1). “The Conservative Plan to Take Over the Country (you need to know about this)”, Sep 26, 2023, Discussion of Project 25 by Leeja Miller, Leeja Miller, duration of video 36:35, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2). “Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision”, Aug 29, 2023, Lisa Mascaro, AP, at < https://apnews.com/article/
3). “How right-wing groups are plotting to implement Trump's authoritarianism”, Sept 14, 2023, Chris Pomorski, Mother Jones, (Originally published in David Corn's Newsletter, Sept 12, 2023), at < https://www.motherjones.com/
4). “ 'Expertise-driven civil service government would be gone': Right-wing Project 2025 agenda revealed”, Sept 8, 2023, “Video of discussion of Project 25 and David Corn Interview on The Reid Out linked from Mother Jones Article above, duration of video 7:43, MSNBC, at < https://www.msnbc.com/the-
5). “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”, Nov 5, 2023, updated Nov 6, 2023, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey & Devlin Barrett, Washington Post, at < https://www.washingtonpost.
6). “Is Trump’s "Brave New World" Coming Soon?: The day after President Trump was re-elected (with MAGA Mike's help), he invoked the Insurrection Act and began the mass arrests...”, Nov 6, 2023, Fictional future letter written by Thom Hartman, The Hartman Report, Posted on “X”, at (formerly Twitter), < https://twitter.com/Thom_
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Election Day Special from dmorista:
Introduction: Following their decades long-term tradition of doing the planning and spadework for the various Reactionary Presidents The Heritage Foundation has written a thousand page report on how to take complete power if the Republicans win the 2024 Presidential Election. They first produced such a report before Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election and it was very useful to him in his program to begin destroying the remnants of the New Deal reforms, basically the biggest positive governmental programs that helped Working-class and Middle-class people.
And make no mistake, this is a much more comprehensive and draconian plan than anything provided to The Ole Gipper. The far-right, led by The Heritage Foundation, is preparing to be ready, in the words of one of their spokesmen, at 12:00 Noon January 20th, 2024, to implement their agenda. The first order of business will be to mobilize the military, complete with a bevy of reactionary toadies in command, after replacing the more Constitutionally minded High Command, who will be ready to violently suppress the expected protests and demonstrations. We would be naive to not understand that there is a great likelihood that these Far-Right loyalists will deploy troops armed with live ammunition; with orders to kill as many protesters as possible and to arrest and imprison the rest of them.
The Project 25 document is full of detailed proposals and agendas, most of them heavily influenced by the most reactionary outlooks of Evangelical Christianity. This is discussed in a variety of ways in the video in Item 1), “The Conservative Plan to Take Over the Country ….”, in Item 2). “Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government ….”, in Item 3)., “How right-wing groups are plotting to implement Trump's authoritarianism”, and in Item 4)., “ 'Expertise-driven civil service government would be gone': ….”, The planners want to enlist the Federal and other levels of Government to enforce a Christo-Fascist Theocracy; that is closely associated with private Corporate and Oligarchical power centers. The main socio-economic planning in the U.S. is already done by the Corporations, and the plan is to eliminate many of the regulatory agencies to fire from 50,000 – 100,000 Career Civil Servants, and replace them with “reliable” empty suits. The video from Item 1). is particularly good at presenting a clear and lucid discussion of just what is in the Project 2025 report.
Many of the far right activists and operatives have recently come to the realization that their agenda is very unpopular. The experience of imposing Bans on Abortion and otherwise attacking Reproductive Healthcare Rights were a wake-up call for many right-wingers. Beforehand they actually thought their views were popular, but have been chagrined by the voting for Abortion Rights, even in their so-called homeland of the Red States.
