TheNew York Timesreports that “Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government…reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.” That expansion involves “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
We all know what that means… we’ve seen this movie before. The history of the world is replete with deranged authoritarians eager and willing to commit any crime, excuse any atrocity, destroy any institution and step over the bodies, in a mad quest for raw power.
The list of cult leaders is, of course, long. In what we think of as “modern times” — whole countries are mesmerized and fall under the spell of an utter madman, and egg him on even as he violates every moral principle, every decent human impulse, every religious tenet they claim to believe in. Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Kim, Hitler, Pinochet, Putin… and now Donald Trump aspires to be one of them. Seldom have dictators, and their enablers, declared their plans so blatantly and in such minute detail, as he and the Republican establishment are in the process of doing now.
"With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.
Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term — or any Republican candidate who can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state”.
“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official.
The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.
Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded factotums more eager to fulfill a fascist approach to “governing.”
“The president’s Day One will be a wrecking ball,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official.
There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It also calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” what the project calls the “woke” agenda.
Chapter by chapter, the pages offer a how-to manual for the next president, similar to one Heritage produced 50 years ago, ahead of the Ronald Reagan administration. Authored by some of today’s most prominent thinkers in the conservative movement, it’s sprinkled with apocalyptic language.
A chapter written by Trump’s former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security calls for bolstering the number of political appointees, and redeploying office personnel with law enforcement ability into the field “to maximize law enforcement capacity.”
Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers said,“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says ."
The Heritage coalition is taking its recruitment efforts on the road, crisscrossing America to fill the federal jobs. They staffed the Iowa State Fair this month and signed up hundreds of people, and they’re building out a database of potential employees, inviting them to be trained in government operations.
“It’s counterintuitive,” Dans acknowledged — the idea of joining government to shrink it — but he said that’s the lesson learned from the Trump days about what’s needed to “regain control."
But if they can’t win at the ballot box, they’ll just use the bullet box, they promise —over and over and over again.
In the latest episode of his show on TBN, Mike Huckabee argued the legal woes now facing Trump are part of a politically motivated scheme from the Biden administration.
“If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024, it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets,” Huckabee warned in his opening monologue."
Georgia state Sen. Colton Moore (R) said on Tuesday “a civil war might break out” when former President Donald Trump goes to trial for his efforts to overturn the state’s presidential election results in 2020, he said in a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.
He lamented that he didn’t want to “have to draw my rifle.”
“We’ve got to put our heads together and figure this out. We need to be taking action right now. Because if we don’t, our constituencies are gonna be fighting it in the streets. Do you want a civil war? I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle.”
Matt Maddock, whose wife, Meshawn Maddock, is a former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and one of the 16 fake electors who state attorney general Dana Nessel criminally charged in July — painted a bleak picture of how some conservatives plan to respond to the charges.
The comments, heard on a recording provided to The Messenger, from state Rep Maddoc who, along with his wife, held a fundraiser at their Milford home.
“If the government continues to weaponize these departments against conservatives and the citizens that are then the taxpayers, you know what's going to happen to this country,”
“Someone's going to get so pissed off, they're going to shoot someone. That's what's going to happen. Or we're going have a civil war or some sort of revolution. That's where this is, where this is going.”
And of course, no one is working harder to destroy American democracy than Republican members of Congress. Here’s mysteriously-unindicted child sex offender Rep. Matt Goetz, speaking at down-home friendly Iowa Country Fair in Des Moines, this last August.
“But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C. “
We can’t say they didn’t warn us, can we?
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Gosh I wish Trump had given us a warning, like maybe if he’d openly, explicitly and publicly preferred the way they do things in Russia and Turkey and Hungary to this country for the past eight years.
I have my Biden/Harris lawn signs but I’m afraid to put them out. I have put my STD (Stop the Donald) sign out and have my fingers crossed for our safety. And I’m serious about my fear. But I will drive over nails to get to my drop box to vote against every Republican running for any office.
Gosh I wish Trump had given us a warning, like maybe if he’d openly, explicitly and publicly preferred the way they do things in Russia and Turkey and Hungary to this country for the past eight years.
I have my Biden/Harris lawn signs but I’m afraid to put them out. I have put my STD (Stop the Donald) sign out and have my fingers crossed for our safety. And I’m serious about my fear. But I will drive over nails to get to my drop box to vote against every Republican running for any office.