized campaigns around “culture war” issues, including curbing LGBTQ+ rights, banning books and opposing gun safety laws.
“There’s been a tectonic shift in how the leadership of the religious right operates,” said Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Christian Jewish Studies, who grew up evangelical. “These folks aren’t as interested in democracy or working through democratic systems as in the old religious right because their theology is one of Christian warfare.”
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