Political and legal experts are sounding the alarm after a New York Times deep dive details how Donald Trump and his top allies are planning to massively reorganize the entire executive branch to hand him unprecedented power and decimate the constitutional basis of checks and balances should he win re-election next year.
“Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands,” The New York Times’ Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman report.
With the assistance of entities like the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that was transformed during the Trump years, The Times reports several of Trump’s well-known associates have been working on plans for his second term.
Among them, John McEntee. Swan last year at Axios described McEntee a “young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah” who Trump had enlisted after his first impeachment acquittal in early 2020 to “activate the plan for revenge.”
“Baby-faced assassin,” is how The Guardian in February of 2020 described McEntee, “the 29-year old at the heart of Trump’s ‘deep state’ purge.”
McEntee rose through the ranks of the Trump White House, starting as the president’s body man and personal aide. He was terminated after failing to pass a security clearance background check and was “under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes,” CNN reported in 2018. Despite his past, Trump later rehired him as his Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, where he initiated loyalty test interviews in the hope of ensuring executive branch employees across all agencies were entirely loyal to Trump.
“What part of candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” was one question potential political appointees were reportedly asked under McEntee’s leadership, CBS News had reported in 2020.
In November of 2021, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl penned a piece for The Atlantic calling McEntee, “The Man Who Made January 6 Possible.”
“McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible,” Karl wrote. “They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.”
The New York Times’ report on Monday reveals Trump and his allies’ “plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.”
Trump, for example, would bring what Congress created to be independent agencies, like the “Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.”
He would “impound” taxpayer funds Congress appropriated and refuse to spend them, a practice outlawed under disgraced President Richard Nixon.
As he wanted to do before the end of his first term, Trump would eliminate civil service protections from “tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.'”
And who would Trump enlist into this fascistic effort?
“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said McEntee, “who is now involved in mapping out the new approach,” The Times reports.
“Our current executive branch,” McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
Russell T. Vought, who lead Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, told The Times: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”
Others The Times mentions are “two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington.”
And Stephen Miller, a white nationalist who The Times notes was “the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.” That agenda included the intentional separation of children from their parents, and some siblings from each other – to send a message to other families not to travel to the U.S. southern border in hopes of applying for asylum or entering and staying unlawfully. Miller’s efforts separated approximately 3000 children from their parents, but he had a plan, never implemented, NBC News reported, to separate an additional 25,000 more.
Experts across the spectrum are responding to The Times’ report with grave concern.
“In 2024, authoritarianism—unchecked, unembarrassed and undisguised—will be on the ballot,” wrote Bill Kristol, the longtime neoconservative commentator.
“Anyone who opposes a Presidential autocracy in America should read this closely,” urged NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
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“Read this piece,” also urged MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. “Be afraid. This is on the verge of happening 18 months from now.”
“Now ask yourself this question,” he continued, “are cautious, in-denial, business-as-usual establishment Dems equipped, or even willing, to address this anti-democratic, autocratic threat?”
Award-winning retired White House correspondent Peter Maer tweeted, “ELECTIONS MATTER. If #Trump wins the #Republican nomination, autocracy will be on the ballot.”
Attorney Charles Kuck, an immigration law expert and adjunct professor of law warned, “Trump and his minions want America to be a dictatorship. Be aware.”
Former Republican and former Tea Party U.S. Congressman Joe Walsh noted, “Deciding how to vote in the 2024 election will be super easy & super straightforward: If you want a dictator in the White House, vote for Trump. If you don’t, vote for Biden.”
Veteran journalist Brian Kareem wrote: “Read. This is the elimination of democracy and the plans of a despotic regime.”
International relations professor and senior editor of Arc Digital, Nicholas Grossman writes: “If Trump conspiring [to] stay in power after losing reelection didn’t convince you. And his team’s plan to purge the civil service of non-loyalists didn’t. Nor did his call to terminate the Constitution. Here’s more evidence of explicitly anti-democracy intent.”
“Democracy can die by suicide, and re-electing Donald Trump would be precisely that,” observed Larry Sabato, professor, and founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Retired U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, the expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security who is now at The Atlantic, balked at The Times title: “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025.”
“Well, that’s one way to put it,” Nichols wrote. “Another would be ‘to establish an autocracy.'”
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