When Trump Wins

Writing on the morning of November 5, 2024, am I tempting fate with the title of this essay? Maybe. But to quote the old golf course quip, when contemplating whether to go for the green rather than lay up, “We didn’t come here to knit.”

I find little to disagree with among my fellow feature writers. Dan McCarthy’s opening essay does a nice job summarizing what a 2025 Trump agenda should look like, taking the main pillars of Trumpism (immigration, trade, and foreign policy) as his jumping-off point, as well as offering some cogent thoughts on pro-life strategy moving forward and the need to return to self-governance. The rest of the participants offer up a robust MAGA agenda.

I will close this TAM Feature by pulling some of these threads together and commenting more generally on what should be the main themes for a Trump presidency in 2025: Voting & Elections; Taming the Bureaucracy; Reckoning with the COVID Constitutional Catastrophe; Immigration & Citizenship; Education Reform—Top Down, Bottom Up; and Combatting Left-Authoritarianism. In the interest of space, I have left foreign policy out, though I don’t mean to discount its importance. My late, great colleague Angelo Codevilla has written the definitive blueprint for American foreign policy, so I’ll cop out by referring everyone to America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams, a book which grew out of a long memo commissioned by the first Trump administration’s DOD Office of Net Assessment to address the question of what an America First foreign policy ought to look like. Many of Angelo’s students, literal and spiritual, will soon (we hope) serve in a second Trump administration. Godspeed.

Voting & Elections

The Kamala Harris campaign issued some talking points this week on what to expect in the coming weeks. Yes, you read that right—they are preparing voters for the possibility of waiting through the weekend for the outcome of this election. Senior campaign officials wanted to reassure their fellow citizens that these delays are “not a sign of fraud, it’s just the way it works.” Without rendering any pre-judgment on the fraud question, it is not illegitimate to ask why America is the only advanced industrial democracy in the world that conducts elections this way.

The polling is clear: a substantial number of Americans, many tens of millions, lost faith in the transparency and fairness of American elections after the 2020 COVID election. This is now a brute fact of public opinion in America. The Harris campaign’s pre-seeding of expectations ahead of the 2024 election signals that this lack of confidence by possibly a plurality of the voting public will be durable. Any widely-held and persistent judgment by the public about the illegitimacy of our national elections must be addressed by responsible politicians at the state and federal level, regardless of one’s opinion about the rectitude of their judgment. Furthermore, this persistent and widespread strain of public sentiment about national elections being rigged or tampered with, which has shown up on both sides of the political aisle going back to at least 2020, delegitimizes presidential authority right out of the gate, with dangerous repercussions at home and abroad.

A commanding win by Trump this cycle would offer him a golden opportunity: to call for a full audit of 2020 and 2024 with the goal of cleaning up and relegitimizing our election processes and infrastructure. A newly-elected President Trump should set up a bipartisan commission to reprise and update the 2005 Carter-Baker Report, “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections.” Among other things, that report warned what most Western European countries already know, preach, and practice: widespread mail-in voting offers many more opportunities for fraud. The goal should be a return to single-day voting on paper (or the rough, technologically-enhanced equivalent), with results announced and disseminated on the same night. A couple of concessions to the objections of the Left could be thrown in for good measure: a national election-day holiday and a national subsidy program so that anyone, anywhere can get a government-issued I.D. quickly and for free.

All Americans of good faith should want to make our elections the gold standard of the free world again.

Taming the Bureaucracy

After more than a century of intellectual and political work by the Left, we find ourselves saddled with a large, powerful, entrenched, and self-interested group of elites ruling outside or beyond the control of the American people. I refer, of course, to our large federal administrative state (each state has its own version, but that’s an argument for another day). As my colleague Charles Kesler put it in the introduction to his recent book, since the 1960s’ radicalization of the Left, what had started as a “post-constitutional” movement in the early years of Progressivism and New Deal liberalism has now morphed into an “anti-constitutional” intellectual and political movement.

