#russell vought

[tomorrowusa]

John Oliver described what a Trump second term would be like. It's a lot worse than just being a rerun of the 2017-2021 period.

This was broadcast before Trump's dip in the polls over the past few days. Hopefully that dip will continue when more people see this vid.

Oliver devotes time to the outline for a second Trump administration called "Project 2025" which is sort of a Christian nationalist „Mein Kampf” for the 21st century.

In short, Trump and his enablers want to destroy constitutional government as we've known it over the past couple of centuries.

One of the people John Oliver mentions is Russell Vought who speaks about a "post-constitutional" America. Of course post-constitutional is just a weaselly way of saying dictatorial.

Project 2025 is not a dog whistle – it's a vuvuzela hooked up to a foghorn. And anybody who can't hear it is deaf to the danger posed by some of the most extreme elements in America.

A little bonus reading...

Trump’s Christian Nationalist Friends Have a Horrifying Plan for a Second Term

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

At one campaign rally after another, former President Donald Trump whips his supporters into raucous cheers with a promise of what’s to come if he’s given another term in office: “We will demolish the deep state.”

In essence, it’s a declaration of war on the federal government—a vow to transform its size and scope and make it more beholden to Trump’s whims and worldview.

The former president’s statements, policy blueprints laid out by top officials in his first administration and interviews with allies show that Trump is poised to double down in a second term on executive orders that faltered, or those he was blocked from carrying out the first time around.

Trump seeks to sweep away civil service protections that have been in place for more than 140 years. He has said he’d make “every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States” at will. Even though more than 85% of federal employees already work outside the DC area, Trump says he would “drain the swamp” and move as many as 100,000 positions out of Washington. His plans would eliminate or dismantle entire departments.

A close look at his prior, fitful efforts shows how, in another term, Trump’s initiatives could debilitate large swaths of the federal government.

While Trump’s plans are embraced by his supporters, policy experts warn that they would hollow out and politicize the federal workforce, force out many of the most experienced and knowledgeable employees, and open the door to corruption and a spoils system of political patronage.

Take Trump’s statement on his campaign website: “I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.”

That executive order reclassified many civil service workers, whose jobs are nonpartisan and protected, as political appointees who could be fired at will. At the time, more than four dozen officials from ten Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, including some who served under Trump, condemned the order. In a joint letter, they warned it would “cause long-term damage to one of the key institutions of our government.”

In the end, Trump’s order had little impact because he issued it in the final months of his term, and President Joe Biden rescinded it as soon as he took office.

But if, as promised, Trump were to change thousands of civil service jobs into politically appointed positions at the start of a second term, huge numbers of federal workers could face being fired unless they put loyalty to Trump ahead of serving the public interest, warn policy experts.

‘AN ARMY OF SUCK-UPS’

“It’s a real threat to democracy,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, told CNN. “This is something every citizen should be deeply aware of and worried about because it threatens their fundamental rights.”

Moynihan said making vast numbers of jobs subject to appointment based on political affiliation would amount to “absolutely the biggest change in the American public sector” since a merit-based civil service was created in 1883.

One of the architects of that plan for a Trump second term said as much in a video last year for the Heritage Foundation. “It’s going to be groundbreaking,” said Russell Vought, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. He declined interview requests from CNN. But in the video, he spoke at length about the plan to crush what he called “the woke and the weaponized bureaucracy.” Vought discussed dismantling or remaking the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

Vought focused on a plan he drafted to reissue Trump’s 2020 executive order, known as Schedule F. It would reclassify as political appointees any federal workers deemed to have influence on policy. Reissuing Schedule F is part of a roadmap, known as Project 2025, drafted for a second Trump term by scores of conservative groups and published by the Heritage Foundation.

Vought argues the civil service change is necessary because the federal government “makes every decision on the basis of climate change extremism and on the basis of woke militancy where you’re effectively trying to divide the country into oppressors and the oppressed.”

A Trump campaign spokesperson pointed CNN to a pair of campaign statements from late last year in part responding to reporters’ questions about the 900-plus-page Project 2025 document. The campaign said, “None of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign… Policy recommendations from external allies are just that – recommendations.” However, the Project 2025 recommendations largely follow what Trump has outlined in broad strokes in his campaign speeches – for example, his plans to reissue his 2020 executive order “on Day One.”

