President Trump’s administration represents an object lesson in lost opportunities. The ability of the administration to cut the Gordian Knot of the Middle East “peace process” and turn the United States into an energy exporting nation was little short of amazing. That said, the horrible personnel choices made by President Trump and his personal indiscipline combined to create a constant sh**storm that prevented President Trump from ever developing the broad national support he deserved. His administration faced a campaign of obstruction and sabotage unlike any other in history. The campaign, centered in our “nonpartisan” civil service, robbed President Trump of his first term included a soft coup attempt based on the Russia Hoax and calculated leaks of national security information.
As the preliminary moves in the 2024 election takes shape and a Trump candidacy looks more and more likely, Trump’s team is planning to ensure that a second Trump administration will not suffer the fate of the first. Axios’ Jonathan Swan has looked into what a second Trump administration has in store and wrote about it in A radical plan for Trump’s second term.
The bad news is first.
According to this article, Trump has been relying on the guidance of a select group of advisors.
Trump doubles down on his loyalty to a small group Courageous. His former White House senior officials Dan Scavino and Stephen Miller are included in the group. John McEntee is also part of this group. It also includes his fourth chief of staff, Mark Meadows, though their relationship was strained when Meadows recounted in his memoir private details of Trump’s hospitalization with COVID-19.
According to sources, Trump is only trusted by a small number of ex- Cabinet secretaries and high ranking government officials. Trump still speaks casually with many people and rarely turns off his cell phone. However, former aides that felt they could sometimes persuade him to alter course said that Trump is quick to disregard advice he doesn’t want to hear.
These were the exact same tactics that President Trump used during his campaign. We all remember what happened between Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, and others. It is a shame that we have to go through it again. I wrote about Trump’s inner circle at war during 2016 (see Donald Trump’s Unveils His “Team Of Vicious Gits” and Open Warfare Breaks Out Among Donald Trump’s “Team Of Vicious Gits”) and much of the chaos in the early weeks of the Trump administration was a direct result of the internecine battles that started on the campaign trail.
Here’s the good news.
MAGA-oriented “non-profits” are building a list of personnel for a Trump II administration and identifying policy roadblocks to remove.
A key hub for 2025 preparations is the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), an organization whose nonprofit status under the tax code allows it to conceal its donors’ identities. CPI is a who’s-who of Trump’s former administration and the “America First” movement.
Founded by former firebrand GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — the bane of Mitch McConnell’s existence when he served in Congress — CPI has become the hub of the hard right in Washington.
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Another influential group is Vought’s Center for Renewing America — designed to keep alive and build upon Trump’s “America First” agenda during his exile.
Vought kept a relatively low media profile through much of the Trump administration but by the end Trump trusted him as somebody who would rebuff career officials and find edge-of-the-envelope methods to achieve Trump’s ends.
Vought and the team from the Office of Management and Budget devised the plan to redirect money from the Pentagon budget in order to fund the wall when Trump was prevented by Congress from obtaining the funding he required.
Vought spoke to Trump in the Oval Office during Trump’s final week and discussed his plans to create CRA. Trump granted Vought his blessing. CRA’s team now includes Jeffrey Clark and Kash Patel as well as other Trump allies including Mark Paoletta and Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.
Vought plans to release a series of policy papers, beginning this year, detailing various aspects of their plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”
Vought also has far-reaching plans. He has told associates it was too onerous in the past for Trump officials to receive security clearances, so he plans to recommend reforms to the security clearance system. He is also interested in changing the way government documents are classified.
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America First Legal was established by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.
Miller also has been working in preparation to 2025. This is something that was not reported previously. He is currently assembling a roster of attorneys who are ready to serve as general counsel in the government under a Trump-led second term.
Trump’s close allies are intently focused on the recruitment of lawyers. Trump frequently complained that he did not have the “right” lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office.
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Other senior officials, including Miller, believed the federal agencies were clotted with cowardly general counsels too worried about their Washington reputations to risk throwing their support behind Trump’s policies. These general counsels, as the Trump team believed, allowed career attorneys to steamroll the federal agencies.
