Politics Project 2025/Agenda 47/Behind the Curtain: Trump allies pre-screen loyalists for unprecedented power

Former President Trump's 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, officials involved in the effort tell Axios.

Why it matters: 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.

• The screening for ready-to-serve loyalists has already begun, driven in part by artificial intelligence from tech giant Oracle, contracted for the project.
• Social media histories are already being plumbed.

What's happening: When Trump took office in 2017, he included many conventional Republicans in his Cabinet and key positions. Those officials often curtailed his behavior and power.

• Trump himself spends little time plotting governing plans. But he is well aware of a highly coordinated campaign to be ready to jam government offices with loyalists willing to stretch traditional boundaries.

If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls "Agenda 47."

• The people leading these efforts aren't figures like Rudy Giuliani. They're smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.

Behind the scenes: The government-in-waiting is being orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation's well-funded Project 2025, which already has published a 920-page policy book from 400+ contributors. Think of it as a transition team set in motion years in advance.

• Heritage president Kevin Roberts tells us his apparatus is "orders of magnitude" bigger than anything ever assembled for a party out of power.

• The policy series, "Mandate for Leadership," dates back to the 1980s. But Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told us: "Never before has the entire movement ... banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state."

Project 2025 gets muscle from 80 partners, including Turning Point USA, led by MAGA star Charlie Kirk; the Center for Renewing America, headed by former Trump budget director Russ Vought; and American Moment, focused on young believers for junior positions.

• A separate group of former Trump officials — the America First Policy Institute, led by Brooke Rollins — has a Pathway to 2025 laying groundwork for what it calls "the next America First administration."

Trump insiders relish rebuilding the team with purists. But the truth is, they have no choice: Many more-traditional Republicans quit the first administration in frustration or were fired by tweet. And some former advisers are talking to prosecutors or are charged with crimes.

• The Trump campaign tells us no outside group speaks for him: "The campaign's Agenda47 is the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House. ... While the campaign is appreciative of any effort to provide suggestions about a second term, the campaign is not collaborating with them."

How it works: The most elaborate part of the pre-transition machine is a résumé-collection project that drills down more on political philosophy than on experience, education or other credentials.

• Applicants are asked to "name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy" — and to do the same with a book.
• Another query: "Name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why."

Details: Heritage's"Presidential Personnel Database"already has 4,000+ entries, we're told.

• We're told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected.
• The massive headhunting quest aims to recruit 20,000 people to serve in the next administration, as a down payment on 4,000 presidential appointments + potential replacements for as many as 50,000 federal workers who are "policy-adjacent," as Trumpers put it.

Reality check: Technically, this apparatus will be inherited by any Republican nominee — Heritage officials tell us they've briefed the campaigns of Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.

• But this is undeniably a Trump-driven operation. The biggest tell: Johnny McEntee — one of Trump's closest White House aides, and his most fervent internal loyalty enforcer — is a senior adviser to Project 2025.
• One of the most powerful architects is Stephen Miller, a top West Wing adviser for the Trump administration. Miller is charting an even harder line on legal and immigration policy than last time. While he maps a White House return, he's president of America First Legal, which vows to fight "lawless executive actions and the Radical Left."

Between the lines: Trump doesn't hide his intentions. It's important to tune out the theatrical language that drives social media and cable TV, and focus intently on the directional guidance of his second term.

• He's telling us exactly what he intends to do — like it or loathe it. And this time, he'll have prefabbed institutional muscle to turn pugilistic words into policies and action from the get-go.

Here's what the early days of a second Trump presidency would look like, based on his words and our conversations with Trump insiders:

1. His top obsession will be the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community — all of which he thinks conspired to investigate him, thwart him, screw him. He's been very clear that he's willing to unleash these agencies against political enemies.
2. The next priority will be the Department of Homeland Security and the border, with plans to erect sprawling detention camps, "scour the country for unauthorized immigrants," and "deport people by the millions per year," The New York Times reports. We're told Trump's top criterion for immigration officials will be whoever promises to be most aggressive. Trump has told allies he's confident the Supreme Court will back his most draconian moves.
3. As first reported by Jonathan Swan for Axios last year, a key tool for Trump's "revenge term" would be the use of Schedule F personnel powers to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants across the federal government. Trump allies want a deep and wide purge of the professional staff that often serves across new administrations.
4. Officials close to the Pentagon tell us they're worried about a plan, articulated by former Trump official Russ Vought in the Heritage document, to direct the National Security Council to "rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory [and] manufactured extremism." Indeed, the Trump allies see obstacles to remove at every level of every agency.

The bottom line: This Trump-allied machine has the most power over the formation of a potential future government of any group in U.S. history. Trump, if elected, will leverage it to do things with government that none of us has seen in our lifetime.

• Go deeper: These themes have been explored in a great, deeply reported series by The New York Times' Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Charlie Savage. Read their pieces about Trump plans for the Justice Department, federal agencies, federal workers, Mexico, radical lawyers, legal gatekeepers and immigration.

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/trump-loyalists-2024-presidential-election

 

Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term
Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out 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.

