“People Aren’t Facing Up to the Horrors a New Trump Term Would Bring: G’bye, NATO. G’bye, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal. G’bye, democracy. He’s telling us plain as day. Why aren’t people listening?”, July 24, 2023, Brynn Tannehill, The New Republic, at <https://newrepublic.com/article/174535/people-arent-facing-horrors-new-trump-term-bring>.
“Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power.”, July 17, 2023, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Introduction by dmorista: The current day U.S. has some disturbing and sobering resemblances to pre-Nazi Weimar Germany; though there are also significant differences. Yesterday Collectivist Action posted another interesting Paul Street article that addressed this issue (there is a bit of confusion in that the url posted in the arcticle takes one to a podcast, the text article is apparently some recent Paul Street post and it does not appear at the place where the link takes you to, but both the article are well worth reading and the podcast is well worth listening to).
The most important areas of resemblance are in the demoralization and defeat of the American working class and petty bourgeoisie; after decades of the U.S. ruling class moving its investments overseas and transforming themselves into Finance Capitalists. In Weimar Germany the earlier German loss of WW 1, combined with the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty, to cause serious suffering in Germany. The socioeconomic and political milieu of a major defeat for a society furnishes the fertile soil in which fascism can grow. In the U.S. the years of the New Deal, WW 2, and the 30 years after WW 2, had been good times for American Workers and Petty Bourgeois. But since the late 1970s the bulk of the U.S. population has been savaged by never ending attacks by the ruling class manifested in significant inflation, loss of millions of jobs that paid a family supporting wage, privatization of formerly public services, and other issues like greatly increased tuition at state universities, the seizure of public schools that were transformed into profit seeking charter schools, increases in health care costs, and more recently rapid increases in housing costs. Unlike the anodyne comments frequently posted, that say that wages have remained stagnant, in reality the buying power of wages has fallen dramatically for most Americans. Another disturbing reality is the presence of thousands of heavily armed paramilitary units, militias, and other armed far-right wing organizations.
The most important difference, between Weimar Germany and the contemporary U.S., is that Germany had a population and a working class and petty bourgeoisie composed nearly entirely by White Germans. The U.S., after nearly 60 years of million plus numbers of legal migrants entering the country per yeare, plus the difficult to measure but certainly also numbering in the millions, of undocumented migrants. Both flows, that now surely number somewhere around 100 million people, were primarily from the Global South.
The result of a massive change in the ethnic composition of the population; the immiseration of millions of formerly economically secure people, both actual individuals and on a class-wide basis; the incorporation of women into the work-force in large numbers; and the many and sometimes bewildering changes in technology, and how working people integrate into the new socioeconomic milieu, has led to an unsettled and in many cases very unhappy population.
The most extreme right-wing factions of the ruling class are ready to try to make massive changes in how the U.S. is administered, and to sweep away the remnants of the New Deal and other social democratic institutions in the society. Brynn Tannehill, a transgendered writer for The New Republic, has followed the development of the Right-Wing takeover of the GOP, for some years now. She addresses important concerns in her article here. This article was mentioned by Paul Street as an important source of information for his thinking. And Tannehill cited the New York Times article posted here, written by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, as an important source for her; of the details of measures they would take after a Trumpista takeover of the U.S. Government, if they win the 2024 elections. The GOP far right hopes to win control of the Executive, both houses of the Federal Legislature; they already control the Supreme Court and have powerful positions in the lower Federal Courts.
The American far-right realizes that the long-term demographic and political trends are moving against them. They clearly want to impose a minoritarian dictatorship, of the far-right, with enough of a disguise of a democratic looking facade and rule to be palatable, but using as much fraud, violence and terror as needed. The 2024 Presidential election is a key time.
“People Aren’t Facing Up to the Horrors a New Trump Term Would Bring: G’bye, NATO. G’bye, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal. G’bye, democracy. He’s telling us plain as day. Why aren’t people listening?”, July 24, 2023, Brynn Tannehill, The New Republic, at <https://newrepublic.com/article/174535/people-arent-facing-horrors-new-trump-term-bring>.
People forget just how awful the Trump presidency was: daily chaos, naked power grabs, corruption, pandering to religious extremists, weaponization of government for personal vendettas, degradation of our democracy, and the constant assault on the rights of women, persons of color, and LGBTQ people. In the past week both The New York Times and The Economist have helpfully reminded us that the next Trump administration will be even worse, because this time they’re coming in with a plan.
