 Welcome back to Think Tech. Welcome back to a view from the North with our old friend Ken Rogers. The question is, what will Trump do when he's elected? If and when he's elected, we'll see what the probabilities are. And the subtitle is, You Won't Like It At All. Welcome to the show, Ken. Think of this subject as a very scary one. I think it's scarier for the United States than for Canada. But if Trump's elected, I just think it's nice and simple the end of democracy as it's now known. Well, let's break it down a little bit. I made a little list. It's out of the Makato. It's not a happy list, but here's the list. It's not just that these things would happen in the U.S. because they will have implications beyond the U.S., including Canada. So the first thing on my little list is he would appoint a new and completely loyal cabinet. He's had a problem with members of his first cabinet. They've turned against him. They're part of the vermin that he will ultimately punish. But he will now appoint a new and completely loyal cabinet, which will never question him, which will do anything and everything he asks, including things that are clearly illegal and unconstitutional. Any thoughts about what that means to have a cabinet of acolytes? I think that the early days of a new Trump presidency would be focused on revenge. And secondly, on the elimination of a good percentage of the existing civil service. And really the whole thing will be oriented to which department can they gut first and which can they gut the fastest. And one would think of the FBI and the CIA would be reasonably high in the list. You know, ones that would be wonderful and expand might be Department of Energy. Certainly eliminate anybody in that department that's worried about climate change, but they would really push that. And I think that would occupy a fair length of time. You know, is all of the revenge actions would get some opposition from, you know, a variety of quarters in the U.S. But I don't know whether they would be sufficient that he would invoke the Insurrection Act. But I certainly think if there's any significant opposition that he would have no hesitation whatsoever to use the U.S. military to try to, you know, kick the public into line. Yeah, no, I didn't include the military on my list, but you're absolutely right. He tried to suborn and corrupt the military in many ways, including having all these retired military officers in his cabinet, which actually I don't think that's legal. But in this case, he would switch out the anybody at the management level, you know, the chief of staff people. And he would again, you know, find acolytes who would take his every command. And then he would command them, I think. He would command them to do things that were completely illegally make him his personal army, his personal military. While he was chasing Millie, General Millie around and trying to put him in jail and have him executed, I think, is what Trump said he wanted to do with Millie. So he would have, he would set it up so that they were all loyal to him, just like the cabinet. And he could have them act as his personal army. And you're right, the Insurrection Act would come into play. If anybody, you know, I mean, you know, we've been using the word insurrection on the January 6 protest. But in fact, the Insurrection Act would be something that he would use to quell any protest against him or against his illegal activities. So you're right. The military was a key part to that. You know, and you're right, getting even would be a big feature. And I don't think it's that hard, you know, because he will have an attorney general that does his bidding. He will have, he will completely, like maybe Clark, you know, the guy who almost got to be attorney general in the last days of Trump's administration, who is an acolyte. And he would have the attorney general, you know, go after anybody on a little list, the Makata list. And he was, there's a lot of people on that list. Anybody never spoke out in public against him. Anybody who turned against him, everybody who was in the Oval Office or in the cabinet or wrote a book or had an article or an interview against him. There's a lot of people. And these people would be on the Makata list. And he would have the Department of Justice, the Attorney General prosecute them. Well, that wouldn't take much effort on his part. Just make the list. Well, he may be able to get, there are smart Republicans in my mind and there are some smart Republicans that will simply salute and do whatever Trump wishes. And a smart Republican would say, well, if you want to get revenge and beat people up, do it via the tax department or somewhere that's a little sneakier than simply, you know, trying to throw Joe Biden in jail. You know, or throw Hillary Clinton in jail or, or, you know, General Milley or somebody like that. In theory, Congress is about the only check on the president and, and really, under the Trump sort of measure of dominance, Congress seems pretty helpless. Like you can even have appointments of what, what appointments are Congress to make. Well, Trump kind of got around that the last time by having everybody in a temporary position. Yeah, that's right. Recess, recess appointments, and they wouldn't be confirmed, wouldn't need to be confirmed. Yeah, I absolutely