The malignant Donald Trump is at the center of these plots, but he is hardly necessary to the overall implementation of the right-wings agenda. The Project 2025 report, along with the cadres of far-right operatives that they are recruiting and training now, will be offered to any Republican President should one win the 2024 election. Trump's take on the situation, and his personal plotting, are covered well in Item 5)., “Trump and allies plot revenge, ….”. While a fine article that updated developments, it was not particularly ground breaking as the New York Times and Washington Post, among many other media outlets have discussed this Project 2025 situation before. Finally Thom Hartman, motivated by reading the Washington Post article in Item 5, wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter that is worth a “light-hearted” but wary of the future read. The Heritage Foundation has not been hiding their project. They put the 1,000 page Project 2025 report online in a PDF format that could be readily downloaded.
The Conservative Plan to Take Over the Country
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision
Kristen Eichamer, right, talks to fairgoers in the Project 2025 tent at the Iowa State Fair, Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump. The Project 2025 effort is being led by the Heritage Foundation think tank. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
WASHINGTON (AP) — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible 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 return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and 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” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.
“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.
“This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”
The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, 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 officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.
The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.
While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.
“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.
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 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.
Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it.
“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.
Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Jimmy Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.
As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.
“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide. Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun,” Guy said.
The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.
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 calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
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 often 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.”
At the White House, the book suggests the new administration should “reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press corps and ensure the White House counsel is “deeply committed” to the president’s agenda.
Conservatives have long held a grim view of federal government offices, complaining they are stacked with liberals intent on halting Republican agendas.
But Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said most federal workers live in the states and are your neighbors, family and friends. “Federal employees are not the enemy,” she said.
While presidents typically rely on Congress to put policies into place, the Heritage project leans into what legal scholars refer to as a unitary view of executive power that suggests the president has broad authority to act alone.
To push past senators who try to block presidential Cabinet nominees, Project 2025 proposes installing top allies in acting administrative roles, as was done during the Trump administration to bypass the Senate confirmation process.
John McEntee, another former Trump official advising the effort, said the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”
In fact, Congress would see its role diminished — for example, with a proposal to eliminate congressional notification on certain foreign arms sales.
Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies the separation of powers and was not part of the Heritage project, said there’s a certain amount of “fantasizing” about the president’s capabilities.
“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 — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” he said.
At the Heritage office, Dans has a faded photo on his wall of an earlier era in Washington, with the White House situated almost alone in the city, dirt streets in all directions.
It’s an image of what conservatives have long desired, a smaller federal government.
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.”
How right-wing groups are plotting to implement Trump's authoritarianism
A representative of Project 2025, a conservative operation preparing for a possible Trump presidency, was recruiting supporters at the Iowa State Fair last month. Charlie Neibergall/AP
A representative of Project 2025, a conservative operation preparing for a possible Trump presidency, was recruiting supporters at the Iowa State Fair last month. Charlie Neibergall/AP
Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Plus, David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has just been released in a new and expanded paperback edition.
There is an authoritarian danger that threatens American democracy. It is a separate peril from Donald Trump and his tens of millions of rabid supports. It is the right-wing infrastructure that is publicly plotting to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional order and concentrate unprecedented power in the presidency. Its efforts, if successful and coupled with a Trump (or other GOP) victory in 2024, would place the nation on a path to autocracy.
Trump’s desire to be a strongman ruler are no secret. He has repeatedly uttered statements that reveal a craving to be in total control of the US government. As he mounts a second campaign for the White House, his team has openly discussed his plans to consolidate government power in the White House should he win. The New York Times recently reported that his crew aims “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.” The Washington Post ran a story in April headlined, “Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term.”
These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives. Say, Trump or an underling orders the IRS to audit the tax returns of a political foe and an IRS career official objects, that person could be pink-slipped.
Yet this effort to reshape the US government extends far beyond the fevered fantasies of one failed casino owner and his henchmen and henchwomen. Much of the right-wing establishment—including its leading think tanks and policy shops—are part of the attempt to concentrate federal power in the hands of Trump or another Republican president.
