Donald Trump is a con artist and a fraud. These are among the milder barbs thrown at the man who will shortly occupy The White House for the second time on 20 January 2025, not just by his opponents but by senior Republican colleagues like Marco Rubio, his newly appointed secretary of state, and Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s candidate in the 2012 presidential election.
Former Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, once described Trump as a “despicable human being” and his choice to lead the US Health Department, Robert F Kennedy Jr claimed in August this year that Trump was “barely human” and a “sociopath”.
This is not even to mention his apparent narcissism, his inclination for creating and spreading fake news, and his complete indifference to the truth.
I could go on. Trump has plenty of character flaws and personality disorders but not enough apparently to deter the average conservative voter. He’s persuaded 75 million Americans that convictions for business fraud and sexual assault together with indictments for election interference and stealing classified documents, were examples of the entire US establishment conspiring to unfairly persecute him. Amazing, eh?
The art of the con
Many of Trump’s followers still believe the 2020 election was stolen despite more than 60 legal challenges in different states failing to reveal the slightest evidence of outcome-determining fraud.
This takes some doing, but Trump has managed it because he is a con man par excellence. His ability to deceive is unequalled. To use one of his favourite phrases, nobody has ever seen anything like it before. He has convinced half the voters in the US not only that he is innocent of all charges, but, against all the evidence, he’s also a genius about to usher in a new ‘golden age’ for America.
Is it remotely conceivable that a 78-year-old in obvious mental and physical decline, and a “f*****g moron” (according to his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson), is going to successfully rebuild the USA in the way he has promised?
The next four years are far more likely to involve the kind of chaos, corruption and constitutional crises that we saw in the first term, only worse.
Project 2025
Reading Project 2025, the 922 page ‘blueprint’ for government published last year by The Heritage Foundation, an extreme conservative American think tank backing Trump, you can’t help but be struck by the scale of the task set out. The whole thing reads like a recipe for institutional nihilism followed by a return to a sort of monarchy.
The blueprint calls for the president to maximise his personal power vested under Article 2 of the Constitution, yet laughably in 2017, as part of a HBO documentary titled The Words That Built America, the recently elected Trump couldn’t even read it through without repeated stumbles as revealed in the book, A Very Stable Genius.
Although Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 and his campaign team insist his manifesto is clearly set out in Agenda47 there appears to be little difference between the two.
Russell Vought, Project 2025’s co-author, has been appointed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Agenda47, in Trump’s inimitable style, pledges to “shatter” and “crush” the ‘deep state’ whereas Project 2025 only talks of “deconstructing” and “dismantling” it. In many cases, certainly on detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, his plans look even more radical.
Will Trump’s Republican support hold?
Liberals fear what is about to happen, but how likely is it that Trump will be able to implement his agenda?
He will face every kind of legal, constitutional, political and economic opposition. Republicans certainly control both the White House and the Senate. But in the House of Representatives, their majority is paper thin. Not all Republicans are publicly enamoured with Trump, and even fewer privately. Many states are preparing to challenge his more radical plans. The supreme court is, on balance, heavily Republican but even they may not be prepared to offer Trump carte blanche.
American agriculture groups have already asked Trump to exempt their sector from mass deportations, arguing that it could disrupt food supply chains heavily dependent on undocumented immigrants. Mexico and Canada have pushed back on his proposal to introduce 25% tariffs.
Can Trump’s team drive his agenda through?
Implementing Project 2025 would tax the best and brightest minds America has, requiring real competence, cohesion, clear thinking and a relentless focus on detail. Trump’s cabinet appears to have none of these qualities.
Donald Trump Junior recently told an interviewer he didn’t want people in the new administration “who [think] they know more than my father”. Hiring sentient human beings with less knowledge than the “stupendously ignorant” Trump might have presented a few difficulties, but it appears his transition team may have succeeded.
Trump’s list of appointees is mostly made up of Fox News hosts, miscreants, cranks, mavericks, ‘swivel-eyed loons’ or suspected Russian assets. They are either mad, bad or dangerous, frequently all three. His administration will by all accounts be the least experienced and least qualified in US history.
Some of the controversial nominees in brief
Kennedy Jr for instance, the man in charge of the health department, doesn’t believe vaccines are effective and claims Covid-19 was genetically engineered to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people”. He is said to be “even crazier than you think” which takes some believing.
