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Trump Campaign Announces their 2nd Term goals

President Trump gives voters an insight into his plans for next term if elected, but they leave more questions than answers. 

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A day ahead of the Republican National Convention, President Donald Trump’s campaign released an outline of what they hope to prioritize in their second term if they are successful in defeating Democratic nominee Joe Biden in November. 

The document, which is titled “Fighting for You,” lists 50 bullet points of policy goals and the president promoted them as part of his agenda for the potential continuation of his presidency. 

Fighting for jobs

The first of 10 sections focus on jobs and start by saying the administration will create 10 million jobs in 10 months. 

In the month of July, there were 30 million people, or 20% of the American workforce, receiving government unemployment benefits.

The Trump campaign does not tell voters how he will create so many jobs in less than a year, but more importantly, he has not explained what he will do to have the 30 million receiving unemployment checks return as part of the workforce. 

Fighting for normalcy

Eradicating COVID-19 is the next section and to the surprise of many, it is not referred to as the “China virus”

The President’s team must have forgotten when their second term would begin because inauguration day is Jan. 20, 2021, yet they listed developing a vaccine by the end of 2020 as one of their goals. 

“Return to Normal in 2021” was the following point, but it goes against the predictions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, who believes the novel coronavirus could be with us beyond next year. 

“I do not believe it would disappear because it’s such a highly transmissible virus, it is unlikely that it is going to disappear,” Dr. Fauci said while testifying in front of the House in July.

Lastly, on COVID-19, Trump wants Americans to know that although the end of the current pandemic is not in sight and its effects will be felt for months after a vaccine is made available, he will “refill stockpiles and prepare for future pandemic.” 

The U.S. was already prepared for this virus, as former president Barack Obama’s White House National Security Council left Trump with a detailed pandemic playbook, which was eventually discarded. 

When interviewed by CNN, Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on the manual, stated that Trump’s administration was briefed on the document, outlining measures for pandemic prevention. 

“They were extensively briefed to the extent that they paid attention to these things during the transition. We really did everything we could to try and leave them in a position to be prepared for this. We left them the detailed playbook which specifically cited novel coronaviruses as a tier one pathogen risk, we left them a dedicated team at the White House,” he said. 

Fighting China for jobs

Trump built a large part of his 2016 presidential run around the message of bringing jobs back from overseas and in 2020, he wants to prevent factories from moving abroad by not giving “federal contracts for companies who outsource to China.”

Signaling out China does nothing to keep manufacturing jobs in America as companies could still outsource labor to other Southeast Asian countries or developing Latin American countries and exploit workers there. 

Fighting for healthcare

On healthcare, the president promises to protect Social Security and Medicare. 

An executive order he signed on Aug. 8 would allow for a temporary payroll tax cut that he said would become permanent after winning reelection. 

The problem is that Social Security is mainly funded through payroll taxes and now estimates say that this move could make the program run out of funds by 2028 or 2032

This does not protect the administration, but rather it puts down a path closer to privatization, which has been a goal of the GOP for years. 

Fighting for “American Exceptionalism”

In terms of education, there are two points and one of them is “Teach American Exceptionalism.” 

American Exception is a theory that the history of the U.S. is uniquely virtuous and essentially glosses over the darker chapters of the country's past. 

This teaching style is designed for people like the president to not have to confront reality, where the effects of slavery, segregation and many other injustices are ever present in our society today. 

In his Fourth of July speech, he mentioned that he believes the way history is taught today is damning for the youth. 

“Against every law of society and nature our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies,” Trump said. 

Little does he know, learning about America’s history with race makes students understand why thousands of people take to the streets to call for criminal justice reform after witnessing multiple cases of unarmed Black men being brutally murdered by police officers is not radical but overdue. 

It also explains inequalities in the American healthcare system that make it so Black and Latinx communities are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.

Fighting to not fight

Foreign Policy was the final section that the campaign mentioned, and it started by saying the president will stop endless wars and bring the troops home. 

He promised the same thing in 2016, but it is contradicting that two points down Trump says he will strengthen and expand the military. 

If the U.S. ceases its conflicts in the Middle East then there would be no need to expand the military unless the president is preparing for senseless regime-change wars in Venezuela and Iran. 

The campaign said that Trump will go into more detail about each policy in his RNC speech, but on a base level it leaves voters with more questions than answers. 

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