What Is Donald Trump Going to do for You?

On the Economy

“The first night of the Republican National Convention kept its official focus on the economy Monday even after Saturday’s shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania in which former President Donald Trump was injured.

Speakers argued that Trump would fix inflation and bring back prosperity simply by returning to the White House as president. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin lamented, “Tonight, America, the land of opportunity, just doesn’t feel like that anymore.”

But Trump has released few hard numbers and no real policy language or legislative blueprints, and most of the speakers Monday didn’t get into details either. Instead, his campaign is betting that voters care more about attitude than policy specifics.

Trump says he wants tariffs on trade partners and no taxes on tips. He would like to knock the corporate tax rate down a tick. The Republican platform also promises to “defeat” inflation and “quickly bring down all prices,” in addition to pumping out more oil, natural gas and coal.

The platform would address illegal immigration in part with the “largest deportation program in American history.” And Trump would also scrap President Joe Biden’s policies to develop the market for electric vehicles and renewable energy.

Democrats and several leading economists say the math shows that Trump’s ideas would cause an explosive bout of inflation, wallop the middle class and — by his extending his soon-to-expire tax cuts — heap another $5 trillion-plus onto the national debt.

The Associated Press sent the Trump campaign 20 basic questions in June to clarify his economic views and the campaign declined to answer any of them. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted that Trump best speaks for himself and directed the AP to video clips of him.”

By — Josh Boak, Associated Press “Trump’s economic plan promises to ‘defeat’ inflation but leaves out policy, budget specifics"

“Trump has said he would seek to extend and expand his 2017 tax cuts, severely restrict illegal immigration while deporting millions of foreign-born residents, impose tariffs on all U.S. imports, and roll back much of Biden’s initiatives to transition the nation to clean energy.

Biden would extend some of the Trump tax cuts − but not for wealthy individuals and corporations – establish more targeted tariffs on Chinese imports and toughen immigration constraints but not nearly as dramatically as Trump.

He also would push a lengthy wish list of social service programs that would make child care more affordable, provide free college tuition, cancel more student loan debt and lower drug prices, among other proposals. But analysts say they’re unlikely to pass a divided Congress.

“Biden’s policies are better for the economy,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “They lead to more growth and less inflation.”

According to a Moody’s study, Trump’s plan would trigger a recession by mid-2025 and an economy that grows an average 1.3% annually during his four-year term vs. 2.1% under Biden. (The latter is in line with average growth in the decade before the pandemic.)

Next year, under a Trump administration, inflation would rise from the current 3.3% to 3.6%, well above the 2.4% forecast under Biden, the Moody’s analysis shows. Compared with Biden, the U.S. would have 3.2 million fewer jobs and a 4.5% unemployment rate, a half percentage point higher, at the end of a Trump tenure.

Even right-leaning economists agree Trump’s trade and immigration policies would hobble the economy.

Scott Lincicome of the libertarian Cato Institute says they would be “highly damaging to the U.S. and global economies.” He adds, however, that specific forecasts “should be taken with a grain of salt.”’

“Moody’s study assumes a Biden administration would be dealing with a Democratic-majority House and Republican Senate as party control of the two chambers flips, while Trump would enjoy a Republican House and Senate, based on models that predict the likeliest election scenarios.

The estimates aren't an exact science, and changes in the proposals would modify the economic impact. But they're crunched by computer models that are based on similar policies over the past 75 years.”

By — Paul Davidson, “Comparing Trump's and Biden's economic plans, from immigration to taxes”

Agenda47 places a focus on pharmaceuticals and medical devices manufactured within the U.S.

Under the plan, essential medical devices and medicines would be manufactured in the U.S. and federal agencies would be required to “Buy American" to prevent shortages.

It also calls for an increase in the production of drugs domestically, bans agencies from other countries from buying "essential drugs" and demands that pharmaceutical companies only be paid the “best price they offer to foreign nations.”

By —Mary Walrath-Holdridge, “As Trump creates distance from Project 2025, the conservative Agenda47 comes into focus”

I could see how this section of Agenda47 may sound good to you. However, I caution you to think for a second about Trump’s history of “accomplishments.” Specifically, how Donald Trump celebrated ending Roe V. Wade.

