I expect to have much to say about this as time goes on, especially if, as seems more likely each day, Trump remains on all the state ballots and is not tried and convicted of any of his multitude of felonies before the election. For now, I will just list some of what is being reported as the Trump plan for his second term as President. http://tinyurl.com/4bxpv8mf
Based on reporting by people in a position to know, Trump will:
- Create an “enemies list” of people he plans to punish for their opposition to him.
- Invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
This effort is being led by Jeffrey Clark, the lawyer who was working with Trump to use the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election by, among other things, pressing state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college. He is one of six unnamed co-conspirators in the federal election interference case and has been charged in Georgia with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement regarding the 2020 election. How Clark retains his license to practice law remains a mystery.
- Direct the Justice Department to investigate and punish former officials and allies who were critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.
- Order the prosecution of officials at the FBI and Justice Department who resist him.
- Appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
- “Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.”
- “Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation.”
- Alumni have also saved lists of … career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.
“… a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff said, “We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”
- “Trump declared on Truth Social (on Veterans Day weekend, no less) that “the radical left thugs … live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He repeated the invective during an appearance in New Hampshire.” http://tinyurl.com/2brrsar8
As Forbes pointed out, “The former president’s incendiary rhetoric invokes a term frequently used by Nazis to dehumanize Jews, including a 1939 quote attributed to Hitler: ‘This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies.’”
- The New York Times reportedthat Trump “is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.” Likewise, The Post reported on “specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”
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The Post just days later reported on Trump’s Univision appearance in which he uttered a bone-chilling threat: “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business,” Trump said. “They’d be out of the election.”
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Axios reported that Trump allies “are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potentialfoot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024.” The report added: “Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.”
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Trump will terminate aid to Ukraine and try to force that country to yield to Russia’s imperialist demands to take over the country. Trump will likely also eviscerate NATO, leaving its constituent countries vulnerable to Russian attack.
Just this weekend, Trump said “if the threatened country was in arrears on its NATO dues, he and the United States would not provide protection. For emphasis, Trump said that — on the contrary — he would “encourage” the aggressor to do “whatever the hell they want.”http://tinyurl.com/yc6ysv3d
In practice, the MAGA gang’s plans will look to end the independence of the civil service, long a bedrock of the stability and coherence of federal policy across both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Equally problematic is the current challenge to the power/authority of independent federal agencies to interpret federal statutory ambiguities under the doctrine known as Chevron Deference. MAGA Republicans want to end Chevron Deference so that if Congress has been ambiguous in legislation or failed to explain every aspect of what the legislation requires, those ambiguities and failures cannot be cured by the responsible agencies, regardless of the consequences. Given the paralysis of the Congress arising from the MAGA Republicans demand that their views control every legislative outcome, the end of Chevron Deference would be catastrophic for the functioning of the federal government.
The bottom line: the return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024 will lead directly and immediately to the end of democracy as the United States has known it since the Founding. The United States will become a dependency of Russia, a tool of Vladimir Putin whom Trump admires above all other world leaders.
The MAGA Republicans who have convinced themselves Trump cares about them will quickly, but too late, discover, that it was all a ruse.