Conservatives have been advocating placing the White House in direct control of the Justice Department—that is, tearing down the (metaphorical) wall erected after Watergate that essentially blocks the president from unduly influencing the decisions of the agency and its criminal and civil investigations. Leading this charge has been Jeffrey Clark, the top Justice Department official who, not coincidentally, colluded with Trump after the 2020 election to push the department to falsely claim the election returns were fraudulent.(Clark was indicted last month in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of the criminal case that alleged Trump ran a “criminal enterprise” to overturn the last election.) Clark had been working on this Justice Department initiative as a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a Washington, DC-based think tank run and staffed by Trump administration veterans, including Russell Vought, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Kash Patel, who worked for Trump at the National Security Council.
The Center for Renewing America is merely a small piece of the right’s let’s-go-authoritarian operation. Dozens of conservative outfits—led by the Heritage Foundation—have banded together to produce what they call Project 2025, which has released a 1,000-page report, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which provides a blueprint for a wannabe-White-House-autocrat. Their proposals include removing protections for federal employees so perhaps as many as 50,000 could be fired and replaced with Trump (or Republican) loyalists. This would be done under the banner of annihilating the supposed “deep state” bureaucracy and smashing the “administrative state.”
As noted above, this would destroy the civil service, booting out of federal agencies employees with expertise and experience and replacing them with political hacks. We’re talking about EPA lawyers who might inform a White House that its proposal to sell oil leases off environmentally sensitive coastlands would violate the law. Or perhaps a CIA analyst who produces an assessment saying that a presidential policy might yield negative consequences (for instance, a report noting that bombing Mexico could cause an immigration crisis).
There’s much more in Project 2025 than eviscerating the civil service. It, too, calls for curbing the independence of the Justice Department and proposes revved-up prosecutions of persons providing or distributing abortion pills by mail. The project urges rolling back environmental regulations, reversing actions to address climate change, and abolishing the Pentagon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. One chapter that focuses on the Department of Health and Human Services calls on the next president to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” In other words, the next chief executive should wage a war on marriage equality.
Project 2025 harks back to a Heritage Foundation tradition. Four decades ago, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency, the far-right think tank produced its first Mandate for Leadership, a thick report laying out conservative proposals for the new administration. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership volume is a similar right-wing wish-list, but an overarching theme is the fortification of presidential power so a presumably conservative president could single-handedly impose right-wing policies on the nation. For a movement once defined by its cries against the evils of big government, this is quite the turnabout. It is a sign of how deeply Trump’s authoritarian impulse has penetrated into the conservative cosmos.
Project 2025 would make real the yearnings of a power-mad indicted former president. The Heritage Foundation claims it is raising $22 million for the venture, which will include recruiting thousands of right-wingers to “flood the zone” of the federal government. This could be a serious and dangerous operation.
The other night I was asked to discuss this initiative on MSNBC. I prepared by reading assorted articles on the project and its own material. But during the segment, I thought of a particularly dangerous possibility.
Trump has already vowed to pardon the January 6 assaulters if he returns to the White House—which would reward and validate violent insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, and seditionists. Now suppose Trump’s supporters—in large or small numbers—mounted new acts of political violence. Under the proposals advocated by Project 2025, Jeffrey Clark, and others, Trump could order the Justice Department not to investigate or prosecute these criminals. He could protect the brownshirts who engage in violence against his opponents. Similarly, Trump could do the same in cases of election interference or voter suppression. He could instruct the FBI to not probe the shady business dealings of his cronies or allies—or those of his family or his own enterprises. He and his favorites would have free rein across the board to break the law or to assist those who do. (See Vladimir Putin.)
Trump has repeatedly said he would use the Justice Department to prosecute and lock up his opponents and critics. That sounds like the usual Trump bluster. But if he gains full control of the department—and the federal law enforcement system—he and his followers (including the violent ones) could get away with murder. Not to be alarmist, but perhaps literally.
