THE PRESIDENT-ELECT’S EMERGING AGENDA

         His Itemized Game-plan

         Here’s my informal tally as of mid-November. All listed items have been personally announced by the President-elect. There are some overlaps, but, for clarity, I’ve attempted to separate domestic from international initiatives.

         Domestic Initiatives

• Renew his first-term federal income-tax cuts for corporations and high-income individuals.
• Mobilize the Border Patrol plus military forces to arrest, detain and deport 11+ million undocumented immigrants.
• Mobilize military forces to arrest political protestors.
• Close the southern border and complete construction of “the Wall”.
• Cancel all pending federal criminal prosecutions against himself and consider pardoning all convicted January-6 Capitol assailants.
• Initiate criminal prosecutions of his political opponents (“the enemy within”), with a goal of imprisonment. Frequently named in his roster of revenge targets are current and former federal officials: President Biden and Vice President Harris, former President Obama, former Secretary of State Clinton, former Speaker Pelosi, former Representatives Cheney, Kinzinger and Schiff, Special Counsel Smith and former FBI Director Comey. Investigative journalists and heads of broadcast-media and Silicon-Valley enterprises are also in his sights.
• Repeal signature legislation and regulations enacted by Democratic administrations, most notably the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act (the main Biden statute for funding U.S. climate-change mitigation.)
• Significantly expand domestic oil-drilling, including on public lands and in coastal waters.
• Severely reduce the size and activism of the federal government, especially key regulatory agencies (like the IRS, the FTA, the FDA, the EPA, and possibly the Federal Reserve.) Strip civil-service protection from thousands of career officers so that they can be fired without cause and replaced with vetted political loyalists.
• Appoint additional, reliably conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices, as retirement opportunities arise, to guarantee a long-term super-majority.
• Relegate governmental regulation of reproductive health to the states, in order to preserve repeal of Roe v. Wade without imposing explicit federal bans on abortion or contraception.
• Remove federal support for trans-gender medical procedures.
• Promote Christian messaging and teaching materials in public schools.

         International Initiatives

• Facilitate an immediate “deal” to end the Ukraine War by terminating further U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, forcing its government to accept permanent Russian sovereignty over 20% of Ukrainian territory. Initiate early and ongoing dialogue between the Russian and American presidents.
• Reduce U.S. participation in, and financing of, NATO.
• Strengthen U.S. financial and military support for Israel: withdraw backing for a cease-fire and a two-state Palestinian solution, and endorse Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
• Impose stiff U.S. tariffs on all imports from abroad, especially targeting China, Mexico and Canada. Utilize tariff revenues to promote American manufacturing, exact policy concessions from foreign governments and replace revenues from reduced or cancelled federal income taxes.
• Impose additional sanctions on Iran.
• As in Trump’s first term, withdraw U.S. participation from the Paris Climate Agreement and renege on U.S. commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

         Where Will He Start?

         While Mr. Trump has not specified a timetable for implementing all the initiatives in the above agenda, he frequently highlights the following priorities for “Day-1”, fast-track, launching:

• “Striking a deal” to end the war in Ukraine;
• Mass deportations;
• Closing the Southern border;
• Expanding domestic oil drilling;
• Withdrawing federal funding for gender-affirming health care;
• Imposing tariffs on all foreign imports;
• Terminating implementation of the Biden Administration’s climate-change legislation and regulations.

CENTRAL CASTING

         The President-elect is rolling out his proposed roster of Cabinet appointments at an unprecedented rate. The nominees’ identities, new assignments and prominent backgrounds add clarity and emphasis to his agenda. Here are my informal notes on first-tranche nominees and their positions:

• Elon Musk: free-ranging “First Buddy” and designated Co-leader of a new non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency.
• Vivek Ramaswamy: DOGE’s Co-leader.
• Susie Wiles: Chief of Staff.
• Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy.
• Elise Stefanik: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
• Mario Rubio: Secretary of State.
• Tulsi Gabbard: Director of National Intelligence.
• Mike Waltz: National Security Adviser.
• John Ratcliffe: CIA Chief.
• Pete Hegseth: Secretary of Defense.
• Matt Gaetz: Attorney General. [Later withdrawn and replaced by Pam Bondi.]
• Tom Homan: “Border Czar.”
• Lee Zeldin: Head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: Secretary of Health & Human Services.

