“You should move to a small town where the rule of law still exists. You will not survive here. You are not a wolf. And this is a land of wolves now.”
Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) in Sicario (2015)
So: will America become a land of wolves? A nation ruled only by the strong, the predatory, the ferocious? Maybe not. But the election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term has dramatically changed the odds.
The late comedian George Carlin once said that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts”. True, Elon Musk prefers customised Cybertruck trainers and an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt.
But when I learned that Trump had included the tech billionaire on his call with Volodymyr Zelensky last Wednesday, I thought immediately of Carlin’s prophecy. Musk, of course, insists that his higher purpose is to defend democracy – like all aspiring autocrats.
The president-elect is notoriously allergic to the detail, nuance and tangle of government. But it is a colossal non sequitur to assume that he returns to the most powerful job in the world without ambitions to achieve, grudges to settle, and a dark plan that posterity will be unable to ignore. He will ensure that his second term is felt all over the world – bigly.
Naturally, it matters very much whom he now appoints to the key positions in the new administration. The immediate hiring of Susie Wiles, his co-campaign chair, as White House chief of staff is a signal that unswerving loyalty to Trump himself will be an absolute prerequisite of recruitment.
And this is not lost on his tribe. On Wednesday, the MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, who has been touted as a potential attorney general, posted on X the following about Trump’s enemies: “Here’s my current mood: I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall”. New paragraph: “(Legally, politically, and financially, of course)”. Davis claims he is not returning to government, but Trump has other ideas. “This guy is tough as hell,” he said of him in October. “We want him in a very high capacity.”
In Trumpworld – especially now – it is important not to fixate upon formal titles. The new administration will resemble a brutal medieval court, in which access and the favour of the Great Leader matter more than which department of state you notionally head.
This will not be a government of all the talents. It will a government of loyalists and lackeys. It will also be, explicitly, a dynastic regime. Don Jr, once the bullied Kendall Roy of MAGA Succession, is now a trusted consigliere, with one eye on a political career of his own.
I am sure Musk, who was $26bn wealthier the day after Trump won, will be given some task force or project to run. He claims that he can cut “at least $2tn” from the $6.75tn federal budget – fiscal savagery that, if achieved, would tear America’s social fabric to pieces.
But what really matters more than his official role is that – for now, at least – he is the second most powerful person in the Trump court. Note how much time the president-elect devoted to the world’s richest man in his acceptance speech: “We have a new star. A star is born, Elon. No, he is. Now he’s an amazing guy… He’s a super genius.”
JD Vance may be vice-president-elect, but there’s no doubt who the new deputy sheriff is – until Trump gets bored, of course, and chooses someone else. That’s the problem with autocrats. They tend to be capricious.
Precisely the same applies to Robert F Kennedy Jr, urged by the president-elect to “go wild” on vaccines and pharmaceutical policy: “I said he could … do anything he wants.”
For now, RFK insists that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” which is generous of him. But the American people should be in no doubt that the man they just elected to be their 47th president includes in his inner circle an anti-vax maniac who wants to remove fluoride from the US water supply, believes that wi-fi and mobile phones cause cancer, and that anti-depressants encourage mass shootings.
If you doubt the scale of RFK’s derangement, check out his best-selling The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (2021) in which he claims, among many other wild fabrications, that “HIV doesn’t cause Aids” and that Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, orchestrated “a historic coup d’état against western democracy”.
When I first wearily waded my way through this book a couple of years ago, I reflected that it was sad that the son of RFK Sr should have stooped so low. Now, the ideas in its pages represent a clear and present danger to public health in the US – and, by extension, to American participation in international pandemic resilience and vaccination strategies.
Only days into the new era, the old order is being swept away, often quietly. On Friday, the hitherto tenacious special counsel Jack Smith pre-emptively sought and was granted a suspension of the federal indictment against Trump for electoral subversion in 2020-21. The chances of the grand racketeering prosecution of the president-elect in Fulton County, Georgia, going ahead were already melting away.
The Florida classified documents trial has been dismissed. As for Trump’s 34 convictions in the New York hush-money case, it seems vanishingly unlikely now that America’s first felon-president will be punished in any meaningful way.
