The American attention span has shrunk since Al Gore invented the Internet, and the pandemic disrupted the time-space continuum. Our memories are foggy, but it’s still stunning that large swaths of the populace — including those who cover politics for a living — have forgotten what life was like with Donald J. Trump in the White House.

Anyone who has listened to a focus group in the last couple of years knows that there is a real nostalgia for the pre-pandemic economy — even though that’s the economy Barack Obama and Joe Biden built and Donald Trump destroyed by mismanaging the pandemic. This sentiment may be misguided. Yet, it is understandable as people navigate higher prices and higher interest rates. The misplaced nostalgia doesn’t stop there. In a September Wall Street Journal poll, 52% of voters believe former president Trump “has a strong record of accomplishments” compared to only 40% for Biden. Once again, this is an incorrect assessment of Trump’s presidency. This foggy memory helps explain the declining share of Americans with concerns about Trump’s mental fitness and temperament — two things that were top concerns only a few years ago.

This forgetfulness is frustrating to the folks who continue to believe Trump is an existential threat. A deeper exploration of how this happened is in order. More research must be conducted to determine how feasible it is to change people’s revised memories of the Trump years. I worry that it may not be possible or cost effective to focus limited time and resources on the past. However, one thing is for certain: Democrats must paint a vivid and credible picture of how a second Trump presidency would impact their lives.

Ron Brownstein recently wrote in The Atlantic:

If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support. But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president.

“I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

Much of the political conversation has centered on the polls and primary contest. Not enough attention is being paid to the hints Trump is dropping about his second-term agenda. So many of us are having conversations with people in our lives who are frustrated with the lack of progress or angry about the Biden Administration’s approach to Gaza and other issues. Here are some examples you can cite to explain the consequences of a Trump victory and why we have to do everything in our power to make sure he never returns to the White House.

Please consider signing up for my newsletter for more resources like this one. I started Message Box to provide the public with the same sort of messaging advice that I used to provide to candidates.

1. Goodbye Obamacare

Over the holiday, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that repealing the Affordable Care Act would be a priority in his return to the White House.

While Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act in his first term, there is ample reason to believe he could easily succeed in his second. John McCain, who famously saved the ACA with his thumbs down, is gone. The party as a whole has moved to the Right. President Trump, with a 52-seat majority, is not out of the question given the difficulty of the Senate map next year. Repealing the ACA would have a devastating effect on tens of millions of Americans who will lose access to affordable, quality care and protections from predatory insurance companies. According to the advocacy group Protect Our Care, here’s what repeal would mean:

• GONE: Protections for 135 million Americans with pre-existing conditions, including 54 million people with a pre-existing condition that would make them completely uninsurable.

• GONE: Medicaid expansion, which covers more than 21 million people. 

• GONE: 49 million seniors will have to pay more for prescription drugs because the Medicare ‘donut hole’ will be reopened.

• GONE: 2.3 million adult children will no longer be able to stay on their parents’ insurance. 

• GONE: Insurance companies will be able to charge women more than men.

• GONE: Premium tax credits that help 80 percent of people who purchase health care on the marketplace.

• GONE: Key support for rural hospitals. 

• GONE: Ban on insurance companies having lifetime caps on coverage.

• GONE: Requirements that insurance companies cover prescription drugs and maternity care.

• GONE: 61.5 million Medicare beneficiaries will face higher costs and disruptions to their medical care. 

2. A Nightmare for Reproductive Freedom

Many who talk about politics for a living (and a lot of voters) have fallen for the myth that Trump is less radical on abortion than other Republicans. His personal views don’t matter (on this or any other issue). What matters is what he has done and will do. Let’s take him at his word (for once). Trump recently said to a gathering of Evangelical activists:

I'm proud to be the most pro-life president in American history … From my first day in office, I took historic action to protect the unborn, very historic. Nobody else did anything near what we did.

Earlier this year, Trump said that the federal government played a “vital role” in regulating abortion.

