We know a lot of what happens next: Trump signs the Paul Ryan budget without reading it, Obamacare is repealed, Dodd-Frank is repealed, the Paris climate accord is rejected, torture is restored, the Supreme Court becomes more conservative than it was even when Antonin Scalia was alive.
But I think this is also true:
You realize he's actually going to try and throw Hillary in jail, right? That wasn't an idle threat.
— Sean Kent (@seankent) November 9, 2016
Look, he's not going to be able to make good on his promise to bring all the manufacturing jobs back with a wave of his hand. He's not going to be able to bring back any of those jobs. His trade wars and his very presence will push us closer to economic turmoil -- it's already happening -- and the Ryan/Koch economic agenda will do to America what Bobby Jindal did to Louisiana and Sam Brownback did to Kansas. I'm one of the few people who thinks Trump will take at least preliminary steps toward building the wall, but it won't get far.
Last night, my wife and I were talking about the certainty that Trump can't deliver on his promises, and her immediate reaction was that when he can't deliver and the public becomes restive, he'll just start a war. But maybe the war he'll use to distract the public will be a war against the Clintons and their aides. I think this will be Rudy Giuliani's principal focus as attorney general, under direct orders from the president. Many in the political establishment will express horror at this, and say that this is what Third World dictators do to their political enemies. But they said that when Trump promised on the campaign trail to lock Clinton up, and America didn't care.
Another thing I'm worried about? Terrorism. Not merely because Trump's secretary of state will be Newt Gingrich and his national security adviser will be a guy who seems to have stepped out of an early draft of Dr. Strangelove, General Michael Flynn. I'm worried that these people are going to make us nostalgic for the Bush team, which was at least able to keep the mechanism of government running in a competent way (even if it ran off a cliff as a result of awful policy decisions).
What worries me is that ISIS, in particular, knows that Trump's response to any terrorist attack on U.S. shores will be excessive and wildly targeted -- if he doesn't begin deporting U.S. Muslims or putting them in camps in his first hundred days, he'll start after a San Bernardino- or Orlando-level attack.
And that's exactly what jihadist organizations want. Recall what appeared in the ISIS magazine Dabiq after the Charlie Hebdo massacre:
The attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize ... or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group statedISIS will expect Trump to take steps to eliminate the American "grayzone" where Muslims can live as Muslims and expect acceptance from their non-Muslim neighbors. ISIS very much wants that to happen. So I believe that Trump's election greatly increases the likelihood of terrorist attacks here.
More awful things are to come. Not all of them immediately come to mind. It's going to be an appalling four years.
