ALan Zendell, February 5, 2025

Sixteen days after his inauguration, Donald Trump has given us a roadmap for how he will govern. Nothing about it is surprising. Everything Trump has done was telegraphed well in advance. His friends even published a thousand-page book that described in detail.

If Trump gets his way, his administration will come to be known as The Great Purge. Before his first day in office had passed he had begun purging immigrants from our population. Trump himself and his surrogates who wrote Project 2025 made it clear that they believe America should be a nation of white Christians in which women are dominated and controlled by men. In their view, immigrants, especially brown, black, and yellow ones, have no place in America unless they happen to possess necessary skills we’re short of. No matter if, like Dreamers, they’ve been here for years, going to school, working, paying taxes, and raising families.

Next came Trump’s lust for revenge, which has him targeting 5,000 FBI agents and DOJ personnel who worked on the federal indictments concerning his mishandling classified documents and the January 6^th insurrection. He has also floated the idea of criminal charges against members of Congress who voted to impeach him. And his ideological quest to purge America of horrors like gender and racial equality, diversity, and women’s right to control their own bodies is an attempt to re-write the Constitution by brute force.

Perhaps even more significant is his vision of a government run by oligarchs. To accomplish that, he will have to widen even further the huge income gap that exists between classes in America. There is no upper limit to the wealth he believes his billionaire friends should control, which means that his two priorities this year will be extending and expanding the 2017 tax cuts and greatly reducing federal spending by taking the axe to federal agencies he doesn’t approve of.

His first three targeted agencies were those in charge of foreign aid, education, and protecting the environment, all of which exist because of laws passed by Congress. The president who campaigned on jobs and prosperity for his middle and working-class base, had no problem with eliminating the jobs and careers of tens of thousands of federal workers and a comparable number of private sector employees who support those agencies. Could his approach be any more cynical?

If he’s allowed to get away with actions that are likely illegal and unconstitutional, Trump will accomplish, with a few strokes of his pen, what five decades of right-wing extremists have been unable to. He will divert trillions of dollars into further tax cuts that will fill the pockets of the Elon Musks of the world, while isolating us from both our allies and our adversaries and handing China a free pass to expand its sphere of influence. If children in some states are poorly educated or greenhouse gases continue to increasingly upset the balance of life on our planet, that won’t be a problem because the billionaires will be safe and secure in their insulated fortresses.

And now, we’ve gone from the merely cynical to the absurd. Trump wants to expel two million Palestinians from Gaza so he can build a new Riviera in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was all smiles sitting beside Trump at the White House when the president floated the idea. Netanyahu’s own extremist supporters have advocated throwing Palestinians out of Gaza so Israel could take it over for years.

Trump’s plan to deport two million Palestinians and send them to Egypt and Jordan is being bashed by both our European allies and leaders in the Middle East. It would be equivalent to evacuating Cincinnati and relocating all of its residents across the Ohio River in Kentucky so Trump can build a theme park. But like much of what Trump has done in his first sixteen days, it’s not possible to tell what he’s serious about and what is just chaff thrown up to confuse his opponents’ defenses.

The game plan is clear: go after everything in sight that might weaken Democrats or the constituencies he’s attacking. Whether his actions are legal or constitutional is entirely beside the point. The first test was to see who was willing to stand up and fight, and so far twenty-one states have sued to reverse some of Trump’s Executive Orders, and two federal judges have issued injunctions to prevent Trump from usurping the functions of Congress. This was all anticipated by the far right. The drill is to move upward through the court system until Trump’s pet Supreme Court gets to weigh in.

This entire year is going to be one protracted legal battle after another, with the fate of our Constitution and our nation hanging in the balance. Our founders were pretty smart, but they never anticipated a Congress that crawled sheepishly into Trump’s pocket and a Supreme Court put in place solely to do his bidding.

1,445 days to go.