FAR-RIGHT former president Donald Trump has been rocketing through the Republican presidential primaries, leaving little doubt as to who will make it as the party’s nominee in this year’s presidential elections.
 
Following the Iowa caucus, which Trump won with 51 per cent per cent of votes, two of the pool of most relevant and influential Trump challengers dropped out of the race.
 
Vivek Ramaswamy, a millionaire who ran a media-savvy socially conservative campaign, dropped out of the race following embarrassing results in Iowa. Household name and Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out shortly afterwards, eliminating Trump’s largest threat and effectively sealing Trump’s victory in the primary.
 
Nikki Haley, who was the US ambassador to the UN under Trump’s presidency and now represents the Republican Establishment against Trump’s more unconventional politics, still hangs on by a thread following a disappointing performance in the New Hampshire primary on January 24.

While Haley has vowed to stay in the race, it is difficult to see a path forward for the candidate, as New Hampshire was predicted to be one of Haley’s strongest states.
 
Now that Trump is the most likely nominee for the Republican Party, working people in the US are threatened with a do-over of one of the most disastrous administrations for their class.

With his 2017 “tax reform” law, Trump effectively oversaw the transfer of $2 trillion from working people to the rich. Under Trump’s leadership, the US adopted one of the deadliest policies regarding the Covid crisis.

There is evidence that Trump knowingly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic for millions of people in the US, a factor which contributed to the US becoming the epicentre of the pandemic. Over a million people in the country have died of Covid thus far and tens of millions lost their livelihoods.

Trump seeks retribution against political rivals
 
What is Trump’s platform for his latest campaign? At the Conservative Political Action Campaign conference in March 2023, Trump announced the campaign theme of “retribution.” He stated, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”
 
Trump plans to oversee a vast expansion of presidential and executive authority, including implementing measures to ensure that the ranks of federal government employees are filled with Trump loyalists.

This includes creating a new civil service test for incoming federal employees, stripping employees of civil service protections, thus making it easier to fire federal workers, and cracking down on media leaks and alleged spying within the federal government.

Trump has called for bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission under direct control of the presidency. He also wants to bring back the practice of “impounding” congressionally appropriated funds going towards programmes he may not like, a practice which was banned under the Nixon administration.
 
This plan for a vast expansion of presidential power comes under the influence of “Project 2025,” a plan developed by the powerful and wealthy Heritage Foundation, which has influenced Republican Party policy since the Reagan administration. The plan relates directly to weeding out federal civil service employees characterised by conservatives as part of the “deep state.”
 
“We will demolish the deep state,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan back in June. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
 
Trump has also drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act upon his first day in office, to allow him to deploy the military against protest demonstrations. In the summer of 2020, during Trump’s last year in office, uprisings ignited following the police murder of George Floyd, and some Trump supporters urged the president to use the Insurrection Act to put down the protesters.

Trump has expressed regret about not deploying more military force against demonstrators. The Act is almost as old as the US itself, having been enacted in 1807, and gives the president broad powers to deploy military force against the people of the country.
 
Trump has already threatened to use the military to quell crime in Democratic Party-run cities (most of the largest cities in the US). Trump will also invoke the Insurrection Act to apprehend migrants at the border, according to former Trump aide and white nationalist sympathiser Stephen Miller.

The far-right agenda on immigration
 
For the former president who first ran on an extreme anti-immigrant platform, infamously calling Mexican migrants “rapists” during his 2015 campaign announcement, cracking down on immigration is at the forefront of his plans for the future of the country.
 
As Trump told a crowd in Iowa on the campaign trail back in September, “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in US history.” Trump was referring to the 34th president’s Operation Wetback, which involved using military-style tactics to remove Mexican migrants from the country.
 
The picture painted by the Trump campaign is dystopian. Trump’s goal is to deport millions of people per year. To achieve this goal, the former president plans to promote a form of deportation that does not require due process hearings — which would necessitate the usage of the Insurrection Acts and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Migrants would be placed in massive camps as they await deportation flights.
 
Trump has also promised to reinstate a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority nations and to reimpose certain Covid era restrictions on asylum claims by asserting that migrants may carry infectious diseases such as the flu, tuberculosis, and scabies.
 
These policies are a surface-level overview of Trump’s plans for the country, a plan that is co-ordinated and bankrolled by some of the wealthiest conservatives in the US. With Biden’s approval plummeting due to the Democrat’s open support for genocide in Gaza, a Trump victory is a real possibility.

This article appeared on Peoplesdispatch.org.