Jonathan P. Baird

No one had expected the Supreme Court would decide the 2024 presidential race. Joe Biden had won the popular vote by over 10 million votes but the tally in the key battleground states made the race too close to call. Trump held a slight lead in the Electoral College. Trump lawyers had argued that vote counts had to be stopped in the swing states because of questions around the validity of mail-in ballots.

To the surprise of everyone, the Supreme Court stopped the vote count, handing the election to Trump. He thanked “his justices”. Again, like they did in Bush v Gore in 2000, the Court majority said its opinion in Trump v Biden had no precedental value.

Trump watchers were surprised by his first moves. Although revenge and victimhood were his constant campaign themes, ordering the arrest of Joe Biden wasn’t written down in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump said that Biden had ordered his murder in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago for national security documents.

Trump also ordered his Department of Justice to prosecute Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis and Judge Juan Merchan. He further ordered the arrest and prosecution of leading liberal and progressive activists and legislators who had opposed him. He described them as “Antifa”.

With an assist from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, he shot his opponents into space to live in a new space station prison colony. Musk had started a new business focusing on incarceration of “high value” inmates. The Trump-Musk alliance was mutually beneficial.

Trump created a new cabinet position for the Department of Billionaire Well-Being premised on the idea that if billionaires are doing well, we all are. Following their recommendations, Trump gutted the IRS and entirely removed any tax burden on billionaires and large corporations. Wall Street was ecstatic.

Less surprisingly, Trump pardoned all of the January 6 insurrectionists who had been convicted during the Biden presidency. Trump called them “patriots who had been wrongly prosecuted”. He got Congress to create a new national holiday on January 6 to honor the memory of Ashli Babbitt.

He also dismissed all remaining criminal and civil charges lodged against him and granted himself a complete pardon from all crimes. The Supreme Court concurred with his assertion of presidential power.

A flurry of Executive Orders accompanied Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Even though the Fourteenth Amendment had protected birthright citizenship, Trump issued an Executive Order to reverse that. He imposed a new Muslim ban and he re-instituted his family separation policy; he removed protection from DACA recipients allowing for their immediate deportation and he closed the Southern border.

Many people had thought deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants was a logistical impossibility. Trump had promised he would pursue “the largest domestic deportation operation in history”. Requisitioning National Guard troops from red states and deploying them in blue states to round up immigrants was at first seen as an outrage until the Supreme Court gave its okay.

It was shocking to see people in big Democratic-leaning cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles dragged out of their homes after their doors were battered down. Even more shocking was to see those people removed to detention camps.

There were so many people detained that warehouses and abandoned malls were used to hold those rounded-up. There were many reports that among those rounded-up were black and brown-skinned Latinos who claimed to be U.S. citizens. That could not be verified but it was very similar to what happened in the Eisenhower Administration’s Operation Wetback in the 1950’s.

The Trump administration built large-scale staging areas near the Southern border in Texas. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott helped out providing endless amounts of razor wire. Using near-constant flights, the administration flew millions out of the United States. Under new expedited rules that made asylum claims impossible, masses of people were removed from the United States quickly. Due process no longer required any hearing before an immigration judge.

With so many of his former foes incarcerated in space or living in fear of arrest, Trump followed through on a range of domestic goals. Reviving the 19th century Comstock Act, his administration was able to get the High Court to outlaw abortion nation-wide with no exceptions. They also passed federal legislation applying the death penalty to abortion providers and abortion patients who sought to terminate their pregnancies.

In 2026, the Supreme Court majority reversed the decision legalizing gay marriage. In an opinion by Justice Alito, the Court noted that the Founding Fathers included no mention of gay marriage in the Constitution. Rolling back LGBTQ rights and trying to push people back into the closet remained a continuing Christian Right goal as they believed homosexuals were diseased and could be cured by a combination of religious indoctrination and psychological counseling,

Trump’s Christian Right supporters were thrilled when Trump used an Executive Order in 2027 to declare America a Christian nation. Trump declared that the Founders never intended a separation of church and state. It was something to see pictures of a white Jesus on postage stamps and to see the 10 Commandments mandated on the walls of public schools and colleges.

A national book ban was promulgated for schools. Books deemed “unpatriotic” or “lewd” were removed from school libraries and burned before crowds of cheering MAGA supporters. No more teaching of, among others, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, A Handmaid’s Tale and Gender Queer. An effort was successfully undertaken to restore Confederate monuments in the South.

The federal government removed all mention of the words diversity, equity and inclusion as part of its anti-wokeness campaign. Also the Environmental Protection Agency purged all mention of the words “climate change” and “global warming” from its website and publications. The administration’s mantra was “Drill baby drill” and every effort was undertaken to promote fossil fuels and to discourage alternative energy. The years 2027 and 2028 were the hottest in recorded history.

Male supremacists in the Trump administration advanced an understanding that a central problem in American life was the women’s liberation movement and they advocated that women’s role is to be a wife and mother. They discouraged careers for women and pushed to take away women’s right to vote which had been guaranteed under the 19th amendment.

On foreign policy, Trump withdrew the United States from NATO and formed a new alliance of autocrats popularly known as the Fascist International. It included Trump and his allies Putin, Kim Jong Un, Orban, Erdogan and Modi. In a major change of nuclear policy, Trump moved to support the use of what he called “low-yield” nuclear weapons. After Trump’s election and with his support, Putin used a “small” nuke in Ukraine and it quickly brought the Ukrainians to the bargaining table.

Back in 2024, people said that the presidential election would be the most important election ever. Most did not pay attention. Trump had joked for years about running for a third term. In 2027 he announced he was running again even though the 22nd amendment forbid it. Having arrested all the most likely Democratic candidates, Trump’s odds looked better and better. In 2028, Trump announced that he planned to run again in 2032.