The must-read reporting over the weekend was Jonathan Swan’s series at Axios exploring the efforts of former President Donald Trump’s supporters and other Trump-friendly Republicans to prepare to staff a potential Trump second term.
During the presidential nomination competition in 2015-2016, Republican Party actors generally opposed Trump, in part because they considered him a risky general election candidate and in part because they were not convinced he would be reliable on matters of public policy.
When push came to shove, however, the elected officials, party professionals, interest group activists, party-aligned media figures and others who might have prevented his nomination chose not to challenge him, mainly because by the time of the Republican National Convention in July they were convinced he was willing to abide by party preferences in most policy areas. Notably, Trump had shown that he was willing to add conventional Republicans to his campaign, and the pattern continued into the presidency.
Trump’s White House was always a disorganized mess, and he had quite a number of White House staffers and executive branch choices who wouldn’t have been part of a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio presidency. But there were plenty of conventional choices, and most of the unusual ones were Republicans on the fringes of the party, not (in most cases, at least) Trump’s personal loyalists.
Four years of a Trump presidency, however, have turned the fringes into the party mainstream, and the fringes have evolved in Trump’s direction.
Swan describes efforts already underway for staffing a second Trump administration along with criteria for selecting personnel. Trump himself is described as obsessed with the 2020 election, and what he mainly cares about is finding people who affirm his false accounts of fraud; anyone unwilling to falsely claim that Trump won the election need not apply for any position.
But as the hearings of the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021, have demonstrated, practically no one from the Trump campaign, nor anyone in the administration who knew anything about elections, believed Trump’s lies, which is why he wound up bringing in outsiders to make his case. That means that anyone eligible for a future Trump administration job is either a sycophant willing to pretend to believe dangerous nonsense, or a fool who believes dangerous nonsense after it’s been revealed that those who propagated it didn’t even believe it.
The second, overlapping qualification for a job appears to be true belief in the Trump agenda. In some cases, that means the narrow set of issues on which Trump seems to have impulses (someone who knows so little about public policy can’t be said to hold actual positions): against overseas alliances, against traditional allies and for foreign authoritarian governments, against immigration and immigrants, against international trade. But it also means embracing the lawlessness that Trump embodies and thus wanting to dismantle the Justice Department and undermine loyalty to the rule of law. As Swan reports, what Trump and his allies most want is to eliminate anyone who resisted Trump’s requests on the grounds that they were illegal.
The third qualification appears to favor people preparing to carry out extreme conservative policies — not things Trump cares about at all, but goals that movement conservatives such as former Sen. Jim DeMint, whom Swan reports is involved in one of the groups vetting names, have tried and failed to accomplish in Republican administrations from at least Ronald Reagan through Trump.
A lot of those policies don’t get implemented because they’re unpopular, and even very conservative presidents shy away from them; others don’t happen because they can’t pass Congress and enacting them without legislation would probably be blocked by the courts. Advocates of these policies know that Trump doesn’t pay any attention to what goes on unless it’s on TV, can be easily manipulated because he doesn’t bother to learn much, and doesn’t care if something his people try to do is said to be illegal.
It’s fine for a presidential candidate to make preparations to fight for policies he or she supports. Indeed, it’s generally a good sign if a candidate takes the possible transition and subsequent governing seriously, beginning with intense demands for staffing the White House and the executive branch. That includes recognizing that the bureaucracy can have a strong status quo bias that makes presidential initiatives hard to implement.
Unfortunately, most of what Trump and his allies appear to bepreparing for is a fight against the law and the constitutional order. Trump has never understood that presidents are not dictators, and he appeared to take it personally whenever anyone in the political system resisted his preferences — not realizing that pushback from the executive branch, the judiciary and Congress was not personally directed at him, but was part of how diverse legitimate interests are represented within a democratic government. Therefore, what Trump and his allies are attempting to do is likely to end either with the kinds of fiascoes and failures that wound up with Trump impeached twice — or with his victory over the republic and the end of constitutional government.
And even if Trump does not regain the White House, his allies — those who meet one or more of the overlapping criteria — have become the mainstream of the party, with all the radicalism and lawlessness that goes with that. Personnel is policy, and it should come as no surprise that the pro-democracy faction within the party has increasingly been marginalized, if not purged. The party leaders who chose not to fight hard against Trump in 2016 have plenty to answer for.
