Disclaimer
President Trump has released are many political statements over the years, and keeping track of them all can be difficult. Individuals can read about what candidates believe in by tuning into their speeches or reading speeches published on their official websites and other forms of media. This piece aims to be an outline of a few key points in Donald Trump’s declared presidential goals, and is not a comprehensive summary of the entirety of his views, opinions, and goals. For a fuller perspective on his agenda, we encourage you to visit his website for his full list of official opinions, stances, and objectives.
Interpreting Trump’s Presidency Goals
Donald John Trump has been elected for his second term as president and has been officially inaugurated a few days ago, on January 20th, 2025. As of November 28th, 2024’s election results, he won by 86 electoral votes (312 to 226), and the popular vote by over 2.5 million votes (76,917,165 to 74,441,488). The house’s majority is Republican, by 6 people. (220 to 214) There were no 3rd party members of the house. The Senate has 8 more Republicans than Democrats, and 51 more than 3rd party members (53 to 45 to 2).
As a result of this turn of events, we must be aware of Trump’s plans for the country as he begins his second term as president. Conveniently, he has uploaded videos documenting said plans to a website called Agenda 47. This began in 2022 and continued to be updated until December 2023. We selected 3 videos from over the past few years to summarize during this piece, although we will link the website below for anyone who wants to watch all of them. (There are 45 videos, so please be aware that watching them all will take a lot of time.)
President Donald J. Trump — Free Speech Policy Initiative
Published in: Dec 15, 2022
This was the first of Donald Trump’s videos outlining his plans for the country. In the video, Trump declares he will “sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens.” In other words, this means that Trump intends to ban the government’s ability to take things down from the internet. Due to a lack of in-depth knowledge of what America’s internet could be like without governmental interference, we have no choice but to speculate on what exactly will occur. It does explicitly state lawful speech, so no, government leaks will not be protected. Then, he intends to “ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis’ or ‘dis-information’.” There is no official website that explains what exactly ‘domestic speech’ entails, so again, only speculation is truly available to discern what this is, and how it will be enforced.
Trump then says he will “begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly.” He highlights the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, and the DOJ, but does make a point to say he will get anyone, “no matter who they are.”
Moving on, Trump’s next policies regards the “new online censorship regime.” This most likely references new acts in regards to government censorship, such as KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which was introduced in 2022, but got approved later on in 2023. It could also reference the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act. Both are more recent developments or done in the most recent term.
He says he will “aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act, and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses.” The Hatch Act is, according to the US Office of Special council, there to “ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.”
Trump was also, in his words, “urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters — and we have to do this right now — to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.”
Next, he says he will “ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business,” section 230 regards protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material. (We searched the article, found no less than 54 titles and several chapters, and came to the conclusion that we could not feasibly do a deep enough dive into each of the individual titles and chapters. However, we did leave links for everything below, so feel free to dig deep into the details if you wish to.) He believes “platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination.”
He believes these platforms should be required to “increase their efforts to take down unlawful content, such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.”
In Trump’s plan, he also intends to address schools and universities. Trump stated that any university that “engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past—such as flagging social media content for removal [and] blacklisting should, “lose federal research dollars and federal student loans” for five or more years. He also intends to lay out penalties for federal bureaucrats who “partner with private entities to do an end-run around the Constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote.”
To protect major platforms from being impacted by “former Deep States and intelligence officials,” he believes there should be a 7-year cooling-off period preventing “any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD” from taking a job at a company that possesses “vast quantities of U.S. user data.” Trump hopes to pass a digital Bill of Rights. He believes that “government officials should need a COURT ORDER to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.” As for why Twitter specifically was cited, it may be because it is a popular social media platform, and may be because of Trump’s connections with Elon Musk. He did mention him in his victory speech, notably.
The next and final quote is extremely relevant today and more applicable to our daily lives. President-elected Trump said, “Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadow-banned, or otherwise restricted no matter what name they use, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why, and the right to a timely appeal. In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose.”
