No one can say that Donald Trump did not warn them. In an unusually detailed interview with Time magazine this week, the Republican nominee sent fresh chills down liberal spines by laying out what he would do if he recaptured the presidency.
This included rounding up millions of illegal immigrants, deploying the military to disperse protests on America’s streets, imposing loyalty tests on federal civil servants, letting Republican states monitor women’s pregnancies, and scrapping the White House’s pandemic preparedness office (because last time that went so swimmingly). He repeatedly declined to rule out violence if he lost in November.
America’s media is understandably focused on the radical import of Trump’s domestic agenda. But some of his clearest language was directed at Europe. There was nothing new in his plans to treat Nato like a fee-paying club — countries that miss their 2 per cent of GDP defence spending target would not be able to count on America coming to their aid. Nor was it a surprise that he would escalate his first term’s transatlantic trade war.