agree. That's a very salient point here. And by the way, it's not, it's not sure that either house will be a Democratic house next time. You know, the Senate may turn Republican too. So if you had a house and a Senate that's Republican, he'd control it all because he controls the party, including of course the right wing group, the Freedom Caucus. Yeah. And what comes out of this? Go ahead. And a question that I'm not sure of is, is how could he get rid of the filibuster? If he controlled it all, you know, it's possible to get rid of it. Well, if there, if let's say there's 45 or 48 Democratic senators, you know, it's pretty hard to get to the 60 level. Do you need the 60 level to get rid of the filibuster? I don't remember the vote count, but it depends on how many he had. And if he could get rid of the filibuster that, you know, the minority party would have no chance. But even assuming that he can't, even assuming that filibuster rule stays in place, which I think you're right, he would want to get rid of it and have a free path to wherever he wants to go. I think the fact is that Congress right now is pretty much ineffectual. And the likelihood is at the least. I mean, the best case analysis, it would remain ineffectual during his administration. And the worst case analysis is he would control both houses and maybe even without the filibuster. Congress is not going to be an obstacle to him, at least as it presently appears. I wanted to talk about civil liberties because that's the part that really scares me. We have civil liberties, you know, the Bill of Rights, so to speak, 10 amendments. We have the rule of law, where you have judges who follow precedent and try to do the right thing. And then you have the Constitution, which we find may not be as respected or enforceable as we saw it. I mean, one good example is the 14th Amendment, Section 3, which prohibits anyone involved in an insurrection from holding federal office, where there's all these issues, unbelievable. And I'm not at all confident that the Supreme Court will enforce it on the plain language of that section. So the Constitution, you know, is at issue 10. And if he were in office, there would be a lot of issues and he would ignore it. In fact, he said that. He said that he doesn't, you know, he doesn't respect the Constitution and he wants to knock off parts of it. Well, one of the very unusual things about the American governmental system is that the President really has pretty absolute power. If he works that, you know, the President can, you know, that all of the civil service in theory works for him. The FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Tax Department, they all work for him and that if Congress, you know, has the ability to adjust the budget, you know, but if, you know, if the existing Congress is made up of a whole bunch of Josh Hawley's and Jim Jordan's, what the heck could you expect other than, you know, whatever Trump wanted to do with any department and anything would happen? I mean, I really think there's zero chance that democracy would survive if Trump has reappointed. He has said, he has said as much. And, you know, if you string together his comments over the last couple of months, you will see exactly where he's headed. It's not a, it's not going to be a surprise. These possibilities are not going to be a surprise. You know, Congress has public policy issues, personal rights issues like abortion, like gun control, like bigotry and anti-Semitism and the like. I don't think Congress would, you know, would intercede on any of that and Trump has a way of fomenting it. So at the end of the day, abortion would be impossible in this country. And he would take steps to make sure that bigotry was happening all over, you know, divide and conquer. If you have a country, you know, in a civil war that's divided in so many ways, then you as the autocrat are more powerful. Standard operating procedure. So the condition of Congress is really important. And if they follow him on those kinds of things and his policies about those issues, it'll really get worse. And it'll affect anyone. You know, the loss of civil liberties, the loss of, you know, these social protections is going to affect everybody in the country. That's why it's extraordinary that there are people out there, Ken, and not kidding, who would vote for him. Either they know what you and I are saying here today or they don't know, they would nevertheless vote for him and bring the whole shebang down on their own heads, shooting themselves in the foot in every single way. We just think we talked a moment ago about, you know, civil rights, the Bill of Rights includes the First Amendment, right? What would happen to the newspapers and the news organizations in the country? You mean all the fake news? All the fake news. And they could go away. And there would be no news. It would be propaganda just like Putin. Well, I would expect that, you know, he'll take, in the early days, the items like the Revenge and obliterating the civil service will take top priority. But I think that he will have a mixture of other things that would have some support from some circles. Example, the southern border. You know, if you just start and take whatever policy there is, just change it to say the doors closed, period, stop. You know, like that would