Ostensibly, a reissued Schedule F would affect only policy-making positions. But documents obtained by the National Treasury Employees Union and shared with CNN show that when Vought ran OMB under Trump, his list of positions to be reclassified under Schedule F included administrative assistants, office managers, IT workers and many other less senior positions.

NTEU President Doreen Greenwald told reporters at the union’s annual legislative conference that it estimated more than 50,000 workers would have been affected across all federal agencies. She said the OMB documents “stretched the definition of confidential or policy positions to the point of absurdity.”

Trump’s comments about wanting to be able to fire at will all executive-branch employees suggest the numbers in a second term would be far greater.

Moynihan, at Georgetown, said US policies already grant the president “many more political appointees than most other rich countries” allow – about 4,000 positions.

“Almost all Western democracies have a professional civil service that does not answer to whatever political party happens to be in power, but is immune from those sorts of partisan wranglings,” said Kenneth Baer, who served as a senior OMB official under President Barack Obama. “They bring… a technical expertise, a sense of long history and perspective to the work that the government needs to do.” Making thousands of additional positions subject to political change risks losing that expertise, while bringing in “people who are getting jobs just because they did some favor to the party, or the president was elected. And so, there’s a risk of corruption.”

Such concerns cross the political aisle. Robert Shea, a senior OMB official under George W. Bush, called himself a hugely conservative, loyal Republican. But hiring people based on personal political loyalties would produce “an army of suck-ups,” he said.

“It would change the nature of the federal bureaucracy,” to remove protections from senior civil servants, he said. “This would mean that if you told your boss that what he or she was proposing was illegal, impractical, [or] unwise that they could brand you disloyal and terminate you.”

Biden has moved to block such a move. On April 4, the Office of Personnel Management, which in effect is the human resources department for the federal government, adopted new rules meant to bar career civil service workers from being reclassified as political appointees or other types of at-will workers.

The new rules would not fully block reclassifying workers in a second Trump term. But they would create “speed bumps,” said Baer. “To repeal the regulation, there would have to be a lengthy period of proposed rulemaking, 90 days of comment,” and other steps that would have to be followed. “And then probably the litigation, after that.”

“PLACES FILLED WITH PATRIOTS”

While assailing “faceless bureaucrats,” Trump also has said he would move federal agencies from “the Washington Swamp… to places filled with patriots who love America.”

But when he tried such moves before, the effect was to drain know-how, talent and experience from those agencies. That’s what happened in 2019 when Trump moved the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colorado, and two agencies within the Department of Agriculture to Kansas City.

“The vast bulk of (headquarters) employees left the agencies,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that promotes serving in government. It led to the loss of “expertise that had been built up over decades,” he said. “It destroyed the agencies.”

A 2021 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that the BLM move pushed out hundreds of the bureau’s most experienced employees, and sharply reduced diversity, with more than half of black employees in DC opting to quit or retire rather than move to Colorado. The GAO also concluded that the USDA’s decision to move its Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to Kansas City was “not fully consistent with an evidence-based approach.”

The two USDA agencies do statistical research and analysis. The ERS focuses on areas including the well-being of farms, the effects of federal farm policies, food security and safety issues, the impacts of trade policies and global competition. NIFA funds programs to help American agriculture compete globally, protect food safety and promote nutrition, among other areas.

Verna Daniels had worked for the USDA for 32 years, most of them as an information specialist at the Economic Research Service, when she and her colleagues found out their agency was being relocated in October 2019.

“I really enjoyed my job. I worked extremely hard. I never missed a deadline,” Daniels said. She said the announcement left her in shock. “Everybody was afraid, and it was happening so fast… We were given three months to relocate to wherever it was or vacate the premises.” She quit rather than uproot her whole family. “It was heart-wrenching.”

The Trump administration said moving the USDA agencies would bring researchers closer to “stakeholders”– that is, farmers. Catherine Greene, an agricultural economist with 35 years at the USDA’s Economic Research Service, called the idea ridiculous. “Every state that surrounds Washington, DC, has farming… I grew up on a hundred-year-old farm in southwestern Virginia.”

