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If there’s one thing I’ve learned from covering Donald Trump, it’s that he doesn’t keep his agenda secret. Take abortion. Before he became president the first time, he was clear about the plan: appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, have them overturn Roe v. Wade, send the issue back to the states. And you know what? That’s exactly what happened.

Now that he’s running for a second term, it’s useful to listen in. In just the past few months, he’s pledged to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” and to end “automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens.” He’s also said, “If I happen to be president and I see someone who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I’d say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They would be out of business, out of the election.”

Susan Glasser say’s Trump is “the politician who’s famous for saying the quiet part out loud.” Glasser reports on politics over at the New Yorker. She’s been following along as day by day a Trump doctrine seems to be coming together. “His plans are very explicitly anti-constitutional, unconstitutional,” she said. “He already has a long list of people he wants to be targeted by the Justice Department, by the IRS, and on it goes.”

But are Americans paying enough attention? “It’s pretty striking,” Glasser said, “that one year out from the presidential election, every national public indicator that we have suggests that Donald Trump is running dead even with [or better than] Joe Biden, despite this extraordinary flood of extremist promises and rhetoric coming from Trump, despite his radical record, despite Jan. 6, despite four criminal indictments.”

On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, we looked at the preview Trump is giving for what a second term could look like. Are you listening? Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: It’s worth asking what Trump learned from his first stint in office. Susan Glasser says, listening to Trump campaign, it’s clear he hasn’t learned the same lessons a milder candidate might have. For instance, while a phalanx of lawyers worked to protect Trump from some of his less democratic instincts last time around, it’s clear that should he move back into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., those advisers won’t be coming with him.

Susan Glasser: Donald Trump saw himself as needlessly constrained in his term in the White House by a whole category of officials, including his White House counsels, his attorney general Bill Barr, as well as his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. It’s fascinating because both of those would be considered certainly by many independent observers and many Democrats to be quite radical Republicans in terms of their views about executive power, in terms of what they were willing to go along with. But both of them drew the line at certain kinds of conduct. And Trump’s approach to a second term seems to be much more grounded in loyalty-testing and assembling a cadre of like-minded officials who essentially will do whatever he wants, not even so much ideologically, but personally.

His first time he was really supported and buffered by conservative lawyers who’d been brought up in the Federalist Society. And it was notable when I saw one of Trump’s allies quoted, basically saying, “The Federalist Society doesn’t know what’s up. We’re going to just blow them out of the water with how we proceed next.” It’s hard to get more conservative than the Federalist Society.

We’re in the........

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