be a popular decision for a lot of people. And a lot of his base in certainly, you know, states like Texas would think that's a wonderful thing and probably ignore what's happening elsewhere. Yeah. Well, remember, he also said he wanted to, he didn't like migrants too much, and he was going to put them in camps. And those, you know, those would be detention, large detention camps with thousands of people in them, either, you know, in Mainland US or in Guantanamo or somewhere like that. And so you completely deprive them of any rights. So I think he would, yes, I agree with you. He would close the border. There would be those who support like Abbott in Texas and many people in Texas who support that. But those are the people that he caught and put in camps, they would be, they would be in terrible shape because he wouldn't offer them any civil liberties at all. And in fact, nobody would have, you know, civil liberties and the Department of Justice wouldn't enforce it. And he would be, you know, we saw him appoint over 300 judges to the federal bench in his first term. And it really turned a lot of them, like Eileen Cannon, you know, into Trumpers. And I mean, they remain loyal to him, even till today in the Mar-a-Lago case. But I think he would do it again, wouldn't he? He would pump out more judges. And including Supreme Court judges, we turn further right. I would suspect they will figure, he would figure out a way to eliminate existing judges. I don't know how, but I think that, that, you know, changing the judiciary is much, much like eliminate the New York Times, eliminate the Washington Post, eliminate, you know, press generally or get it. It's bias, press, it only reports what he wants, not unlike the Russian propaganda machine. However, you know, the, a few of the actions would remain somewhat constant. That is, Biden has been pretty strong in anti-China moves. And I think that that would be about the same with Trump, even though I think he likes China, Russia, Iran, North Korea more than he likes Britain, France, Canada, Australia. You know, he just seems to ally with autocrats, even though the theoretical philosophy is different than the American way of life as it exists today. But I don't see too much that would remain wonderful about the United States. You know, it would be a major problem for Canada, about the only thing in Canada that would probably do well if Trump's re-elected is our oil and gas industry. You know, he certainly wants to promote, you know, no climate rules, no environmental rules for the American oil and gas industry and wants to just, you know, turn up the jets as much as you can to pump out more oil, more gas, and try to dominate the world energy supply. And one of the keys to LNG is that, you know, is it would be easy for the U.S. under a Trump admin to import natural gas from Canada and convert it into LNG in the United States. Basically taking a good percentage of what it's worth, you know, making it American solely because, you know, Canada has trouble with policies that would get pipelines to any of the oceans. Yep. Well, you know, I think oil and gas is just sort of the, it's a big thing, but it's the top of the iceberg in the sense that we would have a transactional president. In other words, if somebody would pay him to adopt the policy, some large multinational corporation would have you would pay him to adopt the policy like oil and gas, he would. And we, you know, we have to remember that during his first administration, he was in there trying to make money for himself and his family. You know, he used every angle he could possibly use to make money to, you know, become more and more ridiculously wealthy, at least in his own mind. And it's like other autocrats. Other autocrats are worth billions and billions and billions. Putin, for example, God knows what Xi Jinping is worth. And, you know, I just saw the other day that some of these Hamas guys, you know, living in Qatar, they're worth billions. Well, the people are starving and gas is so interesting. But anybody who's an autocrat, including Victor Orban in Hungary, can get to be very wealthy on this transactional basis, where organizations, companies, who knows, people who support a given program will pay you, you know, and give you benefit if you adopt their policies. And that's what he would do. It would be unbridled. Oil and gas is the beginning, but just every other thing. I mean, for example, weapons manufacturers, right? We would be, we wouldn't do anything good in terms of, you know, Eastern Europe, but we would be selling weapons all over the world. And they would be paying him off for that. And he would give them benefits for that. There are others too. When you mentioned Eastern Europe, I think one of the first people on his list of revenge would be Volinsky, you know, so that, you know, hello, Putin, you know, I've just got elected yesterday, you can have Ukraine. That's what he said. He said that he said he would end the war immediately upon his election. And that means he would give Ukraine and Zolensky to Putin right away. Day one. Easy. The stroke of a pen. Well, importantly, you might have the day before that he might, you know, pull the US out of NATO. I think that would be one key thing. He doesn't seem to like international organizations more as US can live on