“We’ve all dedicated our lives to looking at farming in America, to looking at food systems in America,” Greene said. “I think the goal was to uproot the agency in such a way that most people would have to move on, and most people did. It was highly predictable.”

The other relocated research agency, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, had 394 employees at the beginning of the Trump administration, said Tom Bewick, acting vice president of the union local for NIFA. Trump imposed a hiring moratorium that left positions unfilled as people moved or retired. By the time the relocation to Kansas City was announced, NIFA was down to 270 employees. “Once it was announced they would move us, we were losing 10 to 20 people a week,” Bewick explained. “We had less than 70 people make the move.” Five years on, he said, “We still are not the same agency, and we’ll never be the same agency we were.”

The USDA said the move to Kansas City would save taxpayers $300 million over 15 years. But the GAO said that analysis didn’t account for the loss of experience and institutional knowledge, the cost of training new workers, reduced productivity and the disruption caused by the move. Including such costs, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association estimated the move actually cost taxpayers between $83 million and $182 million.

Greene, at the Economic Research Service, retired rather than move. After Biden took office, the BLM and the two USDA agencies moved their headquarters back to Washington, but also kept open their offices in Grand Junction and Kansas City, respectively. Greene said she worries for federal workers who might face the same choice in a second Trump term. “They mean business,” she said. “They spent four years practicing, and they are ready to rock and roll.”

To Stier, at the Partnership for Public Service, there is a huge gap between the perception and the reality of the role that the civil service plays across the country. “We’ve been doing polling on trust in government, and when you tag on the words, government ‘in Washington, DC,’ the trust numbers crater,” he said.

USING THE GOVERNMENT TO GO AFTER ENEMIES

On the campaign trail, Trump has regularly claimed, without evidence, that Biden and the Department of Justice are stage-managing various prosecutions of him – including state-level indictments in New York over falsifying business records and in Georgia, on charges of election subversion. Trump has used that false claim to say it would justify him using the Justice Department to target his political enemies. He’s said that in a second term he’d appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden. He told Univision last year he could have others indicted if they challenged him politically.

Trump tried to use the Department of Justice in this fashion during his previous term, repeatedly telling aides he wanted prosecutors to indict political foes such as Hillary Clinton or former appointees he’d fired, such as former FBI Director James Comey. He also pushed then-Attorney General Bill Barr to falsely claim the 2020 election was corrupt, which Barr refused to do.

In that term, some senior officials at the White House and the Justice Department pushed back against pursuing baseless prosecutions. Their resistance followed a tradition holding that the Justice Department should largely operate independently, with the president setting broad policies but not intervening in specific criminal prosecutions.

But in a second term, Trump could upend that tradition with the help of acolytes such as Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice official who faces disbarment in DC and criminal charges in Georgia for trying to help overturn the 2020 election results. As Trump tried to hang onto the White House in his final weeks in office, he pushed to make Clark his acting attorney general, stopping only after senior Justice Department leaders threatened to resign en masse if he did so.

Last year, Clark published an essay titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent” for the Center for Renewing America, a conservative nonprofit founded by Russell Vought. Clark also helped draft portions of the Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term, including outlining the use of the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement, as first reported by the Washington Post.

Trump also has talked about bringing to heel other parts of the federal government.

“We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them,” Trump said in a video last year. “The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.”

Project 2025’s blueprint envisions dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI; disarming the Environmental Protection Agency by loosening or eliminating emissions and climate-change regulations; eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce in their entirety; and eliminating the independence of various commissions, including the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

The project includes a personnel database for potential hires in a second Trump administration. Trump’s campaign managers have not committed the former president to following the Project 2025 plans, should he win the White House. But given the active involvement of Trump officials in the project, from Vought and Clark to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro and many others, critics say it offers a worrisome roadmap to a second Trump term.

“Now they really understand how to use power, and want to use it to serve, not just Republican partisans, but Donald Trump,” said Baer.

On the campaign trail, Trump leaves little doubt about what he’ll try to do.

