“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results.” That was former President Donald Trump on Wednesday, playing cute with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s question over whether he’d accept the outcome of Wisconsin’s presidential election. As my colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim pointed out, Trump has a long track record of similar statements, offering sham justifications to disguise the fact that he doesn’t feel bound by election results. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, laid bare the true consequences of this shell game.
But this latest instance — coupled with statements Trump recently made in his interview with Time magazine — highlight a disturbing and underappreciated aspect of his 2024 campaign. Trump’s approach to election results has become his approach (and his devotees’ approach) to the law more broadly. Even as their policies and rhetoric have become more extreme, Trump and his MAGA acolytes are already lining up the justifications — legal and otherwise — to buttress their extremist and authoritarian agenda in ways that simply didn’t occur to the first Trump administration.
It’s easy to forget how Trump’s immigration policy has shifted in eight years, even as it has remained consistently bigoted.
The deportation of millions, the deployment of the National Guard and even the military domestically, the firing of prosecutors, the autocratic expansion of executive authority, the potential weaponization of the Comstock Act to ban abortion: all of these will have excuses that range from “tendentious” to “outright fiction.” Or, as Trump told Time: “I’ll be doing everything on a very legal basis.”
Take, for example, immigration: It’s easy to forget how Trump’s immigration policy has shifted in eight years, even as it has remained consistently bigoted. His 10-point plan on immigration in 2016 consisted of the border wall and a bunch of truisms. (“We’ll build safe zones, which is something I think all of us want to see.”) The military was absent; the word “invasion” was nowhere to be found, and the courts barely merited a mention.
Contrast this with the Time interview, where Trump defends deploying the military both at the border and inland to deport “15 million and maybe as many as 20 million” undocumented immigrants — the equivalent of deporting the entire state of Florida. With bigger autocratic moves come bigger fictions. Migrants are no longer just “bringing crime”; Trump has created a whole separate (and demonstrably false) category of “migrant crime.”
Domestic deployment of the armed forces would seem to violate an 1878 ban on using troops against civilians. But this Trump, unlike the 2016 version, has a legal facade ready to go: Undocumented immigrants are invaders, not civilians, and “I will be complying with court orders.” Those two sentiments may seem difficult to reconcile, given that the former categorization flies in the face of legal precedent. But as recent oral arguments over presidential immunity have illustrated, precedent means little to this Supreme Court.
Immigration is just the tip of a very dangerous iceberg. In close advisers like Stephen Miller and aligned projects like Project 2025, we can see not only the policies but also the underlying justifications and legal authorities they have ready to go. Part of this effort is practical. Trump’s presidency was rife with policy efforts that either never got past the planning stage or wasted months (or even years) in false starts. The reality that Mexico wouldn’t pay for his border wall meant that less than 20% had been built when he left office. His administration spent the better part of a year tossing out different iterations of Trump’s self-described “Muslim ban,” searching for a version that could pass muster in the courts.
Phrases like "if everything’s honest" and "if things were getting out of control" create loopholes as wide as they are chilling.
Trump’s supporters are determined not to waste time this round. There’s no better example of this than the Comstock Act: Rather than wait for congressional Republicans to pass a new national abortion ban, they could simply resurrect a “zombie law” to criminalize any materials used in abortions and count on the more Trump-friendly courts to back them up.
But mostly this effort is political. As writer Brian Beutler puts it, “To the MAGA core, he offers a bloody revanchism; to the uncommitted, a series of mollifying assurances.” Most of Trump’s signature policy proposals — such as a military deportation force and huge tariff increases — and those of his most devoted advisers are unpopular. So Trump balances the lawless extremes of his ambitions by minimizing how radical his plans sound, hoping to avoid scaring persuadable voters with his authoritarian signals. “When we talk military, generally speaking, I talk National Guard,” he says, as if those two terms are interchangeable. “But if I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military.” Just like he’ll accept the results “if everything’s honest.”
“I don’t think they’re bold actions,” Trump tells Time of his policies, “I think they’re actions that are common sense.” But phrases like “if everything’s honest” and “if things were getting out of control” create loopholes as wide as they are chilling. It’s easy to imagine, for example, a deportation force being sent to New York and then beefed up when local residents resist — with horrible consequences. But if the platitudes get him back in the White House, he and his followers will move swiftly to welcome that horror.