One data point for those who think I exaggerate about the anti-constitutional project of the Left: vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who would likely take on education as a big part of his portfolio in a Harris administration, appointed Brian Lozenski to craft an ethnic studies curriculum in Minnesota. Mr. Lozenski is very frank about his pedagogical project—and, by extension, his educational policy project in Minnesota’s ethnic studies departments. “It’s funny that [critics] don’t understand critical race theory, but they actually tell some truth when they’re like, ‘Yeah, it is anti-state.’ You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. It is a[n] anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.”

Not all our federal bureaucracy is staffed by equally radical anti-constitutionalists. Many civil servants, even partisan Democrats, I’m sure conduct themselves in good faith in their day-to-day administrative duties. The problem is that whatever their motivations, they issue the bulk of the regulations affecting the lives and livelihoods of Americans rather than Congress—and they are insulated from presidential control to boot. This may be a technocratic liberal’s idea of sound public policy creation, but it is profoundly undemocratic and anti-republican.

The second Trump administration should finish what they started too late in the first administration: de-commissioning a large portion of the administrative state and re-constitutionalizing the rest. In answering the charge that the modern federal establishment absolutely must have expert rule insulated from popular control, I defer to my colleague Theo Wold, writing in a recent edited volume commissioned by our Center for the American Way of Life:

Rule by experts is foreign to our constitutional separation of powers; it is incompatible with democratic accountability and legitimacy; and it has proved itself a failure in our own liftetimes. The political branches and the states must be returned to their lawmaking power; and conservatives must relearn to express confidence in that power. Conservatives must accept that some things simply will not be done by a smaller administrative state, and that is the point. Policies that can be achieved only through tyranny are too costly.

Finally, the second Trump administration should continue the regulatory slash-and-burn process its predecessor started in 2017. It doesn’t get at the root of the constitutional problem of our modern administrative state, but by attacking the efficient causes of bureaucratic abuse, a second Trump administration could make America wealthier, happier, and more innovative. Elon Musk is eager to take on this problem through a proposed Department of Government Efficiency. By boosting government revenue, such an effort could at least start to tackle the problem of our national debt. A complete conquest of our profligacy must, for reasons of public appetite for now, remain over the horizon. But preparation should be made by the executive and legislative branches to take full advantage of the inevitable coming crisis and a turn in public opinion. A good place to start would be the evergreen recommendations made by Christopher DeMuth in his excellent 2019 CRB essay, “Trumpism, Nationalism, and Conservatism.”

Reckoning with the COVID Constitutional Catastrophe

The Left (and the establishment Right) would prefer to move on from the COVID years, but a second Trump administration, perhaps with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. riding herd on the process, needs to document and evaluate the numerous ways state and federal officials violated citizens’ rights, ran roughshod over the separation of powers, and did general violence to constitutional republicanism during the recent pandemic. Jeff Anderson, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, has thoroughly documented America’s constitutional failures at all levels in response to COVID-19. An official accounting of this descent into tyranny in response to a respiratory virus pandemic is necessary if we are to forestall a much worse descent when a much more deadly pandemic comes, which experts across the political spectrum fear is a matter of “when” rather than “if.”

Immigration & Citizenship

If Republicans hope to win national elections going forward, they must address the unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants over the last four years. This has been addressed well by others in this Feature. I would merely add that Republicans have a rare opportunity to offer an updated plan of comprehensive immigration reform that is nearly the mirror image of the ones on offer in recent years from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Instead of amnesty, a path to citizenship, and a regularized and expanded immigration regime, it should prize deportation, a robust system of employer sanctions for illegal workers, and a 10-year “net-zero” policy of immigrant importation.

We now have a record number of foreign-born nationals on U.S. soil, and one of the two major parties is hostile to the very idea of assimilation. This is a recipe for disaster and regime dissolution. The idea that the rapid and sustained importation of culturally heterogenous immigrants will have no effect on the character of a people and a regime is contradicted by the accumulated wisdom of many thousands of years of Western civilization. This is an existential policy issue that will dominate European and United States domestic policy for the coming decades. It’s time for a radical course correction.

