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One might reasonably assume that Donald Trump learned an important lesson when he won the 2016 presidential election. For months, he’d heard from experts and analysts that he would not be successful, that Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls was too substantial and his campaign too riddled with flaws. Even mathematical assessments of his odds suggested they were low. But they weren’t zero, and Trump won, and Trump learned that he was right, not the experts.
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We might also assume that Trump learned an important lesson when he lost four years later. He learned in 2020 that his ambitions to retain power were stymied by insufficiently loyal staffers. Or, at least, he believed that — that Vice President Mike Pence could have blocked the confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory or that a better attorney general could have leaned on states about what Trump and his allies called election fraud. This had been a frustration over the course of his presidency, of course, one that led him to shave disloyal or not-loyal-enough members of his administration over the course of his four years in the White House. But in December 2020 and January 2021, he most needed people who would help him redirect the power of government toward his personal use.
Trump came into office in January 2017 uncertain about the balance between institutional governance and his own will; he brought in two top advisers, Reince Priebus and Stephen K. Bannon, who represented the two sides of that equation. Should he come into office again in January 2025, he isn’t likely to be worried about drawing the same balance.
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On Wednesday morning, the New York Times reported on strategizing by Trump and his allies for a second term in the White House. This time, his legal advisers wouldn’t come from groups like the Federalist Society, on which he relied eight years ago as a validator of conservative credentials. Now, he wants different credentials — MAGA credentials, Trump-loyal credentials. So Trumpworld is looking to line up people who meet that requirement.
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“Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement,” the Times’s Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman report. The shift, they write, represents “an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.”
The article focuses on the lawyers Trump would want to bring into a second administration, people who (unlike his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions) would prioritize Trump’s political whims and who (unlike his second attorney general, William P. Barr) wouldn’t balk at endorsing how he deployed his power. He wants people like Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who in December 2020 wanted to send a bizarre, aggressive letter to Georgia falsely alleging that the presidential election in that state was subverted by fraud and who, as a result, came very, very close to being named acting attorney general himself. He wants lawyers like John Eastman, willing to wrench and blowtorch legal language until the will of the electorate becomes secondary to the will of Donald Trump.
It is not only in the legal realm that this effort is underway, however. The Times points to the role of John McEntee, a loyal staffer who spent the tail end of Trump’s term trying to root out staff who lacked the proper amount of fealty. It also notes the role of Stephen Miller, Trump’s notorious former adviser, who has spent the post-presidency running a group that he presents as a right-wing response to the ACLU.
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“[O]ur most fundamental rights and values are being systematically dismantled by an unholy alliance of corrupt special interests, big tech titans, the fake news media, and liberal Washington politicians,” the mission statement of America First Legal reads. Recommended hires from Miller, one assumes, would share a similar assessment of the situation.
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There are other groups, too. American Moment, for example, is a nonprofit that is focused in part on training and preparing younger right-wing activists for positions in the government.
One of its co-founders, Saurabh Sharma, spoke with Bannon on the latter’s podcast earlier this year.
“A lot of the problems that Republicans and conservatives run into, that ‘America First’ runs into when it actually gets power, have to be solved years in advance,” he said. “So we sat down to focus on one of those small problems, which is personnel. … At the end of the day, ideas only get you so far. People are required to implement ideas in institutions, specifically in government.”
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His group was founded shortly after Biden’s inauguration, with one eye already on 2025.
This plan from the pro-Trump right runs in parallel with Trump’s intent to overhaul the protections that government employees enjoy, making it easier to fire people who might object to the injection of partisan priorities. The Biden administration took a step earlier this year aimed at making such a change harder, but it’s unlikely to present much of an obstacle.
The effect of these changes would be obvious. Removing staffers who don’t align with Trump’s priorities. Installing staffers who do. Backstopping them with lawyers willing to make the case that Trump demands rather than the one demanded by the law.
It’s a recipe for a second term in which the guardrails battered during Trump’s first term are removed completely.
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