Read Trump Plans To ‘Take Over All Three Branches For A Generation’

I am elated to see yet another article like the one that was published yesterday in the American Prospect and which formed the core of the article I wrote earlier today about Trump’s plan to become dictator. This is not hyperbole, ladies and gentleman. Donald Trump is a dangerous lunatic. Half a million Americans lost their lives from COVID-19 because one of the first things he did upon taking office was gut the infectious disease experts from the administration, as though he was paring down the waitstaff at the Mar-a-Lago coffee shop.

Then he hid the truth of COVID for four and a half months until it could be hidden no longer and it blew up in mid-March of 2020. Then he demonized the premiere infectious disease doctor on the planet, Anthony Fauci, to such an extent that that good man had to hire armed security for himself and his children. And of course this is but one of the horrors of his administration. I mention it first only because it caused so many deaths.

But not all the deaths. Trump likes to make a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt, but the truth of the matter is that if anybody killed her, it was him. She came to Washington on January 6, 2021 along with a lot of other deluded folk, believing that their hero was going to take care of them, no matter what. Babbitt went to her grave, a lot of her fellow rioters went to prison and a lot more are going through the legal system as we speak. And there are the police offers who lost their lives and the ones who became permanently disabled from injuries sustained that day, as well.

But these atrocities positively pale in comparison to what’s in store. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote the most amazing lede I’ve ever read in my life. Here it is.

A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.

That ladies and gentlemen, is the Upside Down world of politics we live in today, in a nutshell. And Brynn Tannehill of the New Republic ratifies what the American Prospect wrote and amplifies those thoughts with facts of her own. This is what we’re up against. We need to be crystal clear on just how pivotal a point in American history we are at. Tannehill’s piece is entitled, “People Aren’t Facing Up To The Horrors A New Trump Term Would Bring.” Preach it, sister, preach it.

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.”

Stop the presses. Let that sink in. This is nothing short of the end of democracy, right here, and there are now at least a half dozen seminal articles on this topic within the past few weeks. This is the alarm clock going off.

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.

That it does. It also is a set up for the wheels of government to stop turning entirely on Trump’s watch. Millions of people who depend upon the government for Veterans Administration benefits, Social Security, Medicare, etc. may find themselves not getting paid. Any idea the kind of havoc that would wreak?

Tannehill continues and it’s terrifying.

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.)

Key, crucial point made here: Democrats in the Senate are trying to get ahead of this and control it, because they see it coming and they know what it means. But most of the GOP is fine with this. The GOP is fine, just fine, with getting rid of democracy. For the nth time I quote David Frum, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically they will not abandon conservativism. They will abandon democracy.” He said that just a few short years ago, in 2018, and it sounded intensely cynical at the time but we are standing on the very precipice of seeing that comment become a reality.

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.

He might end blogging as we know it as well. I’m sure you remember the articles published here about the whacky bills before the Florida State Senate which would require bloggers to register with the state as lobbyists, and report how much income they made on each piece. Even Newt Gingrich said this was barking mad.

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.

This could come to pass. No Labels wants to run a third party candidate and as you well know, third party candidates bleed away votes from the Democrat. That’s the way of things. In the eventuality of No Labels being on the ballot, Biden could lose enough votes to where Trump could squeak back into office. And then we will be in Hell.

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.

This is what we must do, starting yesterday.

1. Take No Labels seriously. They are the linchpin that could pull off a second Trump term. Watch them like a hawk. We need to keep them off the ballot. No Labels exists to do precisely this, guarantee a second Trump victory.
2. Get out the vote. It’s always crucial but never more so than now.
3. Remind people of just how horrible the first Trump term was. People have a short memory. People worry about Joe Biden’s age. The simple reality is that Biden, bedridden, would do a better job running this country than Trump ever could if Trump was a straight shooter and wanted to serve the country. He is not, never will be, and he doesn’t.

Finally, I’m going to repeat Maureen Dowd again: A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.

This is precisely how nuts it is right now. We’ve never been here before. We’ve never faced these challenges. We saw on January 6, 2021 just how tenuous our grasp on our freedoms really is. The Secret Service thought they were going to die. Mike Pence feared assassination and very probably he was right. That’s why he didn’t get in the limousine.

We need to keep Trump out of the White House.

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