Who’s scared of a Trump redux?

Publications overseas are drawing scenarios about how a second presidency for Donald Trump would look like if he returns to the White House and the majority, if not all, paint a picture fraught with trepidation.

One Trisha Lachman, writing to the editor of the Athens County Independent, opines that a second Trump presidency “is the stuff of nightmares.” She fears that if he wins, he would usher in a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.

That thought echoes Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton’s own chilling warnings about what could happen if the former president is back in office.

Says Bolton in the foreword to his book, The Room Where It Happened: “A mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be president; if his first four years were bad, a second will be worse. Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term.”

Bolton’s very much concerned that Trump would resort to hard isolationism, including pulling the US out of NATO, ceasing support for Ukraine while it struggles against Russia, and emboldening China in its quest to subdue Taiwan.

Interviewed by Time’s Eric Cortellessa in April (How Far Trump Would Go, Time.com, 30 April 2024) Trump revealed his agenda in a second term. A priority would be removing 11 million illegal immigrants from the US, deploying the military inland and on the border for this purpose; withholding, at his personal discretion, funds already appropriated by Congress; sacking US Attorneys disregarding orders to prosecute his perceived foes, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement dating back to America’s founding; and weighing pardons for each supporter accused of attacking the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or have been convicted by a jury.

Further, Trump would gut the US civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his administration “with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Said Cortellessa at the start of the Time interview, “Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.”

Which brings one to imagine, if Trump returns to the White House, a US president more ruthless and vengeful, particularly after he was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush money criminal trial in end-May — an unprecedented, historic verdict that made him the first former US President to be convicted of a felony.

Despite the conviction, Trump — the GOP’s presumptive nominee in the coming presidential elections — can still run for office. And could very well win, a chilling prospect for many worried that Trump’s open praise of controversial leaders and autocrats like the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could be an indication that his would be an imperial presidency if he wins in November.

Warned Time, “To supporters, the prospect of Trump 2.0, unconstrained and backed by a movement of true believers, offers revolutionary promise. To much of the rest of the nation and the world, it represents an alarming risk. A second Trump term could bring, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkley has put it, ‘the end of our democracy and the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.’”

And how would a Trump victory affect Asia?

In the Time interview, Trump said he might or might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country was not paying enough for its own defense.

There could be shifts under a second Trump administration, including troop withdrawals and changes to mutual defense agreements, say experts concerned about the unpredictability of Trump’s potential policy agenda and how this could impact America’s strategic alliances in the Indo-Pacific region, the Philippines included.

Philippine Ambassador to Washington Jose Manuel Romualdez, however, doesn’t seem worried. “We are confident there will be no major changes,” he said, stressing that President Biden was only “continuing” what had already been Trump’s policy in the region and the South China Sea.

But political science and history specialist Ramon Belleno III says that seeing how conservative Republicans are, “if Trump sees China as a threat to Americans’ interests, he might think twice about US military support for the Philippines which could trigger heightened conflict in the South China Sea. He would think about the costs to the US if conflict erupts.”

It would be a real test to see if Philippine-US bilateral ties are, indeed, solid as the current Biden administration says they are.

“Trump is very protective of US interests,” stressed Belleno.

Thus, if a situation arises in which he has to choose between the Philippines and the US, whose interests do you think Trump — as lord overseer of America once more after November — would protect?