Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Hide His Authoritarian Plans for a Second Term

Given how his final weeks in office went down the first time around, it’s not hard to imagine that a potential second term for Donald Trump would be a full-on horror show. Obviously, that’s because those final weeks involved a desperate, unprecedented attempt to steal a federal election, capped off by an actual insurrection that left multiple people dead. But it‘s also not hard to imagine because Trump and his allies fully and proudly admit that should he beat Joe Biden in 2024 and head back to the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, he’ll run the place like a true authoritarian from day one.

The New York Times reports that “Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government…reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.” That expansion, per the Times, involves “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House,” according to people familiar with the matter. (The Federal Communications Commission, for instance, which currently operates as an independent agency, would be directly controlled by Trump in a potential second term.) As previously reported in a report that should have scared the crap out of you, the former guy also intends to make it far easier to fire potentially thousands of career civil servants and replace them with die-hard MAGA loyalists, but in addition, according to the Times, 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.’” And, should voters lose their minds come 2024 and send him back to the White House, he’ll revive the practice banned under Richard Nixon of “impounding” funds appropriated by Congress for programs he doesn’t support.

Thinking these alleged plans are simply fake news made up by the “failing New York Times” in an attempt to stop Trump from being president? They are not! And we know this because some of them, like the impounding business, are literally on Trump’s campaign website, and others are being talked about, on the record, by his advisers. “The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since FDR’s New Deal,” John McEntee, a former Trump administration employee who attempted to purge insufficiently loyal officials in 2020 and is now overseeing the approach for a Trump administration sequel, told the Times. “Our current executive branch,” he said, “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.”

Meanwhile, Russell Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and is now heading up a Trump-aligned policy organization, literally told the outlet, “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.” Commenting on why Team Trump is being so open about all this, he told the Times, that it’s part of a strategy to “plant a flag” prior to the election so that it can be viewed as a mandate should Trump make it back to the White House. He added that he was thrilled to see hardly any of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination defend the longtime independence of the Justice Department after the ex-president attacked it.

Speaking of the Justice Department, former officials warned last month that they are concerned Trump will use the DOJ to destroy his enemies, and given that he’s already pledged to investigate Biden, it’s not hard to see why. (Trump also reportedly plans to “immediately” fire anyone who worked on the classified documents and January 6 investigations into him.)

In a statement, a spokesman for the Trump campaign told the Times the former guy has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done,” adding: “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.”

Not surprisingly, people who don’t work for Trump are not all that jazzed about his (open) plan to rule the country with an authoritarian bent. “It would be chaotic,” John Kelly, Trump‘s second chief of staff—the one who recently reportedly said he should be in “jail or a nuthouse”—told the Times. “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.” Peter Strauss, a professor emeritus at Columbia Law School, noted that the whole reason the current checks on the president’s power are in place is “because we don’t want autocracy.”

Unfortunately, he added that the courts might let Trump get away with it. “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.