         The chief thread linking all these appointees is fierce public loyalty to Donald Trump. This seems to be the President-elect’s premier selection criterion. Mr. Musk was the top financial backer of Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, donating a reputed $200 million. Ms. Wiles and Mr. Miller are long-time inner-circle stalwarts. They are widely credited with maintaining his latest campaign’s discipline and messaging. Senator Rubio was a former rival who later made a humbling obeisance. Mr. Homan volunteered to head up the controversial mass deportation. Mr. Kennedy has become a prominent Trump supporter after dropping his own presidential campaign. Currently Florida’s Attorney General, Ms. Biondi previously served as a high-profile private lawyer for Mr. Trump, helping defend him in his criminal prosecutions.  

         Several appointees apparently lack much prior experience or expertise qualifying them for their new positions. Congresswoman Stefanik has little foreign-policy experience. Mr. Hegseth is a Fox News host and commentator with no management expertise, much less running a giant institution. Mr. Zeldin lacks environmental-policy experience. These glaring resume gaps invite two selection interpretations: Mr. Trump himself intends to retain the dominant role in these host-agencies’ oversight; and he is using these appointments to snub the agencies and the Washington Establishment. (As a symbol of this leave-no-ambiguity disdain, he announced immediately prior to Ms. Stefanik’s nomination that two of his first-term foreign-policy experts, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, would not be joining his new team. Not coincidentally, both the latter officials had been ardent advocates of continuing American support for Ukraine.)

         A number of these appointees have been vocal critics of the agencies they’re now tapped to lead. Ms. Stefanik is a passionate defender of Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu, opposing pro-Palestinian sentiments prevailing in the United Nations. Congresswoman Gabbard is an outspoken advocate for Syria and Russia, as well as a harsh critic of U.S. Intelligence agencies. Mr. Hegseth loudly criticizes Pentagon leadership and resists female service in combat roles. Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy have both been loud critics of federal regulation of their private enterprises. Their new roles will place them in direct control of reducing that oversight. (Compounding this conflict-of-interest, Mr. Musk’s firms are also recipients of billions of dollars’ worth of federal-government contracts.) Mr. Kennedy is a nationally prominent anti-vaccine celebrity and adversary of Public Health and Food & Drug regulations.

         Introducing an added complication to the nomination process, the President-elect has demanded that the incoming Republican leadership of the Senate grant him across-the-board recess appointments, preemptively abdicating the Senate’s advise-and-consent authority over a president’s Cabinet choices. It’s not yet clear how this usurpation will play out, but it sends a dramatic early signal of Mr. Trump’s attitude towards the Constitution’s separation of powers and checks and balances.         

 A COUP RESUMED

         If we combine our examination of Mr. Trump’s agenda of proposed initiatives with his roster of proposed appointees, what can we anticipate about his overarching approach to his new presidency? When he’s itemizing his game-plan, what’s his game? The big picture is idiosyncratic and extremist. What he isn’t planning is as informative as what he is.

         The incoming President indicates no interest in becoming the public sector’s national CEO. He talks and acts not about managing the federal government but about damaging it. Fresh from an unexpectedly sweeping election victory, he’s still behaving like an angry outsider battering Establishment gates. His statements are deliberately combative. His spokespersons issue a steady stream of attention-grabbing, social-media zingers. He successfully commands the national spotlight. The President-elect sustains this attention with an accelerated stream of provocative Cabinet appointments. It doesn’t matter if they’re prudent or confirmable. When Matt Gaetz had to withdraw, his replacement was rolled out within six hours. The Economist recently observed that political campaigns require style, but then governance requires substance. Mr. Trump has not crossed this bridge. He may not intend to.