The practical outcome is that Trump will almost certainly escape accountability for his incitement of the January 6 insurrection. More to the point, the US Supreme Court’s majority ruling in July that the president – whoever he or she may be – has “absolute immunity” for all “official acts” is literally the get-out-of-jail card of Trump’s dreams.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her powerful dissent, the ruling transformed an accountable head of state into a “king above the law”. She continued: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold on to power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
This is of profound consequence because so many of the things that Trump wants to do will be of dubious legality or will involve sharp conflict between jurisdictions. Take his plan to deport at least 11 million undocumented migrants, a project that has been developed over many years by one of his most zealous advisers, Stephen Miller.
In an interview in November 2023 with Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, Miller set out the main points of the plan. There would be “large-scale raids” all over the country, with National Guard sent in by friendly governors – if necessary, from neighbouring states. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives officials, state and local sheriffs would also be deployed in the house-to-house, workplace-to-workplace round-ups.
The seized migrants would be transported to “large-scale staging grounds near the border” (which is why the share prices of private prison companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group have risen sharply since Trump’s victory).
Though often compared to Eisenhower’s deportation of 1.3 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans in 1953-4, Trump’s plan is much more ambitious, both in scale and global reach. Miller envisages “standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly” to more than 100 countries. He is unmoved by the pain that will necessarily be inflicted upon what he calls “fake families”. For his fellow MAGA devotees, “it will be joyous, and it will be wonderful, and it will be everything that you want it to be”.
The humanitarian implications of this appalling project are obvious. The cost to the US economy and the taxpayer will be enormous, too. Yet Trump does not care about any of this. “It’s not a question of a price tag,” he told NBC News last week. “It’s not — really, we have no choice.”
All the lies on the campaign trail about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and gangs taking over Aurora, Illinois: this was Trump preparing the ground through falsehoods, memes, jokes and racist slurs for the all-too-real plan he intends to launch after his inauguration on January 20.
On Sunday, in a clear signal of intent and priority, he appointed Tom Homan, a hardline contributor to the Project 2025 blueprint and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as his “border czar”, in command “of all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin”.
Don’t fall into the trap of imagining that his second term will be much the same as his first. Yes, his attention will wander and many of his promises will be ditched because he simply cannot be bothered. It is absolutely true that he did not finish the “beautiful wall” across the southern border that Mexico was allegedly going to pay for.
But the Trump of 2024 is not the Trump of 2016. He has seen how Washington DC works, how presidential policies can be thwarted or quietly shelved, how the generals and the directors of the CIA and the FBI unaccountably consider their duty to the constitution to be greater than their loyalty to the Trump brand.
Those who say he ran for the presidency again simply to stay out of jail are deluded. He is an agent of chaos, and he intends there to be plenty of it.
Not that he will be unchallenged. Trump will face the full-blown opposition of individual states unwilling to accept his nascent autocracy. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has called an emergency session of the state legislature on December 2 to “protect our state against any unlawful actions by the incoming Trump administration”. His intention, he said, was to “Trump-proof” California.
Newsom’s counterpart in Illinois, JB Pritzker, issued a similar warning on Thursday: “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans:
I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me.”
Massachusetts’ governor, Maura Healey, promised to use “every tool in the toolbox” to “hold the line on democracy and the rule of law”. Specifically, she said she would “absolutely not” allow state police to take part in mass deportations.
In New York State, Kathy Hochul announced the formation of a task force to protect “key areas that are most likely to face threats from the Trump administration”. Pentagon officials are reported to have held meetings to prepare for illegal orders issued by the incoming commander-in-chief.
These are not declarations of secession or open mutiny. But Trump knows that this fight will be real. On Friday, he attacked “Governor Gavin Newscum” and accused him of “using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again’.”
Hope is not a strategy against so determined a demagogue who believes himself to be divinely ordained, has survived two assassination attempts, and – like it or not – now has an unambiguous electoral mandate. Only will, guile, courage and audacity will count, as the new resistance musters in many forms.
The stakes could hardly be higher. For the president-elect, as for the young property developer in Manhattan, the US constitutional order is just another decrepit structure ready to be torn down and replaced by something shiny, vulgar and instantly gratifying. Trump has an idea of America – patriarchal, selfish, unrestrained – that is as deep in his elderly DNA as it is childish in character.
It is bad enough that America has so warmly welcomed the orange fox back into the chicken coop. How much worse that, teeth bared and eyes blazing, he turns out to be a wolf.
