Donald Trump is heading towards presidential victory this Wednesday after election night. After winning in at least three key states, the former vice president already proclaims himself the winner: “It is a victory that allows us to make America great again,” he said in his first speech. Americans had to choose between two very different realities for their country, but also with consequences for the rest of the world. What can you expect from a Trump victory? How can issues such as women’s rights or the wars in Gaza and Ukraine change with the change of government?
Immigration: “We are going to fix our borders”
Trump has promised to deport millions of people even if they have been living in the United States for years and implement a plan to do so “on the first day” using a law from 1798 that allowed the arrest and limitation of even the freedom of expression of any foreigner regardless of their status. .
It also threatens to revoke the right to US citizenship of anyone born in the United States, for example by stopping issuing passports and social security cards to groups of citizens. He has talked about giving “ideology tests” to Muslim immigrants who try to move or seek asylum in the United States. And he suggests that he will resume the entry ban for citizens of Muslim-majority countries, as he already did in his first term (the courts stopped part of this decree, which was annulled by Joe Biden as soon as he came to power in 2021).
The white Christian nationalism that Trump promotes even imitates Ku Klux Klan slogans such as “America for Americans.” During the campaign, he has said that immigrants have “bad genes” and the rally at Madison Square Center in New York a few days ago was a display of insults against Puerto Ricans, Jews and Palestinians, among others.
Several times during the campaign he has insisted on spreading the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eat pets even though his Republican colleagues have asked him to stop doing so so as not to provoke violence in their communities. For Anne Applebaum, the historian and expert on Central and Eastern European authoritarianism, the insistence on the lie that Haitians eat “cats” also symbolizes his followers’ embrace of authoritarianism.
“Everyone was laughing… And that struck me as an example of people lying in a way where, even though everyone knows they are lying, the purpose of the lie was to demonstrate power. ‘We can lie. We can do whatever we want. “We can say whatever we want about these people, and it doesn’t affect us,” Applebaum explains in a podcast on the Atlanticabout his series titled “Autocracy in America.”
“We are going to fix our borders, we are going to fix everything in our country, it is the day when Americans regain control of their country,” Trump proclaimed in his first speech after the election night.
Ukraine and NATO
Trump has expressed admiration for Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un, his role models as authoritarian politicians. But in the case of the Russian president, the relationship goes far beyond provocative words.
Since losing the election in 2020, Trump has spoken with Putin up to seven times, according to Bob Woodward’s new book. Opposition to military aid to Ukraine has been led by the Republicans most loyal to him and Trump suggests that he would end the war “in 24 hours”, that is, accepting the conditions that Putin wants to impose. The vice president’s pick, JD Vance, has been repeating the Kremlin’s arguments against Ukraine for months.
In this context, the European allies would have little room for maneuver, among other things because European security may remain in the hands of France and the United Kingdom, the only nuclear powers in Europe and with much more limited resources than those the Pentagon has.
“The big difference between Harris and Trump would be in relation to NATO and other allies such as Japan and Korea,” Peter Feaver, professor of Politics at the University, explained a few days ago in a talk at the Center for American Studies at the University of Oxford. of Duke, a specialist in military-society relations and former advisor during the George W. Bush Administration. “Trump has few ideas that he really believes in, and one of them is that allies take advantage of the United States.”
In fact, back in 1987, during his first flirtation with the idea of running for president, Trump placed an ad in the New York Times denouncing the alleged abuse of allies.
Trump has insisted that allies have to increase their military budget and has even encouraged Putin to invade countries that do not spend more (Spain is the one that invests the least percentage of its GDP in military spending and one of the few that remains below the 2% target). But a new Trump presidency could go as far as pulling the United States out of NATO without an alternative structure to defend the European countries most vulnerable to Russian attacks.
According to Feaver, “in the short term it would matter less than you might imagine. In the long term, it would matter… for example if there is an attack in the Baltics.” The essential difference, as in every section of Trump’s new term, is that there would no longer be leaders to curb his instincts as they did in the first term when they stopped him with his ideas of using nuclear weapons or shooting at hurricanes: “Trump 2.0 would be very different from Trump 1.0. “The key factors holding back Trump 1.0 will be very different in Trump 2.0.”