         The explicit mission of his nominees, led by the Musk/Ramaswamy “Government Efficiency” duo, is to severely downsize the government, shuttering Departments and Divisions, finding a way to fire thousands of senior civil servants. Their marching orders appear to be to discredit and disrupt, subverting and sabotaging from within. To borrow a descriptor from corporate law, this is a hostile takeover. To be clear, it is not anarchistic. Although Mr. Trump’s agenda is often described in terms of chaos, he’s not intent on dissolving authority; he wants to monopolize it.

         Likewise, his announced program is right-wing but not traditionally Republican.  Some portfolio components are comfortably conservative: like reducing corporate and oligarch income-tax rates, repealing environmental regulations and expanding domestic oil-drilling.  But there are no serious conservative experts on the nominated roster. And the Bushes would never have thrown up protectionist barriers or abandoned America’s overseas allies.   

         The checklist of executive actions is superficially populist: anti-immigrant, isolationist, re-assertively pro-Christian and anti-elite, nominally rewarding his base. (“A promise made is a promise kept.”) But the lethal combination of universal tariffs and expulsion of a massive labor force will raise, not lower, aggrieved constituents’ grocery prices and mortgage rates. Moreover, the President-elect’s posturing as an anti-elite champion is a theatrical role-play. He’s an Ivy-educated, super-rich, urban coastal-dweller. Which is not to deny he sensitively and successfully acknowledged his base’s populist anger. He’s just fanning it to serve his own objectives.

         Those objectives are unabashedly authoritarian. His focus is on power, not policies. He has calmly announced his shocking readiness to mobilize military forces for domestic law enforcement, directly violating a 150-year-old statutory ban. He’s stated he plans to declare National Emergencies to evade Congressional purse-strings, and recess appointments to bypass the Senate’s constitutional advise-and-consent authority. He has plans in train to further consolidate politicization of federal courts. He’s proposing to forego FBI vetting of his Cabinet nominees. He disdains and evades the rule of law, yet manipulates the law to extend and expand his rule.

         It’s important to emphasize that his authoritarianism is more personal than institutional. The main driver seems to be retribution. He’s asserting his own interests more than the Executive Branch’s. We can see this in his threat to prosecute political opponents and journalists who have crossed and offended him. He is rushing to shut down pending criminal proceedings against himself, and to pardon convicted January-6 insurrectionists. (If the Capitol assailants can be retroactively absolved of having committed crimes in following his incitement, then implicitly his orders were also not criminal.) To insulate himself from impulse-tempering counsellors, he’s replacing first-term professionals with sycophants.

         The many threads of unfinished first-term business confirm this is a coup resumed. Still an aggrieved outsider, he is resuscitating his anti-Establishment siege, suspended by his 2020 defeat. This time, his resources and prospects are immeasurably enhanced. Fresh from an electoral sweep, he can claim a mandate for change (even though the latest figures suggest he again did not win a majority of the popular vote.) He controls the party that will control both chambers of Congress. The opposing party is defeated and leaderless. A lame duck with a Supreme Court grant of near-limitless immunity, he may see the inaugural period as a honeymoon for consolidating control. The newly tamed Department of Justice will be poised to do his bidding. Withdrawing from multilateral overseas commitments will enable him to concentrate efforts within his national perimeter. We’ve seen this autocratic movie before. For the sequel, he’s no longer a novice.   

OPPORTUNITIES FOR OPPOSITION

         Without further belaboring second-term risks and threats, I’d like to shift attention to democratic defenses. What feasible strategies might be available to President-elect Trump’s opponents to resist, dilute or derail implementation of his authoritarian inclinations? Before looking at domestic preparations already underway, here’s a broader international canvass.

