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| Trump’s pet promises |
| “A promise made, a promise kept.” Thus Trump at his victory rally yesterday. He was talking about tariffs, which could be uppermost in his mind next January. So what? US campaign promises come with an implied credibility discount. They’re part of the show but not necessarily part of a new administration’s plan. They can easily be forgotten, mired in lawsuits or mangled in Congress. That said, Trump 2.0 shows every sign of being more organised than the first time around, so it may be worth taking him at face value if only as a precaution. A selection of his obsessions: Tariffs all round The promise: a new American autarky bringing high-wage manufacturing jobs back to the rust belt and punishing US trading partners for building up surpluses at – Trump believes – US workers’ expense. The path: 10 to 20 per cent tariffs on all imports into the US, rising to 60-100 per cent (or more) on imports from China even at the risk of starting a full-blown trade war. Economists are agreed the real-world result for US consumers will be a return of inflation, including of domestically produced goods prices as freight, containerisation and manufacturers’ input costs all soar. Drill, baby, drill The promise: to scale up domestic oil and gas production with the goal of national energy self-sufficiency and increased export earnings. The path: Trump boasted falsely yesterday that the US has “more liquid gold than any country in the world”. In fact it has the world’s seventh largest reserves but he’s indicated he intends to boost extraction and sales anyway by scrapping environmental regulations and unfreezing liquified natural gas export permits. He has talked of halving the size of the Department of Energy’s renewables office and cutting EV subsidies provided for in the Inflation Reduction Act, and it’s assumed he’ll pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, making next week’s COP29 meeting in Baku the last of its kind the US attends for at least four years. Musk-style efficiency The promise: Trump said he would ask Elon Musk, one of his biggest financial backers and a man he calls a “super genius”, to eliminate government waste in a second term. Musk has referred to the effort as the “Department of Government Efficiency”, or Doge. The path: Musk is unable to run for US president as a foreign-born citizen, but he is more than welcome to follow in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright and serve in the cabinet. Although there are respected economists who are concerned about the size of US government debt, it will be hard for Musk to make $2 trillion of cuts (at least in a single fiscal year) without slashing spending in sacrosanct areas such as military and benefit programmes, or dramatically gutting other areas such as food inspections or air safety. The financial repercussions don’t seem to concern Musk, who has admitted his cuts would involve “some temporary hardship” and agreed that (coupled with mass deportations – see below) they could cause a “severe overreaction in the economy”. Health of a nation The promise: Robert F. Kennedy Jr will have a “big role” in health, women’s health and battling chronic childhood disease. RFK Jr has already said he would push to remove fluoride from drinking water (falsely claiming it was environmental waste), look at banning certain vaccines, and has hinted he would gut staff at the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) who don’t agree with him. The path: Although the specifics of his role haven’t been announced yet, the former environmental lawyer and nephew of President Kennedy claimed Trump will give him control over a broad range of public health agencies. Following through on his pledges would be difficult for Kennedy, even with control of agencies like the FDA. Even so, handing one of the country’s most prominent proponents of health misinformation a platform could be – with no exaggeration – fatal. Send them back The promise: On the campaign trail this summer, Trump’s rallies were filled with cheers of “send them back” as he vowed to restore many of his controversial immigration policies and launch the “largest deportation operation in American history”. The path: Former Trump officials say the president-elect will mobilise agencies across the US government to deport migrants, working with Republican-led states and threatening to withdraw federal funding from those that resist. JD Vance estimated the new administration could remove a million people per year. The US deported 1.5 million people during Trump’s first four-year term: increasing that number would require many more officers, detention beds and immigration judges. One immigrant advocacy group put the cost of deporting 13 million illegal immigrants at $968 billion over a decade. Retribution The promise: In the years since he left office, describing how he intends to punish his many adversaries has become something of a rhetorical crutch for Trump. The path: These enemies operate in a wide range of public and civic spheres including politics (the Bidens, the Obamas, the Clintons, Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney); government and the military (election boards, poll workers, the FBI, former joint chiefs chairman Mark Milley); law (Democratic district attorneys, judges, lawyers); media (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, Politico); tech (Google, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg); and protest movements. Instruments of retribution he has proposed include deployment of the national guard, televised military tribunals and the appointment of special prosecutors. It’s unclear which, if any, are feasible (or legal), but aides seek to justify them by accusing the Biden administration of “weaponising” the US justice department against Trump. What’s more… That accusation is false; the DoJ was trying to ensure the ex-president was not above the law. But one promise Trump seems to have made to himself – to stay out of jail – he will be able to keep for at least four years. |
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Who Watches the Watchers? 
If the Democrats or their Woke counterparts in any part of the world had such a good looking family, the mainstream media would fill acres of print with their photos. They’d be on the covers of magazines, they’d be permanent fixtures on chat shows, Hollywood would be making movies about them extolling their glamour.
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