To Open The Sky

Trump won fair and square

Suddenly the US election system is free of fraud!

You Put the Felon in the Oval Office, Made Him President...

8 November 2024
(Updated 28 December 2024)

Lime in the Coconut (Harry Nilsson, 1972)

The 2024 presidential election was called early on the morning of 6 November. Donald Trump — twice-impeached president, convicted felon, and credibly accused of conspiracy to overthrow his loss in the 2020 election — won the Electoral College 312-226 and the popular vote by 77,302,580 to 75,017,613.1 Republicans took back the lead in the Senate (53-47) and in the House (219-212).2

This means that Trump will have a fairly free hand in setting policies. Here's what can be known about the penalties he faces, the policies he will seek to enact, and the people he will select to implement them.

Criminal Charges

Trump has been convicted on 34 felony counts of campaign law violations for hiding his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. He is due for sentencing on that in late November. That did happen, but it was delayed until 10 January 2025. Judge Merchan ended the case with Unconditional Discharge — meaning the conviction stands but no penalty will be imposed. (True to form, Trump called it a witch hunt and vowed to appeal.)3

His other federal charges — for inciting the insurrection and for stealing classified documents — are likely to vanish as he fires Jack Smith, the Special Counsel who has been prosecuting those cases. He cannot make the charges he faces in Georgia go away, but progress in that case has stalled and he may be able to keep it stalled.

In addition, he probably will carry out his plan to pardon all the people convicted for the January 6 insurrection: hundreds of people including members of the Oath Keepers and The Proud Boys. Once pardoned, they will not retire.

Trump's Announced Policies

Trump promised to deport 11 million "illegal aliens." That would require a tripling of the number of ICE agents and would cost roughly $1 trillion. It would also severely disrupt the US economy, since most of those undocumented immigrants work jobs few Americans will take — being paid, in many cases, at below minimum wage.

Trump has promised to increase the use of "liquid gold" — meaning oil and natural gas, already being produced at record levels — while slashing regulations on the industry and reducing incentives for renewable energy. This will worsen climate change, but Trump still thinks that's a hoax.

Trump has promised to gut regulations generally. Believe him on this; he did it during his first term when he rolled back 100 environmental regulations, including the limits on mercury and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants. In addition, the Federalist Society's "Mandate for Leadership" calls for weakening the EPA.

Trump promised to downsize NOAA and privatize the National Weather Service. He proposed the latter during his first term. It would mean citizens pay for weather forecasts, including tornado warnings. See The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.

Trump plans to abolish the Department of Education. During his first term, he made Betsy DeVos Secretary of Education. She is on a quest to replace public education with private Christian schools. Dismantling the Department of Education fits with Project 2025 plans to make federal education grants to states "no strings attached" and ramp up parental rights as Florida and other states have already done.

Trump promised to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a rabid anti-vaxxer, authority over health policy. RFK Jr has said he opposes mandates for all vaccines and would remove water fluoridation. However, there is some good news here. It's likely RFK Jr will not head HHS, but will have an advisory role. Also, Trump says he will not try to repeal the ACA as he did before, and has tried to walk back his earlier promise for a national 16-week abortion ban. This and other changes, such as revamping the CDC and NIH, are very much in flux.

As they did before, Trump's policies on taxes tilt toward large corporations and wealthy Americans. He would lower the corporate tax rate from 21% (where it is now) to 15%. He has proposed exempting earned tips, Social Security wages and overtime wages from income taxes. But, again, the details of this remain vague.

Trump sticks to his plans to impose an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20% on all imported goods, and to set tariffs at 60% for imports from China. Despite what he claims, these tariffs will not be paid by the exporting nations, but instead will raise the prices of goods for US consumers and almost certainly increase the inflation rate.

Contrary to President Biden, Trump and JD Vance are decidedly against labor unions and would make it harder for workers to unionize. On 23 October 2023 Trump said in a statement to United Auto Workers, "I'm telling you, you shouldn't pay those dues."

Trump pledges to expand the military and protect Pentagon budgets. Reviving the Reagan-era slogan "peace through strength," he wants to look again at a ballistic missile shield. Without giving details, he insists he can quickly end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Strongly isolationist, he leaves unclear his plans for the NATO alliance.

As he did before, Trump will take every opportunity to place conservative judges on the federal bench. In the Supreme Court, there's a good chance he will have two opportunities when Justices Thomas and Alito retire.

