The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman ominously laid out how a second Trump term in the White House could actually see some of his more extreme policies come to fruition because the people and institutions that kept him in check the first time around are weaker.

Haberman called Trump’s past praise of strongman tactics, like the Chinese killing hundreds of students to put down democratic protests in Tiananmen Square in the 1980s, “steeped in foreshadowing” of what he’d like to do with four more years in power. That is if he actually left office after a second term was up.

“What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings,” Haberman wrote, along with reporters Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan:

Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.

As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.

These extreme measures could include withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, sending the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, and using the military against U.S. citizens to “enforce public order.” But Trump’s greatest challenge to democracy would be his “vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries,” Haberman wrote.

She continued, that the obstacles limiting Trump’s autocratic actions in his first term “would be absent in a second one.”

Some of what Mr. Trump tried to do was thwarted by incompetence and dysfunction among his initial team. But over four years, those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. After courts blocked his first, haphazardly crafted travel ban, for example, his team developed a version that the Supreme Court allowed to take effect.

Republicans in Congress would be “even more pliable in any second Trump term,” Haberman wrote, and their enabling could be just what Trump would need to implement his more draconian ideas.

Read The New York Times article here.

The post Haberman Ominously Warns of ‘Radical’ Second Trump Term With Past Praise of Strong Men and Tanks in Tiananmen Square first appeared on Mediaite.

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