isolation. You know, well, certainly for his lifetime, that might work. Just what's left after he's too old to be alive or somebody dispenses with him along the way. The, you know, where I certainly think that, you know, there'd be a big mess. Certainly the world's effort to deal with climate change would be dramatically reversed. You know, is certainly he doesn't give a hoot about any of the environmental issues and, you know, the anything that's being done will stop being done if it's taking any capital, any money and the choice of in the various departments that they dismantle the civil service. The first people to be kicked out will be anybody that's dealing with climate change. You know, he did a lot to undermine those agencies in his first term. Somebody I know in state government took a trip to Washington shortly after Trump was elected and it was in 2017. And he walked around the State Department, for example, and you could hear a pin drop, he said when he came back, that Trump had somehow dispatched all these staff members in the State Department and in the environmental protection part of the government. And I, these agencies have already been reduced in the first, and I don't know if Biden has fixed that, but it's very clear that if Trump is reelected, he will wipe out some of these agencies that offend him, the environmental agencies, the foreign relations agencies and so forth. And the risk of that, and it was an article recently that I saw to this point, is that if you go isolationist, and you reduce government, and you have an autocrat, you have, of course, you shift the world's power, you shift the power blocks and you have large power blocks, but you also have a higher risk of World War. You have a higher risk of one country invading another and creating a war. And this was happening both for World War I and obviously for World War II. So it's risky business when you go isolationist. The US was quite isolationist before World War II. And had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR would have had a problem in getting people to support a war. And because they were isolationists, you know. Germany might have won. You bet. We hesitate to think of that, but those are the stakes we're playing with here. Yes, well, I mean, you could extrapolate and say much like one of the early things would be to gift Putin, Ukraine, but the next would be, you know, even though he may have anti-China policies with regard to trade and such things. Simply say, well, you can have Taiwan. Right. Exactly. But like, US won't do any fight stuff. No, under him, the US would not resist that, right? He would treat it as a transaction with Xi Jinping. Yep. And to the extent that he supports the military and cosies up to them and, you know, corrupts their leadership, that's not so that he would have a strong military to defend other places in the world. No, he's an isolationist. So what is he doing it for? To have a military that works for him domestically to convert the US military to his own army. That's what I think. That's why he cosies up. That's why he and the magas like to give the military a lot of money so the military feels good about it and would follow his instructions. But I want to go back to the social safety net, you know. There's talk that Mike Johnson wants to undo social security and Obamacare. Actually, yesterday, Trump said he was one of his platform positions is he wants to reveal repeal Obamacare, although it has been very successful as it is not. It's not socialized medicine, but it's more democratic medicine. He wants to repeal it if he gets elected. And the social safety net programs, there's so many of them, he would he would repeal them all. So what happens to the country, if he gets into office, all these people who were uninformed and vote for him, they wouldn't have the benefit of social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, all that gone. I believe it would go a step further. Look at the area of education. And really, if you look at what the major Republican donors keep pushing is you shouldn't really have public education. People should, it should all be private education. And if you can't pay for it too bad, right, you know, I really think that that's that's how do you eliminate the size of government. And if you keep pushing that to the to the limit, you know, that that's one of the key areas that, you know, how to reduce an awful lot of, you know, civil servants is, you know, just if all education. You know, is paid for and and, you know, your thing about Obamacare, you really get, you know, a variety of the health plans. And you simply say everything should be pay as you go. The government's not going to subsidize too much, then you get less and less and less government. And for an autocrat that generally is a good thing. Yeah, well, no, and part of the educational the other, the other hand clapping on the educational system is that so people are not so well educated. On the other hand, they listened to right wing radio right wing television and propaganda. And he would encourage that he's trying to knock off the funding for PBS and NPR incredible. So the whole, the whole complexion of public media would change. So the one hand you have people who are not educated, but they can't afford it. And on the other hand, you have people who