The first iteration of his administration was embarrassingly unprepared because he never expected to win. He and his people blew off most of the normal transition-related activities expected of a president. Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk described how the comically inept Trump crew held meetings in the dark at the White House because they literally didn’t know how the lights worked. As a result of this incompetence, Trump’s administration was somewhat limited in how much damage it could do.
Next time will be different.
He’s coming back with the entire conservative apparatus at his back, having spent four years in the wilderness methodically planning how to permanently alter the political and legal landscape of the country to favor an anti-democratic minority. As Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams told The Atlantic, their goal is to “effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two.”
Central to this is the plan to reinstitute Schedule F for federal employees, which would allow the administration to fire any federal employee with policymaking authority. In practice this means that a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.
Imagine an FDA filled with far-right Catholic appointees looking for every imaginable way to end access to birth control, abortion, and gender-affirming care—and likely succeeding. Other agencies, like Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and the Pentagon, would also be looking for ways to ban or severely limit access. Odds are that all three services will be effectively unavailable in the country before the end of Trump’s next term.
Or imagine the Department of Justice investigating internet service providers and websites for hosting or disseminating information about abortion or LGBTQ people under the Comstock Laws. Or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigating discrimination only against whites, men, and Christians. The possibilities are endless. The right intends to use every power of the government to eradicate anything it considers woke, particularly transgender people. The result will likely be many transgender individuals seeking to leave the country.
There’s also Trump’s belief in unitary executive theory, which basically holds that the president is a sort of elected king who has authority over everything but can be prosecuted for nothing. He and his backers at conservative think tanks like Heritage and Claremont are banking on this theory being green-lighted by a Supreme Court bought and paid for by the Federalist Society. Regardless, Trump intends to fully weaponize government against his enemies, both personal and political.
In practice, this could mean, for example, the president personally instructing the Department of Justice and the IRS to investigate and prosecute anyone he directs them to. According to people who study how democracies die, this would serve as a big, flashing neon light that says the democracy is either dead or dying. But the American public doesn’t seem to notice, or care.
Trump also possesses the power as commander in chief to fire and replace literally any officer in the military. One of the biggest lessons he learned from his last term was that even conservative flag officers who served in high positions in his administration (like John Kelly, James Mattis, Mark Milley, and H.R. McMaster) are still at their core institutionalists. The military is generally good enough at promoting competence that individuals like Michael Flynn are the rare exception rather than the rule. Trump’s solution is obvious: Get officers who say yes to anything he demands.
Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president authority over the military and the right to commission officers. The president has the right to fire, or commission, anyone he wants. And Trump is going to want better yes-men when he announces he’s withdrawing support for Ukraine and pulling out of NATO. Democrats in the Senate see this coming and are trying to prevent it, but most Republicans are ready to let him do it if he chooses (lest they too be investigated by the DOJ, presumably).
On a smaller scale, conservatives love the idea of a military that looks like Russia’s: namely, no gays or women. Trump doesn’t care about such things, but the social conservatives behind his 2017 ban on transgender service members are the same ones who previously opposed women in combat roles as well as opposing the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” During a second term, Trump or his newly appointed brass will almost certainly ban transgender people from the military again, and they will likely at least try to bring back bans on gays in the military and women in combat positions.
Trump and the GOP are also likely to take their cues from Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. When he was invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference as a keynote speaker in 2022, Orbán advised the audience that the path to permanent power is to “have your own media.” In Hungary, virtually no opposition media remains: It is all owned by the government or privately by allies of Orbán. With Trump in power and weaponizing the government against “enemies of the people,” he will likely use the Federal Communications Commission, FBI, IRS, and DOJ to silence critics and end investigative journalism as we know it.
You might ask why the Round Two Trumpies would do things that they know are hideously unpopular with the public. The answer has already been stated: Trump, and Republicans, plan on never leaving power again, and they will use every instrument of the government they’re corrupting to ensure their permanent place in power.
It’s also worth pointing out that Trump is not willingly going to leave office ever again. He’s already under several felony indictments for stolen classified materials, and more appear to be coming for his role in attempting to steal the 2020 election and for the January 6 insurrection. Given the typical timelines of such trials, he’s unlikely to be in prison by the 2024 election. He’s smart enough to know that as long as he’s in the White House, he can’t be prosecuted for anything. The moment he leaves office, he’s going right back to trial and maybe to jail.
