It is more or less a given that Donald Trump’s policy priorities for a second term in the White House, such as they are, mostly revolve around the long, long, long list of grievances that occupy the pile of rotted-termite-infested lumber that passes for his brain — his legal troubles, the Biden Crime Family, all the coordinated actions being carried out by far-flung elements of the Justice Department, the New York Attorney General’s office, and whatever other Marxist radicals have made it their life’s work to Get Trump.
If one wants to know about actual specific policies that the people who do Trump’s thinking for him will try to implement if, God help us all, he wins the election in November, one has to check out the website of Project 2025, the coalition of wingnuts planning out how to hit the ground running when they take over government. Then, when one realizes that the 900-page doorstop of policy objectives that Project 2025 is passing around is longer and more impenetrable than Gravity’s Rainbow, you can go to the Policy section — yes, there is one! — of Trump’s campaign website if you want to discern whatever aims a second Trump administration might have besides stealing whatever nuclear documents and White House furniture it didn’t steal the first time.
So we did that, and we discovered that unsurprisingly, the policies were mostly leftover fodder from the first Trump administration. Now we present to you, Dear Wonkette Reader, the first in our semi-occasional look at what specific policy “ideas” we can look forward to (by looking backwards) in 2025.
First up: Is the United States going to invade Mexico? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” In a section on the Issues page titled “War on the Drug Cartels,” whatever wingnut AI wrote all this gibberish says:
President Trump will take down the drug cartels just as he took down ISIS. He will impose a total naval embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and choke off their access to the global financial system. President Trump will get the full cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels, or else expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign.
Yeah, yeah, and Mexico is going to pay for the wall.
Drunk At Bar Says US Oughta Invade Mexico Is What We Oughta ... Wait No It Is US Senator Tom Cotton
Those of you who spend entirely too much time online may have seen the famous Dr. Manhattan meme from the comic book Watchmen, in which the naked time-slipping blue-balled radiation accident explains that he is simultaneously observing similar events in different eras all at once. That meme is us, after reading the above and then digging up a year-old Rolling Stone report on the carnival of xenophobia and racism that awaits the nation if Donald Trump returns to the White House.
To wit, It is 2017 and we are watching Donald Trump threaten to invade Mexico. It is 2019 and we are watching Donald Trump threaten to invade Mexico. It is 2023 and we are watching Donald Trump threaten to invade Mexico:
Trump lieutenants have briefed him on several options that include unilateral military strikes and troop deployments on a sovereign U.S. partner and neighbor, the sources say. One such proposal that Trump has been briefed on this year is an October white paper from the Center for Renewing America, an increasingly influential think tank staffed largely by Trumpist wonks, MAGA loyalists, and veterans of his administration.
Ah, the Center for Renewing America, the Christian nationalist think tank run by onetime Trump administration flunky Russ “CRITICAL RACE THEORY WILL KILL US ALL IN OUR BEDS” Vought that is becoming the policy center for a second Trump term. Think of the left-leaning Obama-era Center for American Progress, only right-wing, immoral, run by people who are both sure the Rapture is going to happen any second and so bugfuck insane that you wouldn’t put them in charge of mowing your lawn, much less running the country.
That white paper the Trump team is leaning on, by the way, was written by our old friend Ken Cuccinelli, the dumbest bigot Virginians have ever seen fit to elect to high office. And we elected Harry Byrd to high office a lot.
In a nod to Mexico’s status as a sovereign nation, the paper calls on the U.S. to “conduct specific military operations to destroy the cartels and enlist the Mexican government in joint operations to target cartel-networked infrastructure, including affiliated factions and enablers with direct action.”
However, that “enlistment” of the Mexican government comes with a massive caveat: “It is vital that Mexico not be led to believe that they have veto power to prevent the US from taking the actions necessary to secure its borders and people,” the paper reads.
Dear Mexico, we will respect your sovereignty on the condition that we will not respect your sovereignty if we don’t feel like it. Love and kisses, America.
Trump has wanted to invade Mexico since about thirty seconds into his June 2015 announcement that he would run for president, when he made his infamous comments that our southern neighbor was sending all its rapists to America or something. And being Trump, it does not matter how many times career military officers and diplomats have told him it is an insanely terrible idea. He just goes to other people until one of them tells him what he wants to hear. And what he wants to hear is that he can unleash SEAL Team 6 on our closest neighbor, and fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Republican Party is in total agreement that sending the American military to fight what is essentially a well-armed guerrilla force hiding amidst a civilian population is a good idea that has never backfired on this country in its long and quagmire-y history:
Republican congressmen Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) announced legislation to authorize the use of military force against fentanyl trafficking cartels in Mexico. […]
In the Senate, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) announced their own legislation, which would “give the military the authority to go after these organizations wherever they exist.”
Bill Barr wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal expressing support for the Crenshaw/Waltz bill, which is how you know it is a very bad idea. The Graham/Kennedy bill earned a public rebuke from Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. In response, Graham threatened to invoke the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that the US loves to use as a legal excuse for invading foreign nations.
The only missing element is resurrecting Zombie Black Jack Pershing to lead the American military against Pancho Villa and his revolutionaries. And we would not be surprised if Trump seriously thought that’s possible.
So enjoy the relative peace, America. Next year at this time, the 101st Airborne might be marching into Juarez to save us all from the scourge of fentanyl and cheap medicines and tourists walking our fair streets in those stupid woven hoodie ponchos they bought on vacation.
[Trump’s dumbass campaign site / Rolling Stone]
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>>President Trump will get the full cooperation of neighboring governments to expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign.<<
That's funny. He gets positively pissy when Letitia James does this to him.
So we're gonna invade OUR BIGGEST TRADING PARTNER? JFC, these people are indeed bugfuck insane. Is there literally no economist in their orbit that will point out how catastrophically destructive that would be?
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/mexico-surpasses-china-us-biggest-trading-partner-exports/#:~:text=For%20most%20of%20the%20past,biggest%20trading%20partner%20was%20Mexico.