It’s been often said that Trump failed to do more damage to the nation because he and his minions were incompetent The organized right wants to ensure that doesn’t happen again, if Trump stays out of prison and ends up back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Worse, it seeks to institutionalize Trump’s authoritarian instincts. A mad-king ruler needs a support system, and the Heritage Foundation and its partners are happily toiling away to concoct one for Trump.
Click here to watch the MSNBC segment in which we discussed Project 2025.
Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term
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 anonymity to 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.
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.”
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.”
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 Department positions. 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 agenda in 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.”
Marianne LeVine and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
Is Trump’s "Brave New World" Coming Soon?
4 November 2025
Leavenworth, Kansas
Dear Louise,
It’s been almost a year since the last time I saw you, as they were arresting me on the sedition charge that’s kept me in this prison. If the underground network here succeeds, you should get this letter within a few weeks; it’s the third I’ve written you that got out of the prison, but I understand the first two couriers were busted for carrying contraband mail and are now in prison themselves.
The day after President Trump was re-elected (when Speaker Johnson recognized the disputed ballots in five states and threw the election to the House of Representatives), you’ll recall, he invoked the Insurrection Act and began the mass arrests. They tell me both Joe Biden and Merrick Garland are in here, too, although I haven’t seen them; apparently the “high value” former administration officials are locked down in a separate wing.
I’ve been following the news as best I can, and it appears that the initial news reports from January detailing the thousands of people killed and injured by police in the nationwide demonstrations have largely vanished. One of the guards who has access to the internet says all the stories have been scrubbed: it’s as if it never happened.
Part of that is probably because of the updated and retroactive Alien and Sedition Act Congress passed in Trump’s first week, and their “Truth Act” rolling back the Supreme Court’s Times v Sullivan ruling so public officials can now sue for libel.
Following Viktor Orbán’s script from Hungary, Trump and several of his senior officials launched both civil and criminal prosecutions for things reporters and commentators had previously said about them, resulting in over a thousand progressive writers and several dozen publications being run into jail or bankruptcy.
Others — like me, Mary Trump, Heather Cox Richardson, Dean Obeidallah, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joy Reid, and Timothy Snyder — were charged with “impugning the character of officials of the United States” and are sitting in federal prison right now. I guess we knew it was coming.
All those lawsuits and criminal charges destroyed the value of most media operations; it was a great opportunity for Trump’s billionaire friends to buy up most of America’s media just like Orbán’s buddies did a decade ago in Hungary. NBC, MSNBC, and The New York Times are now owned by the Murdoch family; CNN and CBS both went to Elon Musk; and ABC is now the property of Steve Bannon, who — like when Elon Musk bought Twitter with Saudi money — was bought from Disney with Middle Eastern oil money in a deal organized by Secretary of State Jared Kushner.
It was just a few years ago when Orbán spoke at CPAC in Texas and proposed — to a standing ovation — that Republicans should change the libel laws to put “liberals” in the media out of business: they were clearly paying attention. Now, just like in Hungary and Russia, all of the media spends all their time praising the wisdom and accomplishments of President Trump and Vice President Bannon.
Now that Environment Czar Rex Tillerson has outlawed any news reporting on climate change that “may cast aspersions on the critical fossil fuel industry,” I’m not hearing much about deaths from wildfires, floods, drought, etc., although I’m guessing the situation has been getting worse? I suppose the good news for me and my fellow incarcerated reporters, writers, and politicians is that the prison here in Leavenworth has easily survived several tornadoes and derechos: the climate crisis seems far away.
I hear Attorney General Jeffrey Clark has been busy arresting women all across the country. I remember in July of 2023 when 19 Republican attorneys general demanded private medical records of all women in their states who’d gotten abortions; now that the Supreme Court has ruled in their favor, I’m hearing the three largest private prison companies each got multi-billion-dollar contracts to build new women’s prisons.