Education Reform—Top Down, Bottom Up

If the surge of illegal aliens in recent years is a down payment on the future collapse of civic friendship, cohesion, and regime stability brought on by foreigners, then the increasingly anti-American presuppositions of our educational establishment over the last 70 years is a down payment on those same dissolving forces from within. Our graduate schools of education are madrassas of anti-Americanism, feeding teachers into the K-12 system across the 50 states that are primed to teach their students that America’s founding and much of its political development was evil, racist, sexist, imperialist, and transphobic. We can’t assimilate our new citizens like we used to—and we are effectively de-assimilating the children of our current citizens.

To begin to solve the problem of the anti-American ideological projects of the Left in education, a second Trump administration should ally with red state governors and legislatures, at least informally. The goal would be to remove coercive federal mandates in educational policy coming from the top at the Department of Education, while encouraging and staying out of the way of efforts at the state level to reform curriculum at public K-12 schools and universities. The regional cartel of accrediting organizations at all levels of education, but especially colleges and universities, should be broken up. Florida and some of its neighboring states are working on this problem by teaming up to create new accrediting institutions for the Southeast. A second Trump administration should use whatever levers it has from the federal level to accelerate decentralization and accreditation.

A second Trump administration, working with Congress, should also cut off federal funding to private colleges and universities above a certain endowment threshold, especially in non-STEM fields. Many of the elite private institutions of higher education have endowments that would make a robber baron blush and benefit from a federal income tax exemption originally meant to encourage “public benefit.” Many of our libertarian and conservative friends are loath to meddle with private institutions because they fear retaliation-in-kind when the next Democratic administration and Congress take power. We must acknowledge the political reality that the vanguard of the Democratic Party would do this in a heartbeat if they could, regardless of precedent. The hesitation by our friends also overlooks the extent to which the modern higher education establishment is joined at the hip with the modern administrative state. As my colleague John Marini has argued over the years, much of the university system, private and public, is devoted to the “applied science of the administrative state.” Reforming education is vital. All constitutional means must be on the table.

Combatting Left-Authoritarianism

The Left in America today has grown alarmingly comfortable with tactics that the Left of the 1960s would have denounced as fascist and authoritarian. Above all, the Left is determined to censor free speech in collusion with large corporations and weaponize the legal system against their political opponents. There are legislative and regulatory remedies for some of this abuse at the federal and state level. But as John Yoo pointed out recently, there is likely no alternative to raising the cost of such behavior by fighting back in like (if more constitutionally circumspect) fashion. Tit-for-tat is likely to give the other side pause in the future, especially if a reinvigorated Republican Party post-Trump can continue to add to its national political constituency and force the Left to re-calibrate its national political-coalitional strategy.

While covering a lot of ground, this does not exhaust the authoritarian tactics of today’s Left. One underappreciated but alarming trend on the Left, which we see feeling its power so far more in Western Europe than in America, is the rise of hate speech laws. My colleague Arthur Milikh has spoken well about this. With the rise of anti-Semitism on campus, the Right has been tempted to flirt with hate speech codes. It should resist. Nothing less than the freedom of the mind is at stake. Hate speech laws are the camel’s nose under the tent of a stifling, repressive, anti-civilizational impulse, especially with the rapid progress of modern digital surveillance and artificial intelligence. As Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files has revealed, the FBI and certain sectors of the Intelligence Community are now engaged in aggressive outreach to tech companies to suppress speech and manipulate the climate of opinion in the digital public square. This is un-American. If the government is managing a growing sector of the free exchange of ideas and public deliberation, it is managing democracy. A free people should be righteously indignant at such government activity. 

A Project of Republican Restoration

The agenda laid out in broad strokes here would result in a government much closer to the constitutionalism of the American Founding than we’ve seen in America in a century. The first Trump administration, in fits and starts, took up some of these issues. With better personnel and taking the lessons learned from 2017 to 2020, a second Trump administration could make much more progress, making the country more prosperous and effecting a restoration of civic health. Taken cumulatively, the agenda laid out above is probably the work of at least two subsequent administrations, if not the work of a generation. The parts will have to be ranked, modified, and prioritized as the circumstances dictate. There is, no doubt, much more to be done than I have listed here. We should be flexible as to means while maintaining our end: the restoration, so far as possible, of constitutional self-government, a reinvigoration of federalism, the politics of freedom, and the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity.

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