are being educated de facto by right wing propaganda organizations. That's what happens in Russia. Those kids are getting it every day. People are getting it with Russian TV. And he is training them to think like he wants them to think. So you recreate public opinion that way. That's what a good autocrat would always want to do. Importantly, though, you can like, I would not see the Republican side that Trump led Republican side. I really be eliminating, you know, education in the sense of engineering and sciences. You know, the, the idea would be nobody should get a PhD in English or philosophy or psychology or, you know, any of the arts. I mean, who cares about that from an autocrat point of view? You know, we don't want educated people that have these liberal subjects as their background knowledge. You know, because most people that take those subjects are small l liberal in most of their thinking. You know, but you've got, you know, for an autocrat to be successful, you need a good strong army and you need good engineering. Engineering and science people and, you know, basically you got, you know, examples of how that works. Well, now the way China will go to, let's say the best universities in the world and they'll put up a research grant of some sort. And so you got PhD students lining up to, to join in the research project that China's learning all about. Yeah, and they bring it back to China. You know, like indirect way of, of stealing, you know, any technological improvements that the West makes. You know, the Chinese get a pipeline into how to, how to get it for free and to try to not just catch up or stay up, stay even, but try to even get ahead of where the US and the EU are now in terms of any technological advantages. Yeah. So, you know, if you shake it and bake it, what it looks like here when we examine what will Trump do when he's reelected. And the implications are very scary. As civil liberties, the rule of law that would be gone. The social safety net that would be gone. People would be poor. And they wouldn't, they wouldn't know too much. They wouldn't realize what was happening to them to the extent they protested to the extent that anybody spoke up against this autograph who is increasingly powerful. And those people would be prosecuted or put in jail for no reason. And, you know, think that's what Putin does. And then, of course, this is the saying that if you don't like it and you want to go into protest mode, if you want to organize something, you know, on the street, he brings the army in. And they quell that disturbance. So autocracy can be very unpleasant. And at the end of the day, if you don't have a social safety net, you go hungry. And if you don't have medical support, you get sick and you die. It's life and death we're talking about. To extend the American ideal, and I suppose this, you know, has a kind of effect on Canada, we should talk about that. To extend the American ideal seeks to have a good life for everybody, good, healthy, well-fed life for everybody. That would really disappear. And people would be dying for one reason or another. That's the problem of autocracy. The society would be reshaped. The demograph, the demography would be reshaped. And you wouldn't have much of a life left. It really sounds bloody awful. Now question, how would this affect Canada? Well, it would affect Canada completely in the sense that we have, you know, many thousand miles of border that, you know, today you could, you know, if you really wanted to, you could walk across without anybody even knowing it. You know, just that it just so happens that people come and go through the border crossings, you know, like good citizens should. But one of the starts, if he immediately started closing the border, the south border, including all the legal crossings and looking, you know, a for, you know, people smuggling. But if you're going to really grind down on people smuggling, you're also say, well, we're also doing drug smuggling at the same time. Well, it won't take much before the drug smuggling to switch. You know, they'll fly to Canada somehow or get to Canada because, you know, Canada is easier to get into if you're nefarious. Because we have an unlimited number of borders and then try to get into the US. Well, that would then start causing border problems between Canada and the US. And there was some Trump or not too long ago saying that the US should build a border wall across Canada as well. You know, well, if you carry the Trump mess to some limits, you would start to get that way. I mean, in eventually the US would be more like Russia economically than like the US is today or to a lesser extent, China. Where in Russia, you know, nearly half of their gross domestic product is spent on defense. You know, that's what keeps Putin in power, you know, and that would be the autocratic move. Well, it'll take enough years that Trump would be dead by then. You know, given that his age, I don't think he's going to, you know, keep all his marbles if he has that many now for too many more years. So that, you know, who's going to replace him or what's going to happen then? You know, and now I'm sure Trump himself doesn't care about that. However, in the Canadian scenario, we're sitting in the short run, one of the big defensive things is the North American defense