President Donald J. Trump Declares War on Cartels
Published in: Dec 22, 2023
The most recent of Trump’s videos is in response to Biden’s visit to the southern border, which he “erased.” As of November 28th, there are no websites that elaborate as to what exactly that means. Furthermore, he claims that Joe Biden has sided with drug cartels, in regards to the increasing drug crisis. He cites Biden’s Open Border policies. Upon researching this, we discovered that the most recent border policy information includes Biden tightening the border’s restrictions, however, it’s also been labeled a “180,” implying he previously did the opposite.
Trump intends to “take down the cartels just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate,” by strengthening the American borders. He also plans to protect the waters by deploying “all necessary military assets,” to “impose the full naval embargo on the cartels.” He highlights the U.S. Navy. He says he will “guarantee that the waters of the western hemisphere are not used to traffic illicit drugs to our country.”
Furthermore, he says he will “order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure, and operations.”
He says he will “designate the major cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” and intends to sever their access to global financial systems. He wants to partner with other countries to tackle this issue together, citing a previous incident with Mexico. (Searches provided a distinct lack of results.) He said “We have to help Mexico,” and declared, “Either we will get the full cooperation of other governments to stop this menace—or we will expose every bribe, every kickback, every payoff, and every bit of corruption that is allowing the cartels to preserve their brutal reign.” Lastly, he will “ask Congress to pass legislation ensuring that drug smugglers and human traffickers receive the Death Penalty.”
President Trump’s Plan to Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents
Published: Jan 26, 2024
Donald Trump aims to “save American education” through new policies. He disagrees with many aspects of the current education system, whether the content being taught, the materials being presented, or even the teachers in the school. Trump aims to change the education system radically.
Trump says he will “abolish teacher tenure for grades K through 12.” He seeks to remove teachers who are deemed unfit and supports “Merit Pay to reward good teachers.” The concept likely intends to weed out the ‘bad teachers’ and help foster an environment where ‘good teachers’ are compensated for properly doing their jobs.
Trump also wants to “cut the bloated number of school administrators,” including diversity, equity, and inclusion-related positions. He believes that these are not necessary to provide an education and that schools waste unnecessary funds on these positions.
Trump says, “We will keep men out of women’s sports.” This ties into education because he believes that teachers’ jobs should be, “not to indoctrinate children, but very simply to educate them.”
He claims that “if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem.” Trump wants to give parents the power to teach their children how they see fit, “we will put PARENTS back in charge and give them the final say.”
He also aims to punish racial discrimination in the education system. “I will direct the Department of Justice and Education to open Civil Rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination.” This initiative may help reduce discrimination within the Department of Education.
Trump disagrees with many current teaching procedures. He promises to cut federal funding to any school that is pushing Critical Race Theory, Gender Ideology, and “other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content to our children.”
Finally, Trump believes that many people within the Department of Education have ‘unchecked power’. In his words, “We will begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots, and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and that also includes others, and you know who you are.” He wants to remove ‘lunatics’ from the federal government.
Conclusion
As we enter the era of Trump’s second term, many are not sure if his declared plans will or will not benefit the majority of the American people. There will be ups and downs in the next four years, no doubt, but what we can do as US citizens, is to do our very best to do what Americans have been priding ourselves in for decades: remaining steadfast, informed, alert, and open to conversation.
Sources:
Victory Speech (Donald Trump doesn’t talk about his plans in the speech):
https://youtu.be/OFowe8gV2JQ?si=NKkhw5T0EKyIIDNB
Agenda 47
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47
COPPA 2.0
KOSA
https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/about/issues/kids-online-safety-act#
KOSA in more detail
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text
COPPA 2.0 & KOSA
Hatch Act
https://osc.gov/Services/pages/hatchact.aspx
Section 230 overview
Section 230
Border Patrol
Border Patrol Update
https://www.dhs.gov/immigrationlaws