Trump’s first term advisors came from establishment traditional republican, like Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and even an ultra-conservative like John Bolton.
Furthermore, as Feaver recalls, “there is a different Congress. The Republicans of 2025 will not be moderates like Paul Ryan and company” and all this happens “in a more dangerous world” than in 2016.
Gaza and Middle East War
From the highway in the rural county north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you can see signs with the message “support Israel, vote for Trump.”
At the same time, in other Midwestern states, campaigns financed by pro-Trump groups encourage voting to support the Palestinians by opting for third parties that can take votes away from the Democrats.
Netanyahu, who campaigned with Trump’s image in Israel, has not hidden his sympathy for the Republican. As a candidate, Trump has now criticized Biden for “holding down” Netanyahu and has encouraged the Israeli to “finish the job.”
As president, Trump eliminated aid to the Palestinian Authority, supported the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and promoted the Abraham Accords to boost ties between Israel and other countries in the area such as Saudi Arabia without counting on the Palestinians.
Persecution and “internal enemies”
The Republican candidate openly threatens to use the Department of Justice to persecute Joe Biden and his family, despite the fact that years of attempts by the Republican-majority House of Representatives have come to nothing. Trump has also mentioned Nancy Pelosi and her husband and several Democratic senators by name. Trump calls Democrats “the enemy within.” This Friday, the Republican candidate fantasized during a political rally with the idea that former Republican Senator Liz Cheney was facing a firing squad. Cheney, who has now supported Harris, was one of the few in her party to stand up to Trump and support his removal after the assault on the Capitol.
In his previous term, he led the government to persecute journalists and critics, such as former FBI chief James Comey, who was subjected to an intense Treasury inspection that ended in him being refunded money because he had overpaid. According to an NPR investigation, since 2022, Trump has threatened more than 100 times to investigate, persecute, imprison or otherwise punish his “perceived enemies.”
Trump wants to concentrate more power in the figure of the president, put more agencies under his direct control and eliminate protection for public officials and thus purge those he does not consider “faithful.” He already told his former cabinet that he needed “generals like the ones Hitler had” who would carry out his actions without questioning him.
Part of his plans come from the so-called Project 2025, an agenda designed by the conservative Heritage Foundation and from which Trump has tried to distance himself in public, despite the fact that his current collaborators are among its authors, as documented by the New York Times.
Women’s rights
In his first term, Trump managed to elect three justices to the Supreme Court who, using the power of the conservative majority, annulled the national protection of the right to abortion in force since the ruling Roe v. Wade of 1973.
This has meant allowing states with Republican majorities to impose restrictions on the right to abortion and also on emergency medical care for women, access to contraceptives and even fertility treatments.
Trump has preferred to avoid finalizing his plans for an issue that causes him to lose votes since the majority of the population is in favor of protecting the right to abortion and the ability of women to decide. But the evangelical and Catholic activist organizations that supported him in 2016 and were part of his Administration have plans.
“Trump’s allies have plans to further limit abortion rights if he wins. One of the things they would try to do is use the Comstock Act, a 19th century law that could be interpreted to criminalize medical abortion, which is how most abortions occur in the United States now,” explains Lisa Lerer, the author The Fall of Roe. “There are people who would enter the Administration who would want to go much further to limit the right to abortion, not only in conservative states where the procedure is largely prohibited, but in more liberal places like New York or California, where it is allowed. ”.
This Tuesday, ten territories in the United States voted to guarantee access to abortion in their state constitutions. In the case of Maryland, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy is already legal and now the reform enshrines in the constitution “the right to reproductive freedom,” which complicates any attempt to reverse this right.
Economy and tariffs
Trump has given few details of concrete policies beyond tax cuts and the imposition of more tariffs on goods manufactured outside the United States.
Now he suggests he would impose an extra 20% on any imported goods or services, which would especially hurt partners like the EU and also American consumers by raising prices at home.
Meanwhile, his Government would expand the tax cuts for the richest that it approved in 2017, lower the corporate tax and could even abolish the federal income tax.
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