like NORAD. And you have all of these bases in the northern parts of Canada that are all now pretty obsolete. You know, if you look at the problems in Israel right now of their, you know, ability to, you know, knock off missiles. They're doing a phenomenal job, but they're still a big, you know, percentage, an unacceptable percentage getting through. You know, well, you know, if it's Russia or China firing or North Korea or Iran sending icy international continental ballistic missiles, you know, at hypersonic speed, you know, certainly the NORAD system would knock those out, you know, so that, you know, a good autocrat or even, you know, a Biden type of men should be shoring up that NORAD system, you know, and I think that would be a high priority. And but, you know, how Trump would accomplish that is probably different than how Biden would do it. Like Biden agrees, you know, thinks in terms of cooperation. Some Trump would do it, you know, coercively or, or, you know, just send in the army, you know, obliterate Canada. Part of what you're saying I think relates to the enormous possibilities of AI and facial recognition, you know, think of, think of the suppression of civil rights in China. An autocrat in this country would use the same technology, would learn from China, would identify everybody, we'd all be in a database elsewhere, and it would be brutal for us. Life here would be brutal. And, you know, and I think there would be violence and maybe if he died during his office, or if he passed it off to another autocrat. Gee whiz, it would be hard to live here. And especially for people like you and me, well, you live in Canada, but especially people like you and me, you know, who remember the good old days. And we would miss the good old days when we saw everything deteriorating around us, including street violence. You know, I think at the end of the day, you know, the bottom line of everything we've talked about is violence in the street, or a complete dissatisfaction with the quality of life in the country and the economy in the country. It's another discussion. But it seems to me that, you know, you talk about building walls between the U.S. and Canada, and between the U.S. and Mexico. So, Canada will have an onslaught of immigrant migrants from the United States who want to live the Canadian dream, because it'll be the only dream around. And there'll be people who want to go south across the border from the United States to Mexico, because it'll be reversed. Migrants go the other way then. And they go to Europe. I know people who are planning to do that. They're making plans. They are worried about what might happen in this country, what is happening in this country, or Asia. So, I think the world is going to reform itself and travel in migrancy. Yes, that's the right word. Migrancy is going to increase if he is elected. I believe that it'll be worse than that, because I really think that if he had his way, and it was simple, and it wouldn't be simple to just start off with, this is the objective, is the United States to be a white only country? What do you do? What do you do? You make scapegoats, and then you somehow punish them. How do you get rid of 100 million Americans that are not white? When you mention the Canada thing, energy independence is a big item, not like our energy security. And so one of the important moves that Trump would do on his own is really push the oil and gas industry. But when you say what does Canada think, is how long would it take before he would like to take Albert and Saskatchewan? There's a thought. Well, it's a pretty simple straight forward one, really. You've even had, because those two provinces are always the ones with the greatest disputes with the federal government in Canada. You know, because the federal government likes to have rules that are good for Ontario and Quebec, and they're less favorable for the energy producing provinces. And we have several laws in Canada that really, you know, almost require any sizeable manufacturing will occur in Quebec or Ontario, and that all of the other provinces' purpose in life is to supply raw materials to the, you know, central Canada. You know, which, you know, it's certainly not what the way is in the U.S. However, you know, for simple energy security, the Alberta oil sands in particular, you know, has, you know, enough oil to supply the U.S. It's an attractive target for an autocrat who wants to take things or make transactional arrangements to take things. But one thing, we're out of time, Ken, but one thing I'd like to say here at the end of it is that timing is very important here. And I don't think that, you know, we wrap our minds, we all of us wrap our minds around how fast these changes could happen. And I would warn anybody listening or watching that with an unimpeded autocrat coming into office who knows the score and how to advance his own power, things could happen very, very quickly. And it would surprise everyone, but it shouldn't be. Thank you, Ken. One thing I could add is Canadians cannot believe that Trump is even a viable candidate. We just can't imagine that Americans could be so stupid as to even consider electing him. With that, I'd like to say hello. Thank you, Ken Rogers. Back to Ken Rogers in Columbia, British Columbia. Thank you so much for joining us today.