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.
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.
Four years of a Trump presidency, however, have turned the fringes into the party mainstream.
Swan describes efforts underway for staffing a second Trump administration along with criteria for selecting personnel. What Trump mainly cares about is finding people who affirm his false accounts of election 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 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: 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.
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 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.
It’s generally a good sign if a candidate takes the possible transition and subsequent governing seriously.
Unfortunately, most of what Trump and his allies appear to be preparing for is a fight against the law and the constitutional order. Trump has never understood that presidents are not dictators. 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.
Bloomberg