Trump promises to 'save' America with mix of lofty, vague, legally dubious policies (2024)

The way former President Trump tells it, the United States is a “crime-ridden mess” with “the worst border in the history of the world,” simultaneously headed for the next Great Depression and World War III.

Also according to Trump, electing him to a second term will change all of that almost immediately. Foreign wars will abruptly end as millions of undocumented immigrants are deported. The U.S. will “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!” and the associated revenue will “rapidly” transform a weak U.S. economy into one where “incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before.”

Trump’s critics say that’s all bluster. They say he’s a showman who speaks in lofty, populist rhetoric, but whose policies portend the opposite of his promises. Rather than America’s savior, they say, he would be its destroyer.

They note Trump has admitted he would act like a “dictator” on “Day One,” and warn that multiple conservative playbooks for his next term — including Project 2025 and Trump’s own Agenda 47 — suggest a full-scale adoption of authoritarianism.

They believe Trump would dismantle social safety nets for the poor and middle class, illegally discriminate against vulnerable groups such as LGBTQ+ people, and reduce the rights of women, including to reproductive healthcare. Empowered by a recent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents sweeping immunity, they fear, the twice-impeached, criminally convicted former president who helped incite an insurrection the last time he lost an election would be unleashed — and unhinged — if he wins.

The one thing Trump loyalists and critics agree on is that the candidate has said quite a lot about what he plans to do. How they feel about him often comes down to how they feel about those promises — many lofty, vague or legally dubious — and whether they take him at his word or believe he’s lying.

On immigration

Trump has been heavily focused on immigration, claiming an “invasion” of murderers, terrorists, “insane asylum” patients and fentanyl-smuggling gang members along the Mexico border.

Trump has said he will “seal the border” with a physical wall, finishing a job he prioritized during his first term, and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” He has promised to punish so-called sanctuary cities that don’t coordinate with federal immigration enforcement and to deport immigrants without considering asylum claims.

Trump has said he will order his military to attack foreign drug cartels, and seek the death penalty for “drug dealers, kingpins and human traffickers.” He has also said that on his first day in office, he will issue an executive order doing away with birthright citizenship — contradicting long-established constitutional precedent by simply declaring that the “correct interpretation” of the law is that U.S. citizenship is not granted to everyone born on U.S. soil.

Chris Zepeda-Millán, an associate professor of public policy, Chicana/o studies and political science at UCLA, is co-author of “Walls, Cages, and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era.”

His research has found most Americans did not support Trump’s first-term immigration policies, especially those that separated kids from their families, and do not believe a border wall would be effective. Zepeda-Millán said those who supported Trump’s policies — sometimes despite believing them to be ineffective — also held the “most racist views,” including general discomfort with growing Latino populations.

Trump’s hyper focus on immigrants today is an “anti-Latino symbolic action” aimed at those same people, Zepeda-Millán said — his way of “doubling down on getting the most racist white Americans out to vote.” Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris in recent polls on who would handle immigration better, including 51% to 46% in a New York Times/Siena College poll of key swing states.

Trump can be counted on to continue using racism to win political points, Zepeda-Millán said, but he doubts Trump will actually try to deport millions of people, many of whom would be farmworkers. “Everyone knows — including Trump — that significant parts of our economy are completely dependent on not only immigrants, but undocumented immigrants,” he said.

On abortion

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he campaigned on overturning the federal right to an abortion under Roe vs. Wade. As president, Trump appointed three of the six conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe in 2022, ushering in a wave of state abortion restrictions and bans.

Reproductive healthcare advocates have blamed Trump for decimating those rights, which most Americans support, and Harris has campaigned on restoring them.

In response, Trump has tried to walk a fine line on the issue, in part by dodging questions or answering them vaguely. He has taken credit for dismantling Roe and returning the power to restrict abortion to individual states, but resisted calls for a nationwide abortion ban. He has said he personally supports exceptions for abortion in cases of rape and incest and when a woman’s life is in danger, but also left the door open to further restrictions on commonly used abortion pills.

Arneta Rogers, executive director at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law School, said Trump paved the way for extreme antiabortion laws that are disproportionately harming people living “on the margins” — including people of color and the young, poor and queer — and should be made to own that legacy, because “the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

“When people show you who they are, you have to believe them,” Rogers said.

On the economy

Trump has promised to stop taxing Social Security income for seniors, and to stop taxing tips received by service workers. Both promises would cost the government billions, though the exact price tag is unknowable without more specifics. Harris has also pledged to work to end federal tax on tips.

Trump has said he would pay for his agenda by increasing domestic energy production through drilling and driving down fuel costs, by striking better trade deals with foreign countries and implementing tariffs on those that don’t fall in line, and by eliminating waste in the federal bureaucracy.

Blaming inflation in part on “unnecessary spending” by President Biden, Trump has said he would use a special “impoundment” authority — which presidents do not legally have — to withhold “large chunks” of each federal agency’s budget, regardless of how Congress allocated the funding. He has promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.

Susan Minato, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, a union representing service workers across Southern California and Arizona, called Trump’s promise to end taxes on tips a “red herring” that workers recognize as a distraction from his long record of attacking union labor and the Affordable Care Act, which provides many wage earners with vital healthcare.

“Our members see straight through it,” she said — and are spreading out across Arizona, a key swing state, to knock on doors and talk to working voters about Harris being a better option for the working class.

On the climate

Trump has promised to dismantle environmental programs and increase drilling for oil and gas.

Trump has ridiculed wind power as “weak” and electric vehicles as too expensive, and suggested a turn back to fossil fuels will rapidly reduce energy costs. He has promised to withdraw funding from clean energy initiatives under the so-called Green New Deal, ridiculing it as the “Green New Hoax.”

Project 2025 has rejected the threat of global warming outright, calling for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, to be dismantled as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

On Ukraine and Gaza

During his speech at the Republican convention last month, Trump said, “I don’t have wars,” that he “could stop wars with just a telephone call,” and that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza never would have started were he president.

The U.S. was at war in Afghanistan when Trump was president.

After a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month, Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine by convincing Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — to “negotiate a deal.”

Trump has repeatedly professed his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has devastated civilian populations, and said that any Jewish person considering voting for Harris “should have their head examined.” Agenda 47 says Trump will “deport pro-Hamas radicals” from the U.S. and make college campuses — the site of many pro-Palestinian demonstrations — “safe and patriotic again.”

Trump has also said he would build an “Iron Dome” over the entire U.S., referring to Israel’s short-range antimissile defense system. Experts have said building such a system in the U.S. would not make sense given the nation’s size, geographic position and existing defense capabilities, but allowed that Trump may be using the familiar name of Israel’s system as a “metaphor” for a more complex antimissile defense system in the U.S.

The U.S. is threatened by unmanned aerial systems, cruise missiles and other weapons systems, said Tom Karako, a missile defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is already in the process of building out its defenses.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from The Times on the above policy areas.