Do Not Downplay How Bad Trump 2.0 Will Be

When Donald Trump announced he was appointing Dr. Mehmet Oz to his Cabinet, my phone lit up with texts from friends reacting to the latest in a string of surreal hiring decisions. “The worst!!!” one of them said. Another just sent a laughing emoji and the word please. But when I pointed out that Oz, who has said that terminating a pregnancy is “murder” at all stages, could now shape abortion policy if confirmed to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, one friend asked, “Can you please stop catastrophizing?”

I felt patronized, and not for the first time. “How bad will it actually get?” is a question that family, friends, and even strangers who know that my job is to be plugged in to the news cycle have asked me since the morning after Trump’s reelection. I simply repeat what Trump & Co. have already said they want to do: carry out mass deportations, ban abortion nationwide, target transgender people, give tax breaks to the rich, and throw political adversaries in jail. It’s not the comforting answer or the secret plan to slow Trump down that they’re expecting to hear. I can see my conversation partner’s self-preservation instinct kick in as the panic in their face quickly morphs into disbelief.

It’s tempting to think the next four years won’t be worse for them than what came before. “We survived the first Trump administration” is a sentiment I heard a lot before Election Day and since, but who, exactly, is “we”? Not the at least six migrant children who died in U.S. custody in late 2018 and early 2019 — something that had not occurred for almost a decade before. Not my family friend who was among the nearly 5,000 people who perished in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017 owing to the incompetent federal and local responses to the disaster. Not the 22,000 whom experts believe Trump’s rollback of environmental policies has killed. Not the 400,000 who died of COVID-19 by the time Trump left office, 40 percent of whom experts say could still be alive had Trump not accelerated the degradation of the country’s public-health infrastructure. The impact of his administration’s choices is still felt today: Just look at all the women who have been harmed or died as a result of the abortion bans made possible by Trump’s Supreme Court picks.

If the past foretells the future, Trump 2.0 will be as chaotic and violent as his first administration, which ended with thousands of his supporters storming the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election result. But there will be some important differences come January 20, 2025. The so-called adults in the room, the staffers who threw up some semblance of a guardrail to keep Trump’s worst impulses in check, have been exiled from his orbit and replaced with sycophants who follow every one of his marching orders. “Moderating” forces like Ivanka Trump are not returning to D.C. The president-elect’s daughter is now taking up surfing instead of leaking to tabloids that she’s talking to her dad about climate change or LGBTQ+ rights. Over the past decade, the Republican Party has been remade in Trump’s image; the few lawmakers who challenged him have either decided to leave Washington or were voted out of office. His party now controls both chambers of Congress. Then there’s the conservative Supreme Court supermajority, which has repeatedly ruled in alignment with the agenda Trump and his loyalists have for the country.

Many people have already memory-holed the damaging policies Trump passed in his first term, including his attempts to end Obamacare, scaling back food benefits for low-income Americans, squashing efforts to fight climate change, separating migrant children from their families, and supporting the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. His second administration will build on that history. During this election cycle, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the far-right transition wish list, Project 2025. Now, he’s stacking his administration with the document’s authors and collaborators. From White House staff and Cabinet appointments to rank-and-file personnel across agencies, Trump is prioritizing loyalty above all other qualifications — even among independent agencies such as the FBI and the IRS, at which the leadership hasn’t historically turned over with each new president. And his people are ready to remake the country in their Christian, white-nationalist image.

Now the president-elect will be unshackled to pursue an agenda that will unleash untold harm on the most marginalized among us: the poor, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and women. At worst, Trump will have free rein to do as he pleases and his team will stay disciplined in advancing his goals. At best, the incompetency and infighting that defined Trump’s first term will delay and derail some parts of his agenda. Either way, we’ll be picking up the pieces for years to come.

But we know that generations before us have survived worse. And there’s one more key difference from 2016: We now know exactly what Trump is planning and what he’s capable of. Confronting those facts is not catastrophizing, nor should this information paralyze you. Sticking our heads in the sand is not an option. Knowledge is power, and knowing exactly what Trump and his lackeys intend to do to our communities is the first step toward protecting ourselves from whichever attacks are coming.