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Dear John,

The US election is just four days away. Here’s what you need to know before polling day on Tuesday.

This Time, There’s a Plan: How Trump 2.0 Would Be Different

By this time next week, we should know who the next US President will be. We’ll know if American democracy is going to be thrown into peril, and if the ultra-nationalists agitators around the world, from Nigel Farage to Viktor Orbán to Marine Le Pen, will be empowered or restrained. With the polls still so close, it’s important to recognise that a second Trump term will be nothing like the first.

For many in the United States, the last Trump presidency was characterised by one thing above all else: political chaos. Like the UK’s Boris Johnson years, US politics under Trump 1.0 was an absolute 24/7 horror show. Summits with dictators, internal staff feuds, federal investigations, ludicrous U-turns and retracted statements.

It was the mark of a hands-off (and frankly not very intelligent) President surrounded by competing vested interests, looking to use Trump as a vehicle for their own individual benefit. It also showed Trump’s inability to manipulate the levers of power, impeded in his quest for power by legal mechanisms that he and his staff were simply unable to understand or counter.

But this time, there’s a plan. Those in Trump’s inner circle have now unified around a concrete and deeply fascistic agenda – one that they’re already prepared to implement.

Reporters at ProPublica – an impressive investigative journalism non-profit based in the States – have unveiled ([link removed]) several speeches made by former Trump budget director Russell Vought to his pro-Trump think-tank. Vought uses apocalyptic language, evoking 1776 to call for an all out assault on democracy and the civil service. In his speeches, Vought describes:
* Dismantling entire federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency;
* Crafting legal justifications that would stop lawyers from putting the brakes on Trump’s executive actions;
* Using the US military to crush popular dissent (likely referring to protests against Trump’s other authoritarian plans);
* Inflicting “trauma” on non-partisan bureaucrats to make their jobs harder, ultimately to replace them with Trump loyalists.

And of course, Vought is also a central figure behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. ProPublica describes a “shadow government in waiting”, a wholesale effort to prepare loyal staff and policy for Trump 2.0. Vought claims to have already drafted “detailed agency plans” and pre-written executive orders. He’s laid out plans to use an insurrection law from 1807 ([link removed]) to justify use of the military against civilian protests. Vought has apparently designed a “shadow legal council” designed to help Trump crush internal opposition within his government.

This man could, very possibly, be Trump 2.0’s Chief of Staff ([link removed]) in a few months’ time. As I’ve written here before, the writing is pretty much on the wall here. Unlike the first Trump presidency, we’re going to see rapid movement to fundamentally reshape the entire federal government. History teaches us that this is the critical point of no return, a pivotal moment before freedom is lost for decades.

Here in the UK, there’s little we can do but bite our nails and watch what happens next week. But we should also remain aware of the fact that if it can happen there, it can happen here as well. No matter what goes down next Tuesday, we’ll have our work cut out for us.

That’s it for this week.

All the best,

Matt Gallagher

Communications Officer

Open Britain
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