In 2024, the now 77-year-old has swept primary season, speedily securing the delegates he needed to again represent his party in November's election.

And this time around, his chances of winning the White House — and his plans for if he gets there — are being taken far more seriously.

From seeking revenge on his political enemies to ordering mass deportations and an overhaul of the public service, Trump has already provided insights into what he would do with a second term if he got one.

History suggests that not everything he says should be taken literally. At times he appears to delight in making inflammatory statements, only to then accuse what he calls the "fake news" media of taking him out of context. 

But as a former president seeking re-election, what he says on the campaign trail attracts enormous attention, and heavy scrutiny.

Here are some of his plans, in his own words, and what they could mean for the United States.

He's publicly attacked the prosecutors leading the criminal and civil cases against him, describing Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith as "deranged" and New York attorney-general Letitia James as "racist".

The former president has also argued, without evidence, that his successor Joe Biden has "Weaponised" the justice system against him.

And he's vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to "Go after" the current president and what he calls the "Biden crime family".

In March last year, weeks before the first of the four criminal indictments against him was announced, Trump told his supporters: "They're not coming after me, they're coming after you. And I'm just standing in their way."

"I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution." he went on to say.

Trump has since sought to distance himself from those remarks, telling Fox News ahead of the Iowa caucuses in January that he's "Not going to have time for retribution".

He again tried to play them down in an interview with CNBC earlier this month.

"People think that there's going to be revenge," he said.

"And I say, no, the revenge is going to be success."

But John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor who was fired from the role and became one of his loudest critics, believes retribution would "consume" much of a second term.

"I think almost anybody who's on Trump's bad side is a potential target, from the most significant to the most trivial," he told the ABC.

"He won't hesitate to use the instrumentalities of the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence community."

Trump maintains his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and in a speech late last year he promised to "root out" what he called "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections".

The language drew comparisons to that used by dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, something Trump's campaign decried as "Ridiculous" and coming from "Snowflakes".

But the former president only heightened concerns when he suggested twice in two months that he'd be a "Dictator for one day".

Asked on Fox News in December whether he would rule out abusing his power for the purposes of retribution, he replied, "Except for day one".

"He says, 'You're not going to be a dictator, are you?'" Trump said, referring to host Sean Hannity.

"I said, no, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border and we're drilling, drilling, drilling.

"After that, I'm not a dictator."

Emma Doyle, a former White House principal deputy chief of staff in Trump's administration, says she doesn't like the implications of those statements.

But she argues he'd face the same constitutional restrictions that he did during his first four years in office.

"I don't think that in terms of a radical restructuring of American government, trying to give himself another term, the things that people would really be concerned about ... I don't think those things are going to happen," she says.

"And at the end of the day, the way the pendulum swings in American politics, just about everything can be undone."

A fortnight before his 2020 election loss, Donald Trump made an unusual play to give himself extraordinary power over the public service.

He signed an order to reclassify tens of thousands of public servants working in policy-related roles as "Schedule F" employees which stripped them of long-standing job protections, giving the president the power to easily fire them at any time. 

The order never took effect and was soon rescinded by Joe Biden. But Trump's promising to bring it back, and "wield that power very aggressively".

"This," he vowed, "is how I will shatter the deep state" – his pejorative term for the many arms of government he sees as corrupted, such as the FBI and Justice Department.

"We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States," Trump told a rally in 2022. "The deep state must and will be brought to heel."

Government experts say the plan represents a dramatic politicisation of the public service, with experienced specialists likely to be replaced with political lackeys.

Georgetown University public policy professor Donald Moynihan says evidence from around the world shows that sort of politicisation degrades the quality of government services, and injects them with instability.

"You can imagine what happens when Trump takes over and, let's say, turns 50,000 career officials into [political] appointees, and then say there's another Democratic [president] who tries to swing it in the opposite direction," he says.

"You're just going to have more extreme appointees on both sides, pushing the government in vastly different directions for these short four-year or eight-year time periods."

Last year, Trump released a 10-point policy expanding on his Schedule F plan.

It argues Schedule F is about introducing accountability into a workforce where it's lacking — "firing underperforming employees … is often completely impossible," it says.

But it also proposes to overhaul federal departments, relocate up to 100,000 jobs from "the Washington Swamp" to "places filled with patriots", and fire "all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus".

Dozens of conservative and Trump-aligned organisations, led by the influential Heritage think tank, are now working on "Project 2025" — building a database of up to 20,000 conservative-minded workers Trump could appoint across government.

"This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from day one," Heritage president Kevin Roberts told the New York Times, which describes the project as a "right-wing LinkedIn".

Heritage details the vision further in an 887-page blueprint for reshaping government. It advocates eliminating programs and personnel focused on, among other things, climate protection and racial and gender equity.

For instance, at the Treasury Department, it proposes interviewing every official who has ever participated in a DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiative, with the intention of firing them unless they objected to participating.

While not formally adopted by Trump, the document largely aligns with his platform, and its contributors include many of his allies, supporters and former officials.

It's "probably the best detailed blueprint of what Trump 2.0 would look like", Professor Moynihan says.

Immigration was a signature issue of Donald Trump's presidency and it's a major focus of his 2024 campaign.

Opinion polls suggest it's become a top concern for many voters after the number of people crossing the southern border hit record highs late last year.

"You continue to see and hear Trump talk a lot about this because guess what, that's what the American people care about," says Chad Wolf, Trump's former acting secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security.

"They want to find solutions to this problem."

Trump has escalated his rhetoric on the issue, telling a recent rally that one of his first actions if re-elected would be to "Stop the invasion of our country and send Joe Biden's illegal aliens back home".