How did Roe V Wade end? With no plan for our country. We were sent into chaos by a sudden supreme court ruling. Doctors didn’t know how to treat their patients without fear of prosecution. Women had to wait until unviable pregnancies reached a point of sepsis before doctors could help. Some areas even had to stop IVF treatments for people who actually wanted children, due solely to the lack of preparedness from the Trump administration. There was no communication between the Conservative plan and the country, and due to that we suffered.

Think about what would happen to our hospitals and our families if the bills suggested in agenda47 are not planned out properly. Think of what things could look like if the entire medical industry is forced to shift over to American-made products with no real plan. Does American manufacturing currently have the infrastructure to meet the demands of our entire medical industry? Can it do it at the same cost as providing those things to other countries without taking a loss in the US? At no point does Donald Trump prove any of this is possible. Are hospitals going to be allowed to buy things at higher prices to meet demands if other companies refuse to sell at those prices? Will we end up paying even more for sub-standard quality from companies who can sell for cheap? Is it possible anyone’s life is going to be put in danger due to a lack of needed materials?

I hope you’re planning on staying perfectly healthy for the years it takes for the industry to adapt to the changes. If not, you could end up suffering.

With J.D. Vance listed as the VP nominee on the Republican Presidential ticket, abortion rights are in doubt.

“Throughout his brief political career, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio has been an unapologetic opponent of abortion rights, a view driven by his Catholic faith and one he has cited as a driving force in his agenda.

He has supported a federal abortion ban, opposed exceptions for rape and incest, said he wanted to protect life “from the date of conception” and frequently described himself as “100 percent pro-life.”

“I think two wrongs don’t make a right; at the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby,” he told an Ohio radio host in September 2021 before Roe v. Wade was overturned in part by three Supreme Court justices appointed by the man who named him to the Republicans’ 2024 presidential ticket. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term. It’s whether a child should be allowed to live.”

In January 2023, Mr. Vance signed a letter asking the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act, a long-dormant law from 1873, to ban the mailing of abortion medication. Such an action could significantly limit access to such medication, which accounts for a majority of abortions in the country.

“While the use of chemical abortion drugs may be legal in some states, and federal law does not currently explicitly prohibit the use of such drugs, federal law does prohibit the mailing or shipping of such items,” read the letter, which was signed by more than two dozen Republican lawmakers. “Despite attempts to downplay this action, the ‘mere mailing’ of these items is expressly what the law has prohibited for nearly 150 years.”

Enforcing the Comstock Act is included in a plan released by a coalition that has been drawing up America First-style policy plans, nicknamed Project 2025 — though the law is referred to only by the statute number. Mr. Vance has publicly praised those plans as containing “some good ideas,” even as former President Donald J. Trump has tried to distance himself from the effort.

Now, as he joins Mr. Trump’s presidential ticket, Mr. Vance is seeking to play down — and in some cases rewrite — those views, saying he backs Mr. Trump’s support for “reasonable exceptions” and for allowing states to decide their own limits on abortion.

“My view is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his views on abortion are going to be the views that dominate this party and drive this party forward,” Mr. Vance said on Monday in an interview on Fox News, after he was named to the ticket. “You have to believe in reasonable exceptions because that’s where the American people are. And you’ve got to let individual states make this decision.”

His current position is a clear softening for a candidate who once described staunch opposition to abortion as one of the most crucial litmus tests for conservatives.

Since entering politics in 2022, with his run for a Senate seat in Ohio, Mr. Vance has cast himself as a fierce opponent of abortion rights, supporting a Texas law that made abortion functionally illegal in the state and that authorizes residents to enforce the ban. The 2021 law transformed Texas, criminalizing abortion before the Supreme Court overturned the right nationwide.

“I think one of the most important issues for the conservative movement is the right to life,” Mr. Vance told a crowd gathered for a campaign town-hall-style meeting in February 2022. “If you’re not willing to stand on that issue, I think it indicates your character is weak and you don’t have the fortitude to actually serve the interest of our voters.”