Miller has his eye out for general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.
Potential game-changer.
Trump issued an executive order in the final days of his presidency to establish a new class or schedule of civil servant employees. Three types of employees make up the civil service: senior executive, competitive and excepted. Senior Executive Service was created to serve as an equivalent to a general officer corps. It has failed to live up to its potential. You apply for jobs and you are selected based on race, gender, sexuality and ability to follow progressive shibboleths. Finally, employees who are not eligible for open competition will be considered excepted. There are five types of the excepted category:
Schedule A. Schedule A. Positions that are not confidential or policy-determining, but which cannot be examined in a practical manner, shall be included.
Schedule B. Schedule B. Positions that are not confidential or of policy-determining nature and where it is impossible to conduct a competitive exam shall be listed. These positions will be subject to OPM’s noncompetitive exam.
Schedule C. The Schedule shall list positions that are confidential or policy-determining.
Schedule D. All positions other than those that are confidential or policy-determining in nature and for which it is impractical to adequately recruit students from qualifying educational institutions or people who have just completed such programs will be included in Schedule.
Schedule E. Positions of administrative law judge appointed under 5 U.S.C. 3105 shall be listed in Schedule E.
This link explains Schedules A through C; Schedule D is the Presidential Management Fellow program. Schedule E is for administrative law judges. Schedule C is the exception, or political appointees. It’s probably the most familiar schedule. These employees are distributed across the government at approximately 4,000. Senate confirmation is required for 1,200. The role of Schedule C employees is to carry out the president’s policy objectives.
Trump faced a Civil Service which was inimical to him and his policies. The resistance from the agency employees overwhelmed the handful of Schedule C workers. Trump added Schedule F to this category on October 26, 2020.
- Involvement in policy formulation and advocacy.
- Policy-related substantive work within an agency/component that is primarily focused on policy
- The supervision of attorneys
- The agency has a lot of discretion in determining the way it performs the functions that have been given to them by law.
- You can work with deliberations or proposals that aren’t public in nature, which is generally covered under deliberative privilege.
- directly reporting to or regularly working with an individual appointed by either the President or an agency head paid at the GS-13 level or higher, or
- Assisting in the executive secretary of an agency or component
- conducting certain collective bargaining negotiations on the agency’s behalf
This would entail the reclassification of tens of thousands of employees as Schedule F, meaning they would be, for all intents and purposes, “at will” employees. This is my personal opinion. Republicans will not be disappointed by this move, as the worst thing a Democrat government can do to fill these positions is to hire people who are already in them.
The Intelligence Community and Department of Justice must be wiped out.
The Intelligence Community (the Department of Justice and the FBI) declared war against President Trump. There’s no question about that. There was not only the obscene Russia Hoax but also the joint effort that resulted in President Trump’s first impeachment on the most flimsy and transparently partisan grounds. Likewise, when Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced during the campaign, the Intelligence Community wasted no time declaring it a Russian fake.
As we and a federal grand jury (see Jonathan Turley and Former U.S. Atty Raise Questions About ‘Critical Stage’ of Hunter Biden Case) now know, the laptop is completely legitimate.
Swann claims that the Trump team identified top-priority targets to cleanse.
Sources close to former President said He will. — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.
Final thoughts.
This plan, aggressively executed, would be the best thing that’s happened to the nation since, at least, the election of Ronald Reagan. This would stop the five-man federal bureaucratic column of activists Democrats from waging a guerilla warfare against Republican administrations. It also returns a significant amount of government control to elected officials. The Intelligence Community and Department of Justice are nothing but Democrat stormtroopers. If a Republican president can’t bring them to heel, he’s doomed.
It is my hope that Trump will look at Joe Biden, and not run for office. His first term was marred by his bad behavior. It’s too late for Trump to make a change. He has the potential to do much more for his own cause by sharing the torch rather than simply running. He will have a plan for doing what he wasn’t able while in office if he runs and wins. If he doesn’t run, he has left his successor a blueprint for action, and we should demand they promise to carry it out.
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