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I worked in the first Trump White House. This time take his threats seriously.

I worked in the first Trump White House. This time take his threats seriously.

Inauguration day has arrived and what was previously almost unimaginable is now our reality: Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office.

For Trump supporters and detractors alike, one question looms over the nation today: What’s next? Trump’s first term offers some clues, and I witnessed it up close as the vice president’s national security adviser. Mike Pence. However, a lot has changed since then.

Continue MSNBC Live Blog for the latest updates and expert analysis on Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Trump begins second term as convicted felonbut for all intents and purposes, he is free of legal entanglements over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and his Hoarding of top secret national security documents..

He feels emboldened not only by shirking any real legal responsibility, but also by the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that granted the president near-total immunity. Furthermore, Trump views his narrow victory in November as a public mandate, a sanction of his MAGA agenda that many in his first administration resisted. And, naturally, Trump is, unsurprisingly, unpredictable.

In short, this will be a very different administration than the one I served.

Working in the Trump White House, I quickly learned to take him at his word. He’s not as enigmatic as he seems and usually says exactly what he plans to do. I fully anticipate that Trump will get to work on three priorities: retaliation, immigration reform, and deconstruction of the federal bureaucracy. These are the promises he campaigned on and are most motivated to keep. And he will do it, aggressively.

With Trump being Trump, political warfare will take priority and will be easier to initiate from the executive branch. Trump’s enemies list would make Richard Nixon blush, as it includes current and former elected officials (yes, even presidents), military and intelligence officers, prosecutors, judges, journalists, political operatives, corporate entities, and others. Anyone who has publicly criticized, challenged, scrutinized, denounced or filed a lawsuit against Trump is a potential target. His weaponized Justice Department will be busy from the start, with high-profile investigations launched immediately.

Politics is more complicated, and immigration policy is especially so. Consider that Trump’s first term saw a sharp increase in border encounters, despite harsh policies that were poorly planned but devastatingly effective in sowing fear and pain. His executive orders separated immigrant families with no plan to reunite them and inflicted unspeakable trauma on children, with many still separated today. The intent was clear: to dehumanize immigrants and create a chilling effect to deter others from seeking refuge in the United States.

Punitive policies like these will quickly return, with fewer voices willing to oppose the machinery of cruelty.

Along with cruelty was chaos. I was at the epicenter, working firsthand on the travel ban in the harrowing early days of Trump’s first term. The policies were implemented without warning, without coordination and without regard to the human cost, regardless of the impact on our international relations. This relentless chaos was not a mistake by the administration but a feature: a deliberate strategy to sow division, test the limits of power, and dismantle norms in the name of political theater.

As Trump takes office in a new era of unbridled leadership, cruelty and chaos will evolve into a more calculated agenda. Having rejected the bipartisan border bill last year to make mass deportations the crown jewel of his campaign, Trump will lean heavily on Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to boast about it. Expect institutionalized brutality and deportation of naturalized or even native citizens. We can probably expect to see an uptick in vigilantism and hate crimes. These will only diminish if Trump supporters perceive that the human and financial costs outweigh any benefits.

Then there is the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. With DOGE, Trump will be more effective at breaking the system than in his first term. Expect a federal hiring freeze to be at the top of any executive orders Trump issues early on.

My biggest fear is the risk of foreign-driven terrorist attacks as cuts to our intelligence and national security weaken defenses and allies become reluctant to share critical intelligence. In the wake of such an attack, Trump is likely to follow his usual pattern: spreading misinformation, making premature accusations, and politicizing the tragedy for his own agenda. Even more alarming is the possibility that it will militarize law enforcement, pushing the United States toward a police state. Under the guise of security, this could lead to excessive use of force and suppression of civil liberties, threatening the very freedoms it claims to protect.

The shutdown of federal law enforcement will also fuel the current rise in domestic terrorist threats. Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has openly promised to gut the FBI, he focused on reducing the workforce and flirted with the idea of ​​closing the agency’s headquarters and turning it into a museum, the same agency tasked with identifying and defeating domestic terrorists. Trump, as president, often ignored or downplayed these threats, although he sometimes openly expressed his fondness for far-right extremists, such as those who stormed the Capitol on January 6. But a second Trump administration is likely to focus more on investigations of personal grievances rather than legitimate domestic threats.

Trump voters who hoped that dismantling the federal government would result in “draining the swamp” will be sorely disappointed. Instead, mid-level bureaucrats will lose jobs and government functions will be disrupted or eliminated entirely, while Trump’s billionaire tech allies funnel public dollars into private activities. Some things never change.

This is not just another inauguration. It is the beginning of a darker chapter in American history that many Americans will not fully understand until it is underway. Trump’s unpredictability, his tendency to exploit divisions, and his relentless pursuit of power persist, but his second term promises to be far more extreme and lacking in accountability. The American people must prepare for what is to come.

This article was originally published in MSNBC.com