What could a second Trump term bring?

WASHINGTON— A handwritten timeline in a National Guard notebook marks events of Jan. 6, 2021, when more than 1,200 domestic terrorists breached the Capitol.

The author marked when a police officer defending the Capitol and members of Congress fired the bullet that killed Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old attacker who has since become a martyr in ultra-right and anti-government circles.

“2:44 p.m. – Shots Fired in the Cap.”

Mikie Sherrill heard that gunfire. Masked against COVID-19 and perched in the gallery that overlooks the floor, Sherrill, a Democrat just recently elected to a second term, had come, like the rest of Congress, to certify the election results of November, a typically ho-hum affair. Soon, she and her House and Senate colleagues were trying to slip away from the mob, after former President Donald Trump had whipped his supporters that day into violent rage by lying repeatedly that he had won the 2020 election and Democrats were stealing it.

“We weren’t sure that the elevators wouldn’t open up onto a crowd of people trying to harm us,” Sherrill said.

Members and staff barricaded themselves in Capitol Hill offices. They pushed furniture against doors. Turned off lights. Stayed quiet. Hid under desks. Many soiled themselves out of fear.

“I was slipping in people’s blood,” Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer, testified in 2022 about the attack. “I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”

With the Capitol secure, lawmakers reconvened at 11:32 p.m. Some Republicans, like Sens. Steve Daines of Montana and Mike Braun of Indiana and Kelly Loeffler, then a senator from Georgia who had planned to object to the election results, pulled back. One hundred and forty-seven Republicans, including Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd), did not, voting instead to overturn the accurate election results at Trump’s direction.

“Heartbreaking,” Sherrill said. “It was very hard to get past that,” she said. “There were people in that session of Congress that I did not work with because I was so furious about what had happened.”

Domestic and global impacts

After the post-election crisis of 2020, the presidential race four years later appears to be a dead heat and Trump, 78, a twice-impeached candidate found guilty in a New York trial this summer of defrauding the public to win the White House in 2016, could win again, throwing domestic politics and global affairs into tumult.

Unless Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress, Trump, who has drummed out his former critics within the Republican Party, would be able to govern without political checks. 

For New Jersey, a Trump victory would likely be first felt in the streets, soon after he is sworn in Jan. 20, 2025, if people protest against his election and his expected first move, a sweeping crackdown to deport the roughly 11 million people in the U.S. without immigration documentation.

“On Day One, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a Michigan rally in May. To get around legal protections for asylum seekers fleeing violence or persecution, Trump has said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law that allows for the deportation of any noncitizen of a foreign enemy nation.

New Jersey is one of the five top states where undocumented people live, along with California, Texas, Florida and Illinois, according to the think tank Third Way.

Trump and his allies, including adviser Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hardliner, have said they would federalize the National Guard and deploy the military to  sweep up people to deport.

In this vision, troops would herd up people and hold them in detention camps, likely including “large-scale staging grounds” near the Mexico-U.S. border, Miller told right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk.

Trump has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country,” and has also pledged to end birthright citizenship, granted to anyone born in the U.S. and protected under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Amending the Constitution requires three-fourths, or 38, states to agree. 

Project 2025’s influence

How Trump operated during his first term, from 2017 to 2021, provides clues to how he might again.

A blueprint of policy proposals called Project 2025, a more than 900-page document the right-wing Heritage Foundation assembled in preparation for a new Trump term, does too.

During a Heritage event in 2022 held in Florida, Trump said the organization would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”

Project 2025 includes sweeping proposals to curtail civil rights, personal freedoms and significantly alter the landscape of the U.S. government. Many of its authors write from Christian and Western backgrounds, arguing that liberals are “threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities.” A section about the Labor Department suggests a society-wide day to rest since “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest.”

Trump’s allies have pressed him to enforce the Comstock Act, a federal law signed in 1873 that could be used to cut off access to abortion pills like mifepristone sent through the mail, though Trump has balked at that idea.

The law, named after anti-obscenity campaigner Anthony Comstock, could allow anti-abortion groups to restrict abortion access without going through Congress and even in states, like New Jersey, with state-level protections.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, as well as Rep. Chris Smith (R-4th), signed a letter sent to the Justice Department last year calling the “distribution of abortion drugs by mail” criminal.

Eliminate, privatize

Beyond calling for the Department of Health and Human Services to be renamed the “Department of Life,” Project 2025 would eliminate or privatize whole chunks of the federal government.

The departments of Education and Homeland Security would be eliminated. So would the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, while the Transportation Security Administration and the National Weather Service would be privatized.

Weather information providers and forecasters rely on data from federal agencies like the National Weather Service, and dismantling that service could put lives at risk during violent storms, David Robinson, New Jersey’s state climatologist, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

Other departments, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, would be splintered apart or folded into other departments.

Creating a new federal agency or dismantling an existing one requires an act of Congress.

On the campaign trail, Trump, who infamously demanded loyalty from former FBI Director James Comey before firing him in 2017, has promised to fire career apolitical federal staffers and replace them with political loyalists. He aims to do this by reinstating a federal employment category called Schedule F — something he did by executive order while president, before President Joe Biden rescinded that order.

Investigation, isolation

During his first term, Trump grew furious at the Justice Department and investigations prosecutors there built against him, including the probe into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Trump has since thundered against people who have challenged him, including Democratic and Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach him, and another prosecutor — Jack Smith, the special counsel examining Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s mishandling of classified government records.