         A Democratic Defenses Toolkit

         Harvard Professors of Government Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (best known for How Democracies Die), conducted a year’s research to review and synthesize comparative international efforts to defend democracies against authoritarianism. They reported their main findings in the New York Times on November 3, 2024: There Are Ways to Keep Autocrats Out of Power. Why Don’t We Use Them? Published just before the 2024 American election, their synthesis includes strategies for deterring and defeating authoritarian candidates. But it also embraces strategies for resisting and deposing authoritarian incumbents. Although most of their case studies were foreign, they also highlighted examples of vigilant American defenses in the past. The article is dense and lengthy. Here’s my precis to give you the gist.

      The professors identified five successful defensive strategies:

1. Laissez-faire;
2. Militant or defensive democracy;
3. Partisan gatekeeping;
4. Containment;
5. Societal mobilization.

         In their context, laissez-faire means counting on the marketplace of ideas in free and fair elections to expose and defeat extremism. The authors label this threshold defense as the traditional American response. But they note that, in America, the Electoral College distorts majority rule. And worldwide candidates intent on subverting democracy don’t always lose. Numerous charismatic foreign extremists have won initial democratic elections “and then used their elected offices to undermine fair competition, making it nearly impossible to remove them from office democratically.” Recent examples range from Hungary to Venezuela. Laissez-faire is sometimes manipulated, inadequate and overwhelmed.

         Far more muscular is militant or defensive democracy. Introduced in West Germany in the 1950s, in agonized recollection of Hitler’s rise to power via the ballot box 20 years before, this Constitutional and statutory approach authorizes the State to restrict and even outlaw “anti-constitutional” speech, groups and parties. Invoked against neo-Nazi and Communist parties in the 1950s, today it’s being utilized against the far-right Alternative for Germany party.  The authors emphasize the risks of partisan or incumbent-party abuse invited by this censure or disqualification. But they point out that many governments from South Korea to Brazil have implemented some adaptation.

         A third defensive strategy is partisan gatekeeping. Political-party leaders intramurally block extremist candidates from nomination before they can stand (and possibly win) in general elections. In the United States in the 1920s, the Democratic Party used internal censure to block Henry Ford from winning their nomination for president. He was extremely popular but anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi.

         When authoritarians make it onto the ballot, pro-democracy forces may turn to a fourth strategy, containment. Politicians or parties across the partisan spectrum forge a temporary coalition to isolate and defeat authoritarians. In 1974, as President Nixon’s personal involvement emerged in the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Republican Senators joined forces with Democratic colleagues to conduct nationally televised hearings pressuring the President to resign. Other recent multiparty containment collaborations have been successful in Poland and France.

         The fifth universal strategy is societal mobilization. This can take the form of respected, influential leaders speaking out – from organized religion, business, labor and/or past governments – combined with civil-society protests. Successful examples included Catholic bishops’ leadership in Germany and persistent citizen rallies in Brazil.

         Unfortunately, from the authors’ perspective and discouragingly from mine, American efforts to mobilize these democracy defenses against Donald Trump’s extremism have thus far been short-lived or unsuccessful. Laissez-faire did defeat him in the 2020 election but he denied defeat, incited an insurrectionist mob and strung out criminal prosecutions until reelected. The United States Constitution’s 14^th Amendment does include a militant-democracy tool that bars former public officials who engaged in insurrection from holding subsequent public office. But the Supreme Court ruled this provision could not be invoked against him without targeted Congressional legislation. Partisan gatekeeping and/or bipartisan containment appeared to be momentarily intensifying immediately following the January-6 Capitol assault, when Republican leaders, including Vice President Pence and Senate Majority Leader McConnell unsparingly condemned then-President Trump’s personal complicity. But they promptly caved when his base didn’t waver. Thereafter, the Republican conferences in both congressional chambers have almost unanimously protected him. As for societal mobilization, it has never gained sufficient momentum in the United States to bring down Donald Trump. Unlike in other democracies, big business has backed him for his tax-cut support. And Catholic bishops and Evangelical Protestant leaders have accepted his moral failings in exchange for his championing of their long-term programs to curb women’s reproductive rights. In all these domains, partisanship has proven too potent for democratic defense.