A second Trump presidency would be a nightmare for abortion rights — even in the states that recently passed laws or constitutional amendments guaranteeing access. If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and White House, they will almost certainly seek to pass a national ban on abortion. Even if that were to fail, a Trump Administration would weaponize the power of the state to make it harder to access abortion services. The FDA could reverse approval of mifepristone — the abortion medication. Even more alarmingly, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has been pushing all Republican candidates as part of their Project 2025 policy manifesto to utilize an obscure law called the Comstock Act to ban abortion without an act of Congress. Mary Ziegler of Slate recently wrote about how this plan could be implemented:

Heritage argues that federal law prohibits the mailing of any item “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” The only obstacle in enforcing Comstock, according to Heritage, was Roe. Now that the right to choose is gone, Heritage argues, a GOP administration can announce its intention to enforce the Comstock Act on Day 1. The next step could be prosecutions in federal court of anyone, anywhere in the country, who is involved in receiving or mailing an item knowingly for abortion.

With Roe gone, Trump would make things much, much worse.

3. The Economy Gets Worse — Much Worse

Like most Republicans, Donald Trump is content to complain about the economy without offering solutions to lower costs or raise wages. However, Donald Trump’s economic policies will exacerbate the current problems and make the economy more favorable to major corporations at the expense of workers.

First, Joe Biden’s Administration has been the most pro-union in modern history. Don’t get distracted by Trump’s fake visit to Detroit during the UAW strike. His administration would be the most anti-union. Every level of government would be used to make it harder for workers to organize and unions to bargain collectively.

Second, earlier this year, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s policy advisors were already sketching out plans for another massive corporate tax cut. According to Stein’s report:

Trump and his advisers have discussed deeper cuts to both individual and corporate tax rates that would build on his controversial 2017 tax law, which they see as a major accomplishment worth expanding, according to interviews with a half-dozen people close to the former president, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The cuts could be paid for, at least in theory, with a new 10 percent tariff on all imports to the United States that Trump has called for, which could raise hundreds of billions in revenue. The sharp new tax cuts would help offset higher consumer costs caused by the tariffs.

The previous Trump tax cut ballooned the deficit and failed to grow the economy because the benefits went to corporate executives and wealthy investors. Matt Yglesias argues in his Slow Boring newsletter that the tariff used to pay for this tax cut (and other Trump policies) would make inflation much worse:

The price of everything goes up. A fraction of those higher consumer prices flow to the government, and the rest goes as windfall profits to people who own American businesses. But you can’t attract new workers into producing everything simultaneously. That would just be inflation on top of inflation. And with the deficit soaring due to regressive tax cuts, interest are going to go up up up.

4. The Death of Democracy

While Donald Trump remains vague about a lot of his second-term agenda, he has been VERY specific about his plans to weaponize the government to protect himself and his friends and punish his enemies:

• Trump said during a recent campaign in Iowa that he wants to use the military to police crime and protests in U.S. cities.

• After some of his appointees blocked his efforts to use the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines and deploy the military to help overturn the election, Trump allies concocted a plan to staff the government with lawyers who would bless such unconstitutional actions — think Rudy Giuliani but smarter and sober.

• In public and private, Trump pledged to use the Department of Justice to investigate his critics — particularly those who opposed his efforts to steal the 2020 election. According to a frightening report from the Washington Post:

  In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former Chief of Staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chief of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said ‘In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.’

• Trump plans to change a civil service rule called “Schedule F” to purge the federal government of career public servants whom he views as insufficiently loyal to him. The vagaries of federal hiring policy may seem boring and esoteric, but Georgetown University professor Don Moynihan explained in a recent New York Times column why we should all care:

  Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.

I could go on and on and on about just how bad a second Trump presidency would be for the nation and the planet. The above examples are a fraction of the irreparable damage he would do. No one who reads this newsletter needs this reminder (I hope!). We are, however, in a moment when the differences between Biden and Trump are being blurred in the media, and some voters say they will sit out the election because of legitimate disagreements with the Biden Administration’s policy decisions. Hopefully, these examples can help in your conversations about the stakes of the 2024 election.

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