Someone who lives down to their billing is Kash Patel, a former chief of staff in the Department of Defence, who warned Trump’s political foes last year: “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly”. Patel is now Trump’s choice to head the FBI. This Substack post by Joyce Vance, former attorney for the Northern District of Alabama (and no relation to the vice president-elect), helps to explain fears about the “deeply strange” Patel.
It was suggested in 2018 that Trump’s chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles, worked with Russian intelligence to corruptly obtain social media services to help the campaign of Florida governor Ron de Santis.
Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat accused of peddling Russian narratives, is to become director of national intelligence. There are fears that NATO allies might stop sharing intelligence with the US in case it winds up on Putin’s desk. Gabbard has blamed NATO and the US for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is openly described on Russian state TV as their “agent”.
Given their inexperience, and Trump’s main focus turning to settling scores with his political adversaries and media commentators, it’s far more likely that the ship of fools will wind up on the rocks. There are already reports of infighting at the top.
Lessons from Trump’s first term
To see the problem his new cabinet colleagues face, Miles Taylor, a member of Trump’s first administration, writing in The New York Times in 2018, says the president’s erratic leadership style was “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective. Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back”.
Bear in mind that Project 2025 calls for the president to “set and enforce a plan for the executive branch”. Trump was incapable of this in 2016 and is infinitely worse today. The president-elect is even more obsessed with petty grievances and revenge, and more unpredictable and capricious than he was eight years ago.
Stephanie Grisham, who served Trump as his press secretary from 2017 to 2021, in her book I’ll Take Your Questions Now: My Time in The Trump White House, says her job was like “… living in a house that was always on fire or in an insane asylum where you couldn’t tell the difference between the patients and the attendants or on a roller coaster that never stopped – but trust me, it was a hot mess 24/7”. And she adds, usually it was the president himself, “screwing up the messaging”.
She talks of the dysfunctional Trump White House where “… everything was like a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks”.
Ushering in a new “golden age” for America seems like quite a stretch.
Will Trump serve a full second term?
As Trump seemingly descends into senility, some commentators predict his vice president, JD Vance, under the 25th Amendment, will at some point have to declare the president “unable to perform their duties due to sickness or disability”.
His cabinet is packed with loyal supporters yet we know most have been highly critical of him in the past, so their reliability is questionable. It’s entirely possible, even probable that Trump won’t last until 2028.
Certainly, by the mid-term elections in November 2026, Agenda47/Project 2025 needs to be bearing some early fruit if the Republicans are to have any hope of retaining control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. I suggest this is not going to happen in two years and probably never. The US economy is in good shape now but Trump’s plans pose some serious risks.
Inside the DOGE’s palace of many cuts
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, joint heads of a newly created ‘Department’ of Government Efficiency (DOGE – though it should be noted that only Congress can create departments!) are charged with cutting $2tn out of US spending; about a third of the total. Ramaswamy has mused that the federal government headcount (about 2.8 million souls) could be reduced by 50% if employees whose social security ID ends in an odd number are summarily dismissed. Repeating the exercise after a year for those with odd starting numbers, would cut the initial total by 75% over two years, he has said.
Doing this while attempting to detain and deport 13 million undocumented immigrants (at a cost estimated at $968bn over a decade), deregulate the economy and boost defence spending on both conventional and nuclear weapons, looks difficult if not impossible.
Chaos is the more likely outcome, and the Republicans may seek a way out.
Who could replace Trump as the GOP’s chief con man?
But here’s the dilemma. If the GOP ditch Trump, their problems could be multiplied rather than eased. Trump is the only man able to persuade Republican voters that all is well, even as civil society collapses around them and they’re reduced to penury. Vance isn’t in the same league and neither is anyone else.
Trump’s MAGA supporters accept every utterance from their leader, regardless of how bizarre or provably false. The Republican congressman for Texas, Troy Nehls, recently claimed Trump was “never really wrong”, although most of us have difficulty remembering when he’s ever been right. Nehls presumably thinks the noise from wind turbines causes cancer and F-35 stealth fighters are invisible and can’t be seen even “when you’re right next to them”.
When the economy runs into the sand, Trump’s skill as a confidence trickster will prove essential. The GOP have ridden a tiger for eight years and will find dismounting a little tricky.
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