         American Opposition Initiatives Already Underway

         With few remaining weeks in office, the Biden Administration is rushing to disburse appropriated funds for military support to Ukraine and renewable-energy grants to mitigate climate change. Vetted federal-judge confirmations are also being fast-tracked.

         Democratic governors led by J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Jared Polis of Colorado are organizing a working coalition to oppose what they anticipate will be new-administration pressures, especially attempts to cut off appropriated funds. The group hopes to become bipartisan. Governor Newsom in California has convened a special session of the state legislature to increase funding for the state’s legal defenses against new-Administration strictures on immigration, environmental conservation, climate-change mitigation, LBGTQ rights and reproductive care.

         Activist non-governmental organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and the Natural Resources Defense Fund are preparing to raise legal objections to presidential initiatives they consider unlawful or unconstitutional. Opponents’ litigation resisting President Trump’s first-term specious claims of election fraud was overwhelmingly successful.

         Republican majorities in the new Senate and House will both be thin, with many moderates in place. It is not inevitable that President-elect Trump will receive a Congressional rubber stamp for all or even most of his demands. Already, his withdrawal of Matt Gaetz’s nomination suggests Republican Senators’ behind-closed-doors resistance may be having a deterrent effect.   

         Political scientists remind us that 33 U.S. Senate seats will be up for election in the 2026 mid-terms. Flipping four seats would enable Democrats to block many presidential initiatives during President Trump’s final two years in office.  With a narrow 218/212 split, the House too will be in play.

         More grimly, international relations are currently in an unusually precarious state. An early outbreak of regional hostilities involving American allies could demand or encourage American participation, overcoming Mr. Trump’s preferred isolationism and preempting his domestic agenda.

         As an added possible instrument for opposition engagement, blog readers Carroll and Nancy Taylor draw our attention to the worldwide institution of the Shadow Cabinet. In dozens of parliamentary democracies including Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa and Thailand, the opposition party forms an informal body to shadow or mirror the actions and positions of government ministers. The rationale is to hold accountable the party in power, sector by sector, and to offer alternative policies. Especially given the U.S. Democratic Party’s current disarray and President-elect Trump’s strategy to appoint unqualified, Trojan- Horse Cabinet Secretaries, this template would seem timely and constructive. At the least, it could mobilize a panel of articulate spokespersons to counter the new President’s media dominance. Simultaneously, it could help keep future Democratic leaders nationally visible.

PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES FOR AGILE AGERS

         I’ve an uneasy feeling that our blessed generation may be ending our run in national and global conflict. And that, even if societies eventually emerge into more cooperative times, we won’t last long enough to join the dance.

         It’s prudent and practical to concentrate on what we can influence and control. For the present, there may be a few things we can do to make the best of this turbulent transition:

• Keep informed of political and economic developments, without sinking into daily anxiety or despair.
• Marshall liquid financial resources for quick recourse in any emergencies.
• Within the constraints of family relationships and obligations, consider emigration if America’s stability seriously deteriorates.
• Pay attention to any local danger or violence directed against seniors, their property or communities.
• Stay engaged in civil society, defending constitutional and legal institutions. Contribute, if affordable; demonstrate, if safe.
• Proactively reach out to fellow citizens with differing opinions than one’s own. Heal the breach.
• “Be the light,” as my wife Nancy affirms, borrowing an idea and spirit from former Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman. Be compassionate and considerate. Walk the walk.
• Invest daily in physical and mental exercise for yourself (and your partner, if applicable.) Don’t neglect spiritual nurturing, whatever form best suits you. Health and healing begin from within. First things first.

Thanks to Shutterstock.com for the use of their photos.

Let me hear from you: rbs@agileaging.net .