ELECTION 2024
Trump’s Second-Term Plans: Anti-‘Woke’ University, ‘Freedom Cities’
Former president wants more active government, upending GOP orthodoxy
By Andrew Restuccia and Aaron Zitner
Updated Dec. 2, 2023 12:25 am ET
WASHINGTON—As he campaigns to retake the White House, Donald Trump has increasingly tossed aside the principles of limited government and local control that have defined the Republican Party for decades.
The former president is laying plans to wield his executive authority to influence school curricula, prevent doctors from providing medical interventions for young transgender people and pressure police departments to adopt more severe anticrime policies. All are areas where state or local officials have traditionally taken the lead.
He has said he would establish a government-backed anti-“woke” university, create a national credentialing body to certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values” and erect “freedom cities” on federal land. He has pledged to marshal the power of the government to investigate and punish his critics.
It is a governing platform barely recognizable to prior generations of Republican politicians, who campaigned against one-size-fits-all federal dictates and argued that state legislators, mayors and town halls were best positioned to oversee their communities. While many of his proposals would be difficult to achieve, the second-term agenda outlined by Trump could require waves of new federal intervention, even as he calls for firing government workers, neutering the “deep state” and cutting regulations.
“If Trump wins, the days of small government conservatism may be over,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who served as the policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
A transformed GOP Agenda
For Trump, a second presidential term would mark the culmination of a yearslong campaign to reshape the party in his image, moving away from the core ideals espoused for decades by Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and other idols of the conservative movement. Instead, Trump has rallied his millions of supporters in part by tapping into the cultural and social grievances that animate the conservative base.
The rapid shift in the priorities of the party has led to something of an existential crisis for longtime Republican officials. They have privately said the GOP of today is unrecognizable from even a decade ago, when many Republicans were campaigning on leaner government, balanced budgets, entitlement reform and free trade.
As president, Trump presided over four straight years of rising annual deficits, signing bipartisan budget agreements that boosted federal spending. He launched a trade war with China. And earlier this year, he warned his party not to “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.”
“What do we stand for as Republicans? The orthodoxy is a little bit upside down,” said Margaret Spellings, who led the Education Department and the Domestic Policy Council during the George W. Bush administration.
Fighting the culture wars
The former president’s allies contend that the party needed shaking up, and that Republicans were losing elections because they misjudged what American voters wanted. They contend that government intervention is a necessary corrective to what they view as overreach at the hands of liberals promoting their own ideas on diversity and education.
Brooke Rollins—a Trump White House official who now leads the America First Policy Institute, a think tank run by former Trump aides—argued that the majority of the public thinks that “the federal government [should] ensure that it is working on behalf of the people.”
“When local or state government drifts away from that, either unintentionally or intentionally, then I think that the vision is with an America First approach that the federal government will lean in and pull freedom back to where it should be,” Rollins said.
A Trump campaign spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s approach has won partial buy-in from powerful conservative groups. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said conservative policy has to “account for the reality of the damage that has been imposed by the culture war.”
In dozens of policy proposals outlined in speeches and on his campaign website, Trump has called for vastly expanding the power of the presidency, shifting authority away from federal agencies and to himself. He has said he would slash major federal programs and revive a mandate from his first term to eliminate two regulations for every new one that is put in place.
“For anyone to say he loves big government—that’s just wrong,” Rollins said.
More government means more bureaucracy
Implementing many of his other proposals could require building additional layers of government bureaucracy, some of which could overrule or duplicate existing state and local efforts. Credentialing teachers on the federal level could mean creating a new government body that would complicate existing state certification efforts.
Setting up a new government-backed university could require a labyrinthine system of government contracts to hire instructors and staff. Trump’s proposals to direct the government to investigate everything from MSNBC to hospitals could require hiring additional lawyers and other employees to carry out the probes.
Other vaguely defined ideas—like Trump’s proposals to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to declassify and publish documents on “Deep State spying” and an independent auditing system to monitor U.S. intelligence agencies—would also likely require new government programs.
Washington policy-making veterans said many of Trump’s plans are unlikely to come to fruition even if he wins a second term, citing logistical and financial hurdles, potential opposition from Congress and likely court challenges.
The former president’s proposals “might make for good stump speech fodder (at least for his MAGA base), but are miles from the real world of programs and policies,” Michael Petrilli, an education policy analyst and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said in an email. “The point of these proposals is to take sides in the culture war, not to present a governing agenda.”
Write to Andrew Restuccia at
andrew.restuccia@wsj.com and Aaron Zitner at
aaron.zitner@wsj.com
