Former House speaker Newt Gingrich appeared to give air to rumours that Donald Trump and his allies plan to purge the federal workforce of people who are not personally loyal to Mr Trump should the ex-president retake the White House in 2024.
The ex-congressman and longtime Trump supporter was speaking on Monday at the America First Agenda Summit, a gathering of Trump supporters in Washington DC where the ex-president himself is set to speak Tuesday in his first address in Washington DC since the January 6 attack on Congress.
Mr Gingrich told a crowd that “we have a seasoned enough cadre, that if we work at it methodically, we can actually have an enormous impact on profoundly reshaping the federal government”.
The remarks were just a small part of Mr Gingrich’s speech clipped and shared online by a Democratic operative. However, they come on the direct heel of a report from Axios detailing the implications of an executive order that Donald Trump signed in 2020 known as “Schedule F”, which Joe Biden rescinded upon taking office, that would give the president of the United States the direct authority to fire people working in tens of thousands of positions within the federal government.
And Axios further reported that some of Mr Trump’s allies are quietly preparing efforts to use that authority, which Mr Trump could grant himself with the stroke of a pen, to initiate a purge of the federal workforce and clear out many individuals who, for example, accept the legitimate results of the 2020 election or do not support Donald Trump’s far-right political agenda.
One of those Trump allies supportive of the idea is Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, who told Axios that he advised the former president to “fire everyone you’re allowed to fire...and [then] fire a few people you’re not supposed to, so that they have to sue you and you send the message.”
Mr Trump has yet to announce a 2024 bid for the White House but remains vocally indicative that he will indeed run; just earlier Monday the former president took to his Truth Social platform to espouse a poll that showed him in control of the 2024 GOP primary field.
Despite this, he remains under investigation by the January 6 committee as well as a state-run investigation in Georgia which has called a grand jury to investigate his attempts to pressure officials in the state to overturn the 2020 election results which saw him lose Georgia to Mr Biden.
The Justice Department is also running its own January 6 investigation; the chief of staff to his vice president, Mike Pence, testified before that grand jury on Monday.