He's argued (again, without evidence) that prisons and mental institutions abroad are being "emptied out".

And he's accused migrants of "Poisoning the blood of our country", a statement criticised by the White House as "echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists".

Trump has promised to reinstate a program known as "Remain in Mexico", which forced tens of thousands of people back across the border onto Mexican soil while they waited to make their claim for asylum before US authorities.

He's pledged to bring back the so-called "travel ban", which limited travel from five Muslim-majority nations as well as Venezuela and North Korea, and he's vowed to extend it to people from Gaza.

Trump has also promised to end automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants born in the US, an idea he flagged in his first term but didn't follow through on. (It's not clear whether the plan would survive inevitable legal challenges.)

And he's pointed to an Eisenhower-era program under which around a million people were deported to Mexico in the 1950s, to signal he would go further.

"We will use all necessary state, local, federal and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history," he told supporters in Georgia last year.

Stephen Miller, one of Trump's former senior policy advisors who helped develop his immigration policy, later said it would involve building "large-scale staging grounds near the border", most likely in Texas.

"You go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids, you have to have somewhere to put them," he told the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

"So you build these facilities where then you're able to say, you know, hypothetically, three times a day are the flights back to Mexico, two times a day are the flights back to the Northern Triangle, right, on Monday and Friday are the flights back to different African countries."

Biden's campaign has criticised Trump's plans as "extreme, racist, cruel policies".

The president campaigned in 2020 against what he called his opponent's "inhumane" approach and scrapped several parts of it.

But under increasing political pressure over the southern border, he's now describing the situation as a "crisis".

And he's pushed Congress to back a bill that would temporarily prohibit people from seeking asylum in the US whenever arrivals crossed a certain threshold.

Some immigration advocates accused the president of "mirroring the prior administration", while Republicans — including Trump — argued it didn't go far enough, and it failed to pass.

It means legislative change on immigration is unlikely before the election is held in November.

During his first term, Donald Trump had the opportunity to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court, and in doing so, tipped the political balance of the court.

The majority-conservative bench struck down Roe v Wade, which had enshrined the nationwide right to an abortion for decades.

The decision handed power back to the states, prompting some to ban abortion, and leading to a patchwork of laws across the country.

In many ways, this is an area where Trump has already delivered the big prize to his base.

"After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade," he posted on social media last year. 

"Without me the pro life movement would have just kept losing."

Since the Supreme Court ruling, reproductive rights have been the subject of intense debate across America.

Some women argued their lives were put at risk when they were denied emergency abortions in states such as Texas.

In February, a new front in the fight over post-Roe reproductive rights opened when a court in Alabama ruled frozen embryos could be considered children.

It prompted several IVF clinics to shut until the state passed a law protecting them from legal liability. (Trump was among high-profile Republicans who called for the state to protect IVF access.)

The US Supreme Court is also currently considering a challenge to the approval of an abortion medication, which could impact access even in progressive states.

But abortion bans have proven a difficult sell at the ballot box, and Democrats are campaigning hard on the issue.

Joe Biden says he wants to guarantee abortion access in federal law — but that would require winning enough support in Congress.

Trump has indicated he'd support a national ban at 15 weeks (with exceptions for rape, incest and pregnancies threatening the life of a mother).

He has repeatedly suggested he could broker an agreement between opposing sides.

"We're going to come up with a time — and maybe we could bring the country together on that issue," he told a radio program on Tuesday.

"The number of weeks now, people are agreeing on 15. And I’m thinking in terms of that... but I'll make that announcement at the appropriate time."

Emma Doyle says Trump is not as personally motivated by the issue as someone like his former vice president, the evangelical Mike Pence.

"He's convinced he can find a way to bring those sides together," she says.

But many advocates on both sides have strongly indicated they are not willing to give ground to the other.

Donald Trump's impact on American political and social life is likely to be deeply felt into 2025 and beyond, even if he loses in November.

His refusal to accept defeat in 2020 had consequences that are still felt throughout America's political institutions. His alleged attempts to overturn the election result are central to two of the four criminal cases against him.

"He sent supporters, including groups like the Proud Boys, whom he knew were angry, and whom he now calls 'patriots', to the Capitol to achieve the criminal objective of obstructing the congressional certification," federal prosecutor Jack Smith alleges in one of those cases.

But Trump, who describes people who were jailed over the January 6 attack as "hostages" that he may pardon, calls the charges against him "fake".

He's refused to stop repeating the false claim that the election was stolen, and polling suggests about a third of Americans now believe the claim.

Trump is also suggesting that a loss this year would be the result of election interference, too.

"The only way it can end where they win is a rigged election," he told a rally in South Carolina earlier this month. "They rigged the presidential election, and we're not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024."

Some observers fear Trump's ongoing promotion of these conspiracy theories could lead to more violence in the wake of an election loss this year.

The Biden campaign says Trump "Wants another January 6".

But John Bolton says while Trump is a "burn-the-house-down kind of person if he doesn't get what he wants", he does not pose an existential threat to democracy.

"I'm sure if he loses, he will say the election was stolen … and there will be efforts to disrupt it, as there were in 2020," he says.

"But even sitting in the Oval Office, he was not able to change the reality that he had lost. And while I think there could be disruptions, I think they're not going to result in anything approaching even the level of turmoil we saw in 2020."

At the weekend, though, Trump voiced another warning about what he thinks a defeat would mean.

"If this election isn't won, I'm not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country," he said, without elaborating on what he meant.

"If we don't win this election, I don't think you're going to have another election – or certainly not an election that's meaningful."

Original Story By | Jade Macmillan, Brad Ryan & Emilie Gramenz