Trump 2.0: Here Comes the Night

Norm Eisen, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, believes the government is too big to completely cave. “I think that if Trump is president, I believe that conventional wisdom is true that he will try to surround himself this time with loyalists who anticipate and obey his whims,” Eisen said. “But every president is frustrated by the response, or lack thereof, of the government apparatus and bureaucracy. And I personally doubt that there are enough people to fill the thousands and thousands of politically appointed government jobs who are willing to break the law for Trump. Still less the next-level civil service jobs that he wants to make political.”

Eisen also said he’s got faith in judges and courts, citing legal challenges in the first Trump administration, including two court cases against Trump, involving his D.C. hotel income, over potential violations of the Emolument Clause, which forbids federal officials from taking foreign gifts. Trump ran out the clock on that, when the Supreme Court mooted lower court decisions allowing the cases to proceed, since Trump was out of office. By the way, the hotel is now a Waldorf-Astoria and no longer Trump’s, so at least he can’t execute that little bit of graft.

Eisen predicts Trump’s impunity—leveraging renewed political ascendance with a crypto company for personal gain, for example—will create a “toxic cocktail” that will draw immense legal action: “He’s doubling down, so you can expect the legal pushback to double down.”

The ACLU is among the NGOs that have spent months preparing for a Trump 2.0. Its playbook is detailed “down to the hour after the victory is announced” and includes the transition period and the administration’s first 100 days, Zamore said. Broadly, the four-part plan involves litigation; preparing an oversight agenda for the House, assuming it goes blue; partnering with blue states and cities that have pro–civil rights political leaders; and mobilizing and organizing for mass actions. One node of resistance is a unified defense by blue states. “If one governor takes a stand, it’s worth something. But if 10 stand together, it’s really powerful,” Zamore said.