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymityto describe private conversations.Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.



To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.

“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”



The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.

“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”

Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.



Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.

‘He is going to go after people that have turned on him’
It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.

Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”



Barr, another Trump appointee turned critic, has contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my boots.”

“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying weaklings into doing his bidding.”

Milley did not comment.

Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.



Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.

“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”

But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.



“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

A fixation on prosecuting enemies
As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.


“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”


Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.

“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a 500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump White House adviser.

Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.

Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.



In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J., golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.

“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.

Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. Project 2025 comprises 75 groups in a collaboration organized by the Heritage Foundation.

Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times,” he said.

After online publication of this story, Rob Bluey, a Heritage spokesman, said: “There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

How a second Trump term would differ from the first
There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.

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.

In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior Justice Departmentpositions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.

The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agendain his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in the West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.

Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive orders, according to people familiar with the situation.

“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”

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, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.

“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/

 

The Left Is Right To Fear Our Plan To Gut the Federal Bureaucracy


KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Those of us working on this project intend to make sure that the deep state can no longer throttle conservative governance through administrative sabotage.
2. Ensuring that the deep state cannot disrupt the work that the American people elected a president to do is precisely one of the top aims of Project 2025.
3. There is no reason the non-Brahmins should pay for this in the form of a bureaucracy that thinks like this or a broadcaster that reflects these views.

The permanent bureaucracy and its backers are having conniptions over Project 2025, an endeavor to ensure the next conservative president is ready to govern from day one. Truth to tell, the denizens of the permanent state are not wrong to fret.

Those of us working on this project intend to make sure that the deep state can no longer throttle conservative governance through administrative sabotage. This is also true for the institution that reflects the views, biases, and mores of the permanent state rather than the public itself: public broadcasting.

Project 2025 aims to make sure that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) ceases to receive public funding, so conservative taxpayers are no longer forced to pay for NPR and PBS, which CPB funds. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

The men and women who work for the federal bureaucracy may be great people individually, but nobody elected them, and therefore, they too often escape accountability. Nobody can throw them out on their ear at the next election. And therein lies the problem, as they have arrogated to themselves powers that belong to the three traditional branches of government.


Trump’s first impeachment, for example, came from the swamp, and there were many anecdotes about how often and how brazenly members of the bureaucracy simply told political appointees trying to implement his agenda, “No, we’re not doing that.”

But this is not about Trump. Those of us who have worked in past Republican administrations know the reluctance of federal bureaucrats to go along with conservative policy didn’t start with Trump – nor will it end with him. It’s no surprise that the surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are all deeply blue, while the District of Columbia itself voted 95% Democrat in the last presidential election.

So, ensuring that the deep state cannot disrupt the work that the American people elected a president to do is precisely one of the top aims of Project 2025. It is led by my Heritage colleague Paul Dans, the former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management.

The project Dans leads “brings together 45 conservative organizations ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people.”

This is how new people would be brought in. But how would the boycotters be dealt with? PBS recently ran an Associated Press story that explained how they think it will happen. “Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F—a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the two million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired,” the report said.

“It frightens me,” AP and PBS quoted professor Mary Guy as saying. “We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” Guy added.

The Left is scared. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, another who is never one for nuance, said Project 2025 will “radically change the form of governance that we have in the United States so as to concentrate all the powers of the government in a single leader.” It is “fundamentally opposite to the whole idea of why we exist as a country in the first place,” she claimed.

Perhaps Maddow was absent on the day the history teacher discussed government being “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Nobody elected the some four million-strong federal bureaucracy.


MSNBC is a private network, and has every right to employ Maddow or whomever else it pleases. The folks who run public broadcasting, however, should have realized that because they draw money from Americans across the political spectrum, they should have played the news and commentary down the line.

They don’t do this, and haven’t bothered to in decades. In but one of the most recent examples, “It’s Been a Minute,” an NPR show aimed at younger audiences, recently ran an episode on how capitalism isn’t “the answer for black people.”

We don’t need to show 1,000 examples of this. NPR hasn’t bought into just anti-capitalism (read: Marxism), but into its much more noxious cultural variant as well. As the show remarked, “Economics reporters weren't talking about it; culture reporters were.” For NPR, it’s “Latinx,” and “ze/zir,” all the way.

This happens to be the view of the Left that the great left-of-center thinker Ruy Teixeira calls the “Brahmin Left.”

“The fact is that the cultural Left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech, and, of course, race and gender that are quite far from those of the median working class voter (including the median non-white working-class voter),” Teixeira wrote.

There is no reason the non-Brahmins should pay for this in the form of a bureaucracy that thinks like this or a broadcaster that reflects these views. In my contribution to Project 2025, I wrote that, “The 47th president can just tell the Congress, through the budget he proposes to Congress, and through personal contact, that he will not sign an appropriations spending bill that contains a penny for the CPB.”

If Maddow doesn’t like it, so be it.

https://www.heritage.org/progressiv...ght-fear-our-plan-gut-the-federal-bureaucracy

 

Where and who would you be shooting?

But unless you're a felon nothing is preventing you from having guns.