As Speaker Johnson said, echoing Trump’s logic in tearing children from their parents at the Southern border (now he just shoots them), “If we don’t jail a few of these women persisting in getting abortions, nobody will take us seriously.” And, of course, there are many more women being arrested for illegally possessing birth control pills and IUDs now that they’ve both been declared abortifacients and thus illegal. I understand the protests have largely gone underground since the new Sedition Act forbids public demonstrations and General Flynn’s soldiers are using live ammo?
Today’s election day for the 2025 off-years, although at least 48 million fewer people will be voting since the Democratic Party was declared a criminally seditious organization under the Patriot Act and everybody who’d been registered as a Democrat lost their right to vote for ten years or until they’d successfully completed a re-education course. Another brilliant idea from Putin and Orbán, although President John Adams had nearly done the same thing in 1798.
Talking with other prisoners here, the most common thing I’m hearing is how surprised everybody was at how quickly Joint Chiefs’ head General Flynn had been at deploying the military when crowds began showing up on inauguration day after Trump issued those blanket pardons to himself and the January 6th rioters.
He was able to use the military — with live ammunition — to “keep the peace,” of course, because this time Senator Tuberville had kept all the senior military positions open — like Mitch McConnell did with Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination — so Trump wouldn’t be frustrated again by “socialists” like General Mark Milley (who’s now in a cell just down the block from me).
I hope you’re doing okay financially, since they seized all our savings. I understand your Social Security payment has dropped about 25 percent since JPMorgan took over the program? At least for now you can ignore paying taxes on the money, since Congress defunded the IRS.
And I’m hoping you were able to find a decent Medicare Advantage program, now that they’ve shut down traditional Medicare altogether? My cellmate tells me that now that the Advantage programs are the only game in town, they’ve begun charging over twelve thousand dollars a year for them — about the same as regular health insurance — and they’re getting even more aggressive at denying payment for claims. Please keep eating well and exercising: you need to stay healthy!
How are our grandkids? I know Texas and Florida shut down all their public schools just before the new school year started, following Abbott and DeSantis rolling out statewide voucher programs so every child can have a religious education, but haven’t heard that Oregon has yet gone down that road. I hear rumors the Trump administration is going to put into place a nationwide voucher system now that the Supreme Court has ruled that America is, in fact, a “Christian nation” and every child is entitled to a “Christian education.”
I was so saddened to hear that when Trump, Speaker Johnson, and Majority Leader McConnell cut off all US aid to Ukraine that country’s government collapsed, and the Russians slaughtered hundreds of thousands suspected of collaborating with the Zelensky administration. When Russian forces entered Poland, I fully expected a NATO response, but I hear Trump vetoed that, too.
Republicans in Congress appear, from what I hear, quite happy with the new US alignment with Russia and rejection of our former European alliances (except Hungary). Hopefully when the top Democrats get out of jail they’ll be able to convince their Republican colleagues to reconsider, if President Trump lets them back into the Capitol.
At least Taiwan won’t be a flashpoint for a war now that Secretary Kushner and his wife have negotiated a peace between them and China. I understand it’s modeled after the Hong Kong transition, which has many in Taiwan worried, but the Chinese forces backed up by the US fleet in the region — and North Korea’s new treaty with the US — seem to be keeping unrest there to a minimum.
Are ICE and the Border Patrol still using live ammunition down south? The story I heard through the grapevine here was that after about a week of the Rio Grande running red with blood, most asylum seekers abandoned their efforts and are staying in Mexico. Secretary Kushner brought in Saudi officials to explain to Congress how they’ve been using live ammunition to protect their borders for years, killing people regularly, and that it’s good target practice to keep our troops’ training in tip-top shape.
While those of us convicted under the 2024 updates to the libel and sedition laws and Patriot Act are considered “enemy combatants” and thus not entitled to constitutional protections and things like mail privileges, I hear they may let us have one zoom call with family on Christmas (now that it’s a “mandatory holiday”). Next week is our 54th wedding anniversary; I miss you, and hope you get this note before our Christmas call!
Sending you, our kids, and our grandkids all my love…
— Thom
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