Much more nebulous — but no less ominous for his having promised magnanimity during the last week of his campaign — is how far Trump will push his vow to seek "retribution" on perceived enemies (a long list) and to use the military to crack down on "the enemy from within," by which he means Democrats. He calls them "the radical left lunatics" and has singled out Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, among others. However, if he does pursue this agenda, he will have a freer hand thanks to the Supreme Court grant of immunity for official acts and to a cooperative Congress.

People

So far, Trump has only selected a Chief of Staff: Susie Wiles, a stalwart staffer of Republican politicans. She is known for working adroitly behind the scenes. Trump's choice of her (or, it may be, his being forced to choose her in order to keep other support) speaks to a more professional effort this time around. Given that, it's harder to guess who else he will pick. But some names from his first term are likely to be on the list: names including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, John Paulson (a major donor), Richard Grenell, John Ratcliffe, Mike Lee, and Kash Patel. Stay tuned.4

A Word about the Campaign

The Democrats

Kamala Harris ran a good campaign, given the time constraint she was under. I voted for her and I don't regret it. She is a former prosecutor and attorney general, so I knew she would uphold the rule of law; and having watched her serve in the Senate, I knew she could cut through the nonsense Republicans are so prone to spout.

That said, I wish she would have done more to distance herself from the Biden administration's position on Israel. Another candidate could have been chosen and, if President Biden had dropped out earlier, could have been vetted through the primary process.

One more thing: For some time, going back to Bill Clinton's "triangulation," Democrats have abandoned their traditional support for working people and labor unions. This has cost them heavily, never more so than in this election. If you want support for that conclusion, check out Robert Kuttner's 2010 book A Presidency in Peril or Thomas Frank's 2016 book Listen, Liberal. Bernie Sanders gets it; he has been telling the Democrats to change course since 2016, and getting slapped down by them for his trouble. But he just won a resounding victory: validation in Vermont.

The Republicans

Just as he did in 2015-2016, Trump ran a terrible campaign. In my view, it was even more terrible than his first — and that's saying something. No need to go into detail; we all watched it. The salient points are that 1) Trump continued to lie, even more nonsensically than ever; 2) that his mental acuity had clearly declined; and 3) that he picked a running mate who, though younger and smarter, was as dedicated to bad policies as he was. (Look up Curtis Yarvin.) So badly did he perform on the campaign trail that he seemed to want to lose. And that may have been the case, for efforts to prepare legal challenges to a Democratic victory ramped up in red states.

The Voters

From 2016 through 2024, Trump enjoyed steadily increasing tallies in the popular vote: 65 million in 2016, 74 million in 2020, and 77 million in 2024. Until this year, his Democratic opponent always got more than he did. Notably, he won more support this year among Blacks and Latinos, two groups that he has treated badly in word and deed. Meanwhile, 18 million Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 sat this election out. It truly boggles my mind. Why did it happen? Why would so many American citizens choose an inveterate liar, convicted felon and con man whose policies consistently favored the wealthy over an honest, decent woman whose policices would help the middle class? I await the conclusions of the Democratic Party elites.

Many say we shouldn't blame the voters; that they're too divided by partisan rancor, that they're stuck in misinformation bubbles; that they struggle to pay the bills. I'll grant all of that, but still won't excuse them for choosing the candidate who by his own track record has no desire to help them, despite what he promises.

The Media

The news media have long covered political campaigns as if they were football games, following the progress of each team toward its goal and carefully tracking the score: polling percentages. They cover issues too, but typically not in much depth. Their coverage was particularly lax in 2016, when they reported every twist and turn in the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton's emails but mostly ignored the FBI probe of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia — except to report Trump calling it a "witch hunt". Major cable news media once aired an empty podium where Trump was scheduled to appear for some 20 minutes while a speech Hillary Clinton was making at that very moment was ignored. All told, Trump got $2 billion worth of free coverage.5

The situation in 2024 was somewhat better, but still marked by "football-game" coverage and "bothsidesism" as if this was a contest between two normal presidential candidates. It was not.

The Long Game

Republicans since Reagan have been playing a long game whose objective is permanent control of the reins of government. Many books have documented aspects of this. A few are Jane Mayer's Dark Money, Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, David From's Trumpocracy and Nick Bryant's When America Stopped Being Great. A key facet of this long game is degrading the quality of American education (See: Betsy DeVos). I'll have more to say on that later. Note that Trump loves the poorly educated.

The Bottom Line

And now that the Felon has taken his oath of office, for what little that's worth…

How is he doing? Here are some of the things he has accomplished.