Experts explain just how dangerous a second Trump term would be

Experts Wednesday warned that Donald Trump's first term would pale in comparison to what he would do if re-elected to a second term.

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall compiled a host of dark forecasts from a variety of experts and spilled out more than 3,000 words to warn voters of the twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted, and now convicted felon former president's intentions.

"The most important reason a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first is that if he does win this year, Trump will have triumphed with the electorate’s full knowledge that he has been criminally charged with 88 felonies and convicted of 34 of them (so far); that he has promised to 'appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family'; that he intends to 'totally obliterate the deep state' by gutting civil service protections for the 50,000 most important jobs in the federal work force, a central tenet of what he calls his 'retribution' agenda," Edsall wrote.

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Trump and his supporters have made clear they will not accept defeat in November any more than they did in 2020, which culminated in the deadly U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

"They believe that Trump is the one true legitimate president, that those who refuse to accept this fundamental fact are the true deniers, and that any result other than Trump’s restoration would be a thwarting of history’s purpose and a diabolical act of treason," Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, writes in a forthcoming article in Liberties. "The authoritarian imperative has moved beyond Trumpian narcissism and the cultish MAGA fringe to become an article of faith from top to bottom inside the utterly transformed Republican Party, which Trump totally commands."

Trump's character hasn't changed, according to Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who warned that three factors would make a second presidency even worse than the first.

"First, he has systematically eroded the norms and the institutional guardrails that initially set boundaries on the damage he and his now more carefully chosen loyalist enablers are poised to do in carrying out the dangerous project to which they are jointly committed," Tribe wrote. "Second, their failures to insulate themselves from electoral and legal constraints during the dry run of 2017-21 have led them to formulate far more sophisticated and less vulnerable plans for their second attempt at consolidating permanent control of the apparatus of our fragile republic."

"And third, their capture of the Supreme Court and indeed much of the federal judiciary has put in place devastating precedents like the immunity ruling of July 1 that will license a virtually limitless autocratic power — if, but only if, they are not stopped during the epic struggle that will reach one climax this Nov. 5 and another next Jan. 6," Tribe added.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on Hitler and Stalin, told Edsall to think of a second Trump administration starting at the images from Jan. 6, 2021.

"That is where Trump left us and that is where he would begin," Snyder wrote.

"Democracy depends upon example, and Trump sets the worst possible one," Snyder added. "He has openly admired dictators his entire life. He would encourage Xi and Putin. The Russians make completely clear that a Trump presidency is their hope for victory in Ukraine. Allowing Russia to win that war, which I think is Trump’s likely orientation, destabilizes Europe, encourages China toward aggression in the Pacific, and undermines the rule of law everywhere."

Trump had no clear agenda when he entered the White House in 2017, just an assemblage of grievances and prejudices, and some of his worst impulses were tempered by the experienced officials who surrounded him and institutional guardrails imposed by bureaucrats he derided as the "deep state," another expert said.

"Trump says he wants to replace the bureaucracy — part of the 'deep state' — with political appointees," wrote Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia. "He wants to go after his political enemies, lock up refugees in camps, and implicit in all this he will appoint cabinet members and high level officials who support what he wants to do instead of the 'grown-ups' who constrained him at every turn during his presidency."

The U.S. Supreme Court has shown it's willing to give Trump nearly unlimited powers, no Republican spoke out when he said there would be a "bloodbath" if he wasn't re-elected, and his legal predicaments give him a great incentive to do whatever it takes to retake power, according to Snyder.

"Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison," Snyder wrote. "This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy."