Here's exactly what the first year of a second Trump Administration will look like

Concentrate: Day One is coming

Watching Donald Trump flounce around in front of television cameras over the past week with far-right shill Laura Loomer on his arm—openly daring everyone to assume that the political had become the personal and that Mar-a-Lago now had a new, freshly Botoxed Eva Braun haunting its gold-leaf bathrooms—I couldn’t help but think we had entered a new phase of brazenness that we need to read as a louder-than-usual warning of what a new Trump Administration will be like should they win in November.

It’s obvious that Trump and his whole campaign were caught off-guard by the Democrats subbing Harris for Biden; that the debate with Harris further damaged his grip on the White House; and that he—they—are now responding in the only way they know how: by doubling down on the outrage.

Not only is Trump flaunting his relationship with Loomer, the sort of relationship that would normally—demonstrably—destroy someone running for President of the United States, but we have his running mate openly admitting that they are manipulating the media.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do,” Vance said.

Well, of course it is, and we all know that Trump has had the political media on a string since he first rode down those escalators back in 2015. But showing us how the sausage is made in the blatant way that Vance did with the hapless Dana Bash suggests a new level of shamelessness.

The gloves are off, they will take a victory in November as a green light for their extremism, and it is increasingly apparent that immigrants will bear the brunt.

In the face of this, Harris-campaign spokespeople like Pete Buttigieg politely explaining to us that all Trump is doing is trying to distract us from other matters is the worst sort of West-Wing naivety imaginable. As are the Harris campaign’s plans to spend the remaining weeks of the campaign doing more sit-down interviews with mainstream journalists. Analyst Brian Beutler notes, “This is…fine. But it’s also myopic.

“There’s so much unfolding before our eyes or obscured just out of view that might maintain or build Harris’s margin, and Democrats should exploit those things, too.”

Beutler has a commendable real media view of how these things work, but this isn’t about media strategy. Anti-immigration is a genuine, central policy-and-who-we-are matter for Trump and his GOP and we can’t just analyse these things in terms of “how they play”. The truth is, they play just fine with a significant section of the electorate, but it is what happens next—in the event Trump is reelected—that should concern us.

The Trump campaign’s attacks on legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—including the way it has mobilised fascist militias like the Proud Boys and other thugs—along with his flaunting of the openly racist Laura Loomer¹, is all part of a grooming process, setting us up for the horrors that are to come; for the sort of authoritarianism that a second Trump Administration will represent; a process of normalisation we shouldn’t underestimate.

Trump has his mojo back, and weird and brat will no longer cut it.

In her book, Into That Darkness, journalist Gitta Sereny interviews Franz Stangl, the former Commandant of the Treblinka death camp, and she asks him why he bothers to humiliate and torture his prisoners when he knows full well that he is about to kill them all.

“To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies,” Stengl replies. “To make it possible for them to do what they did.”

The white, patriarchal, Christianist supremacy that underlies Maga-Nation is deeply inflected by the sort of racist demonisation of immigrants with which all far-right politics is concerned. Hitler’s Germany may be the extreme case, but that extremity allows us to clearly see the outlines of how the process works, and so considering that history will help us see what Trump has in store.

There is no doubt that Trump and his team are trying as hard as they can to dominate the news cycle, and the more outrageous the lie, the more likely the mainstream media is to allow them to do that: yes, the media is that irresponsible.² But what Trump and Vance are doing now, openly and flagrantly, is confirming that hatred of immigrants is central to the Maga GOP project and that if they are elected in November they will use attacks on migrants, not to distract us from other things, or dominate the news cycle, but because that’s what they believe in.

If we are going to draw lessons from history, then the institution we need to understand is the concentration camp because knowing that history will make clear what the first year of a new Trump Administration will look like.

Day One is coming and this is what it will look like