The conclusion is clear: Fire everyone who might prosecute him, and never leave office again to ensure that his Heritage-approved stooges never get replaced by a future president. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly talked about third and fourth terms. He wasn’t joking; he was testing the waters to see how much backlash ignoring the Constitution would draw.
Almost none came, and his answer was clear: Trump will leave the White House only in a hearse, and he will use every power he has to see that it happens. It’s not impossible, either: Pack the court with people who do whatever the administration wants, and anything can be constitutional. The fact that they’re starting this term in office with a 6–3 conservative court doesn’t hurt their chances of success.
Certainly, there will be resistance from blue-state governors. However, they’re not capable of doing much about it without breaking the union. Trump and the GOP won’t hesitate to use the full power of the federal government to bring them to heel, starting by withholding federal funding for things like education. All of this doesn’t even begin to describe the full, unrelenting cascade of horror that will be a Trump second term for people who are unwelcome in a country reshaped by a religious right minority. And the worst part is, I believe this is currently the most likely outcome. Because of the Electoral College, in order to have a 50–50 chance of winning the election, Biden needs to win the popular vote by about 4 percent. He barely won a handful of swing states last time with a 4.5 percent national advantage. Most polls show his lead to be something closer to 2 to 3 percent this time around.
Biden’s popularity has waned, and the American public has a short memory. They forget how chaotic and radicalized Trump’s first term was. We collectively cannot grasp how bad a second term will be, in the same way that we cannot grasp how big the universe is, or what infinity looks like. White Americans have never lived in a country where democracy has collapsed. Black people come closest, the older ones among them having collective generational memory of Jim Crow and slavery.
The United States is probably about to have a “fuck around and find out” moment that’s lethal to our form of government as we know it. The rapidity of the collapse is going to be terrifying. It will rival the end of the Weimar Republic in terms of its swiftness, and how far it swings away from democracy and human rights. It will come like a tidal wave. So much so fast that civil rights organizations won’t have the resources to fight more than a fraction of it, and the result will be like sandcastle walls trying to hold back a tsunami.
I just hope we get to 2026 and don’t look back at this article as prophetic.
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“Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power.”, July 17, 2023, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president's recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by 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, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies -- like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses -- under direct presidential control.
He wants to revive the practice of ''impounding'' funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn't like -- a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ''the sick political class that hates our country.''
''The president's plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn't been done since F.D.R.'s New Deal,'' said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump's systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.
''Our current executive branch,'' Mr. McEntee added, ''was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It's not enough to get the personnel right. What's necessary is a complete system overhaul.''
Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions -- proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.
''What we're trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,'' said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
The strategy in talking openly about such ''paradigm-shifting ideas'' before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to ''plant a flag'' -- both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump's Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump's campaign, said in a statement that the former president has ''laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.'' He added, ''Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.''
The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump's own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump's advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president's hard-line immigration agenda.
Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump's turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.
''It would be chaotic,'' said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump's second White House chief of staff. ''It just simply would be chaotic, because he'd continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.''
The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state -- agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.
Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.
The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory's adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president's ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.
''The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don't answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,'' said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to ''dismantling this rogue administrative state.''
Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, ''I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.''
Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.
Early in Mr. Trump's presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a ''deconstruction of the administrative state.'' But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.
Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.
Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings -- putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)
Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies' independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.
Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.
Mr. Trump's allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them ''under presidential authority.''
Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump's first term -- and blessed by the Justice Department -- but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve's independence, people familiar with the matter said.
The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve -- an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president -- could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website's discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.
Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But ''at the bare minimum,'' he said, the Federal Reserve's regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.
''It's very hard to square the Fed's independence with the Constitution,'' Mr. Vought said.
Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president's power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.
Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president's control over officials ''because we don't want autocracy'' and to prevent abuses.
''The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,'' he said. ''They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.''
Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.
On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice -- though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.
Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service -- government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.
The former president views the civil service as a den of ''deep staters'' who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, ''Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,'' that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.
Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.
Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute -- a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials -- argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president's agenda.
''Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,'' Mr. Sherk said. ''Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.''
Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently -- promising on his campaign website to ''find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education'' and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.
''We will demolish the deep state,'' Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. ''We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.''
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PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (A14) This article appeared in print on page A1, A14.
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