In his first term, Trump oversaw a sharp pullback from the world’s diplomatic stage, withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate deal, berating NATO allies in Europe, mocking the U.N. and mocking North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “little rocket man.”

A similar isolationist encore is to be expected if he wins, placing the future of allies like Ukraine, Taiwan and South Korea at risk.

Economically, Trump has proposed 60% tariffs on imports from China and 20% tariffs on everything else coming into the U.S. Importing companies would pay those tariffs and pass those higher costs onto their customers.

NJ’s prospects

While many of Trump’s goals would affect the U.S. in sweeping ways, some would be particularly harsh on New Jersey.

Though Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction, Trump said this summer he supports the deduction. In 2017, Republicans passed and he signed a bill that capped the deduction at $10,000.

That deduction is of particular importance in states with higher costs of living, like California, New Jersey and New York.

Authors of Project 2025 also urge the elimination of the National Flood Insurance Program, a change that would likely sharply increase costs for beach communities in the state.

As he did his first term, Trump could also approve offshore oil and gas drilling in coastal New Jersey, stymie funding for the Gateway infrastructure project, block federal nominees for jobs important to the state and deny disaster-relief funding for political reasons.

He could also leave federal positions that require Senate confirmation vacant — a common practice during his first term, when he called temporary staffers who took these jobs “my actings” — and hobble agencies’ work.

Democratic-led states and legal groups would surely fight those maneuvers in court, but after Trump appointed and the Senate confirmed three conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court, giving it a 6-3 tilt toward Republican causes, that could be a difficult path.

In July, the court ruled in Trump’s favor, granting presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution against “official acts” they commit on the job.

The Harris platform

Vice President Kamala Harris has run on the record of the Biden administration, in particular touting climate, health and tax changes under a large federal law that, among steps, capped insulin costs at $35 a month for some patients and allowed federal officials to negotiate lower prescription drug prices.

Harris has also vowed to protect the federal health care law widely called Obamacare, which has gotten more popular, even among Republicans, since it was enacted in 2010.

The vice president supports an expansion of free and universal preschool for 4-year-olds, tax credits for first-time homebuyers and a federal child tax credit.

What either candidate could accomplish depends on who wins the two congressional chambers.

Van Drew optimistic

“I think it’ll be good,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd) said of a second Trump term. “I have a good relationship with the president. He loves New Jersey.”

On SALT specifically, Van Drew said, “I think that is something that he is really going to look at,” adding, “It’s a good idea to lift that cap.” 

At the Republican National Convention this summer in Milwaukee, delegates waved signs from the convention floor that said, “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”

“Just a wholesale mass deportation is going to be hard to achieve,” Van Drew said in a recent interview with NJ Spotlight News.

People with criminal records or those who possess “terrorist backgrounds or really questionable backgrounds” should be deported, Van Drew said. “They’re not the majority, but they are here, and they should be deported.”

He expects a more curtailed deportation strategy. “I think it’ll be more focused towards those that really have committed crimes, shouldn’t have been released.”

Menendez nervous

Rob Menendez declared his candidacy for New Jersey’s 8th Congressional District on the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack.

“It’s impossible to have watched what happened that day, whether you were here, whether you were watching in real time, whether you look back on it and not be really horrified,” Menendez said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

Sitting in his office in the Longworth building on Capitol Hill, Menendez, a first-term House Democrat, is worried about the next transfer of power, on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress is due to certify the results of the 2024 presidential election.

“January 6 makes us all nervous about what happens,” Menendez said.

For the first time in U.S. history, the U.S. Secret Service has labeled that day a “national special security event,” the strictest designation possible.

Talking about how to prepare for possible election violence has been difficult because Republicans take that topic as an indictment of Trump and the Trump supporters who trashed the Capitol, Menendez said.

“January 6 was not a bunch of rowdy Democrats. It was a bunch of Trump supporters,” he said, describing the attack as a “line back to Trump” and Republicans. “They want to sever it.”

Planning for what a new Trump term could bring is a theme in his office, Menendez said, citing the privately run immigration center in Elizabeth as an example. “A lot of what we’ve done this Congress has been thinking about things like the Elizabeth detention center and how that could be used even more to tear families apart,” he said. “It’s a bully mentality. It’s a targeting mentality.”

Less moderation

If Republicans sweep into office, there might be little Democrats can do to curb a potential authoritarian Trump, who has said he wants to be “dictator for a day.”

At times and on certain issues during Trump’s first term, moderate Republicans like Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah, bucked the party line. So too did House members like Nebraska’s Don Bacon or Tom Reed, a New York Republican who was close to Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-5th). But there aren’t many of those Republicans left, and some, like Bacon, could lose their seats this election.

“I don’t have a lot of faith in this plan, but I think the plan is to find those people,” Sherrill said when asked about Democrats’ strategy if Republicans sweep into control of Congress and the presidency.

As a democracy, the U.S. has slid 11 points in 13 years in the rankings of Freedom House, a Washington-based nonprofit that has studied democratic risks for decades.

“The signs of erosion are many: worsening congressional gridlock, declining trust in democratic institutions, and the assault on our democracy on January 6, 2021, among them,” Mark de la Iglesia, director of US Democracy at the group, wrote in an essay last week.

Benjamin J. Hulac covers New Jersey’s congressional delegation and federal decisions that affect the state. This story is being republished with permission from NJ Spotlight News as part of a content-sharing arrangement through the NJ News Commons.

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