He carried those beliefs into the Senate, where he has voted against protecting the right to fertility treatments like I.V.F. He has also opposed judicial nominees with a history of supporting abortion rights and legislation that expressed support for protecting access to abortion.

Mr. Vance has urged Republicans to be not just anti-abortion but “pro-baby and pro-family and pro-people who are raising our families.”’

By — Lisa Lerer, “Opposition to Abortion Rights Is at Center of J.D. Vance’s Political Career.”

Do you believe there’s no possibility Donald Trump would pursue a federal abortion ban? He’s surrounded himself with the most extreme within his party, if they push for an extreme bill, will he stop them? Or, will he let them have what they want?

Are Trump’s actions and comments “racist”? Or are they “bigoted”?

“One of the common defenses for Trump is that he’s not necessarily racist, because the Muslim and Mexican people he often targets don’t actually comprise a race.

Disgraced journalist Mark Halperin, for example, said as much when Trump argued Judge Curiel should recuse himself from the Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage, making the astute observation that “Mexico isn’t a race.”

Kristof made a similar point in the New York Times: “My view is that ‘racist’ can be a loaded word, a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.”

This critique misses the point on two levels.

For one, the argument is tremendously semantic. It’s essentially probing the question: Is Trump racist or is he bigoted? But who cares? Neither is a trait that anyone should want in a president — and either label essentially communicates the same criticism.

Another issue is that race is socially malleable. Over the years, Americans considered Germans, Greeks, Irish, Italians, and Spaniards as nonwhite people of different races. That’s changed. Similarly, some Americans today consider Latinos and, to a lesser degree, some people with Muslim and Jewish backgrounds as part of a nonwhite race too. (As a Latin man, I certainly consider myself to be of a different race, and the treatment I’ve received in the course of my life validates that.) So under current definitions, comments against these groups are, indeed, racist.

This is all possible because, as Jenée Desmond-Harris explained for Vox, race is entirely a social construct with no biological basis. This doesn’t mean race and people’s views of race don’t have real effects on many people — of course they do — but it means that people’s definitions of race can change over time.

But really, whatever you want to call it, Trump has made racist and bigoted comments in the past. That much should be clear in the long lists above.

Trump’s bigotry was a key part of his campaign

Regardless of how one labels it, Trump’s racism or bigotry was a big part of his campaign — by giving a candidate to the many white Americans who harbor racial resentment.

One paper, published in January 2017 by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction, after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.

Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta

Another study, conducted by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich shortly before the 2016 election, found that if people who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.

And a study, published in November 2017 by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race. In this study, respondents were randomly assigned “a subtle image of either a black or a white man.” Then they were asked about views on housing policy.

The researchers found that Trump supporters were much more likely to be impacted by the image of a Black man. After the exposure, they were not only less supportive of housing assistance programs, but they also expressed higher levels of anger that some people receive government assistance, and they were more likely to say that individuals who receive assistance are to blame for their situation.

In contrast, favorability toward Hillary Clinton did not significantly change respondents’ views on any of these issues when primed with racial cues.

“These findings indicate that responses to the racial cue varied as a function of feelings about Donald Trump — but not feelings about Hillary Clinton — during the 2016 presidential election,” the researchers concluded.

There is also a lot of other research showing that people’s racial attitudes can change their views on politics and policy, as Dylan Matthews and researchers Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel previously explained for Vox.

Simply put, racial attitudes were a big driver of Trump’s election — just as they long have been for general beliefs about politics and policy. (Much more on all the research in Vox’s explainer.)

Meanwhile, white supremacist groups have openly embraced Trump. As Sarah Posner and David Neiwert reported at Mother Jones, what the media largely treated as gaffes — Trump retweeting white nationalists, Trump describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals — were to white supremacists real signals approving of their racist causes. One white supremacist wrote, “Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full-wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters.”

Some of them even argued that Trump has softened the greater public to their racist messaging. “The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions,” said Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, which succeeded David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will.”

And at the 2017 white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, said that the rally was meant “to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.”

So while Trump may deny his racism and bigotry, at some level his supporters seem to get it. As much as his history of racism shows that he’s racist, perhaps who supported him and why is just as revealing — and it doesn’t paint a favorable picture for Trump.”’

By — German Lopez, “Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020.”

Trump Lies About Crime and Public Safety

“Closing out the Conservative Political Action Conference today, former President Donald Trump said that President Biden had presided over a spike in “bloodshed, chaos, and violent crime.” The former president is misleading the American public about current crime trends.

Here are the facts on crime. Starting in the early 1990s, crime dropped rapidly in the United States. The causes were complex — owing much to improving economic conditions and innovations in policing strategy. Following a decades-long decline, violent crime rose during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, President Trump’s last year in office, murder rates climbed by nearly 30 percent and assault rates by more than 10 percent.

Here, too, the reasons are complex, but may have much to do with the pandemic. Covid-19 proved to be a generational disruptor in America, instigating social and economic hardships at all levels of society. For example, the country saw an economic decline and increases in unemployment due to businesses that were negatively impacted by shutdowns. We saw a surge in firearm ownership and shooting incidents, at least in the cities that track this data. It was also a period of tremendous isolation. After-school programs and other critical services and interventions that cities relied on to confront violence were shut down.

But since 2021, violent crime has started to fall. According to the FBI, as of 2022 violent crime rates had fallen by 4 percent and murder rates by roughly 7 percent since 2020. Preliminary data suggests those declines accelerated in 2023.

In his Saturday speech to conservatives, Trump also spoke a good deal about an immigration crisis in America, making misleading statements about what he referred to as migrant crime and noting it will be “far more deadly than anyone thought.” Here, again, the former president was not truthful. There is no evidence of a migrant crime wave, including in New York City, which the former president referred to in his remarks today. To the contrary, statistics indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began bussing migrants to New York. Additionally, research reveals that undocumented immigration is associated with a decrease in property crime and additional research finds that Fentanyl is primarily trafficked by U.S. citizens.

Although violent crime appears to be receding across the nation, the American public is not fully aware of this trend. Most Americans believe that crime is rising, including 78 percent of independent voters. This gap between crime and perceptions of crime is not new — it’s a decades-long trend. Gallup routinely asks voters whether they believe crime is higher or lower than the previous year. Even in the midst of the decades-long decline in crime, between 1990 and the mid-2010s, Gallup records only two years when a majority of voters did not believe crime had risen.

Although the reasons why crime increases and decreases are complicated, we know that various social, economic, and environmental factors, such as growth in income and an aging population, are significant drivers of crime rates. We also know that investing in our communities through funding after school programming, anti-violence initiatives, and safe “third places” — like parks and community centers — helps build long-term safety.

Creating thriving and safe communities are goals we can all embrace. But misleading the American public about the truth and distorting reality is not the way to deliver public safety.”

By —Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Ames Grawert, “Trump Misleads About Crime and Public Safety, Again”

Education

“Trump's proposals for education reform focus on defunding and punishing educators and institutions that do not teach conservative values and creating new organizations to enforce rules created around Republican talking points to "save" schools from "Radical Left maniacs."

These plans include:

• Cutting federal funding for any school or programs teaching "Critical Race Theory," "gender ideology" or other lessons deemed "inappropriate."

• Keeping "men out of women's sports."

• Abolishing teacher tenure.

• Pushing prayer in public schools.

• Seeking out and undoing "Marxism" in education.

• Certifying only teachers “who embrace patriotic values" through a new credential program.

• Undoing DEI policies.

• Encouraging home and religious schooling.

• Creating a "Parental Bill of Rights" to give parents control over curriculum.

• Allowing parents to elect school officials and favoring school districts that enable teachers to carry firearms.

On the college level, Agenda47 wants to punish universities like Harvard for "turning students into Communists and terrorists" and plans to do away with the existing accreditation system, replacing it with one that adheres to GOP values and heavily fines those that don't comply. With money made from the fines, Agenda47 proposes the creation of a free online “American Academy" with "no wokeness or jihadism."‘

By —Mary Walrath-Holdridge, “As Trump creates distance from Project 2025, the conservative Agenda47 comes into focus”

These people have clearly never been in a public school. There will be teachers that lose control of their firearms. There will be kids who wrestle the gun from the teacher and then use it. There will be kids who did nothing wrong who will die if we do this.