“We will put unelected bureaucrats back in their place,” Trump told his supporters at one rally last fall. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

[lordrakim]

Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term

Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. Continue reading Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term

[alwaysbewoke]

An influential conservative think tank close to Donald Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration if the former president returns to power, according to documents that we obtained. Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America (CRA). He’s rumored to be a potential chief of staff if Trump returns to the White House. Vought – who served in Trump’s first admin – has remained close to the former president and hopes to elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a potential second term, according to two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. One document drafted by CRA includes a list of top priorities for a second Trump term, including “Christian nationalism,” invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era. Vought also: ➡️ has said immigration requirements should include whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history” ➡️ has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump admin official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives ➡️ is advising the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. Proposals include repealing LGBTQ+ rights, increasing abortion surveillance and defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, CRA is already influencing Trump’s positions. His thinking on withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and using military force against Mexican drug cartels is partly inspired by separate CRA papers, according to reports by Rolling Stone. Trump’s campaign has repeatedly insisted that it alone is responsible for putting together a policy platform and staffing for a future administration. They declined to comment. So did Vought.

x

so many people claim that voting for biden would somehow be immoral given what's happening in gaza, but what these people fail to realize is that there are numerous issues at play. biden is at the top of the hill of shittiness; however, at the same time, we simply cannot allow what the right has planned to be carried out. it would not help gaza, and it would surely make life here worse for everyone, including those who want to see a free palestine.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 9, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 10, 2024

Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. 

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on. 

Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.

Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign. 

While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship. 

The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing. 

To keep the government from crushing those individual rights, the Constitution’s Framers wrote the Bill of Rights. Those first ten amendments to the Constitution hold back the federal government by, among other things, prohibiting Congress from making laws that would establish a national religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion, limit freedom of speech or of the press, or hamper people’s right to assemble peacefully or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. 

The belief that liberalism depended on a small government dominated the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the rise of industry in the late nineteenth century shifted the relationship between individuals and the government. Was everyone really equal when industrialists were worth millions and commanded state legislatures and Congress, while workers, consumers, and children had little leverage to protect themselves? 

The majority of Americans said no, and Theodore Roosevelt agreed. The danger for individuals in their era was not that the government would crush them, but that industrialists would. In order for the government truly to protect the people, Roosevelt argued, it must regulate businesses and support the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. A true liberal government, one that protected the rights of individuals, must be big enough and strong enough to act as a referee between workers, consumers, and businessmen. 

Roosevelt actually loathed Wilson, in part because Wilson ran for office in 1912 with the argument that as soon as the government broke up big corporations, the country could revert back to a small government. To Roosevelt, this made no sense. Unless the conditions of the modern economy were changed—and he believed they could not be, because the trend was always toward bigger and bigger enterprises—industry would always concentrate. Only a big government could stop those corporations from taking over the country.

Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence. 

A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence. 

And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience. 

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. 

Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said. 

In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it. 

On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[faircatch]

Trump and his allies plan to infuse "Christian nationalism" into his administration.

[justjensenanddean]

‘Tracker’: Justin Hartley on Working With Good Friend Jensen Ackles for First Time

ET has a first look at Justin Hartley and Jensen Ackles on set of ‘Tracker’ season 2, which airs Wednesdays on CBS.

[syrma-sensei]

That does put a smile on my face

[tomorrowusa]

Russel Vought is a former Trump cabinet member AND a co-author of Project 2025 which is sort of a MAGA Mein Kampf.

Trump, a congenital liar, has denied any connection to Project 2025. But the vast majority of contributors to the Project are people with political connections to Trump or former members of his administration.

Vought is the most high profile person connected to the Project. He was secretly filmed by British climate activists and told them that Trump's denial of a connection to Project 2025 was just window dressing for public consumption.

The more that people hear about Project 2025, the more they hate it. So share the video above which shows a Trump former cabinet member bragging of Weird Donald's connection: "He's very supportive of what we do."

Project 2025 is a blueprint for a Christian nationalist dictatorship to hit the ground running on Day One. It is a flow chart to Gilead.

[arlengrossman]

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies. By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman/ New York Times/ July 17, 2023 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…

[wilwheaton]

A disintegrating Trump puts Vance a heartbeat away from the presidency, but there’s more than Vance to fear. Although Trump has publicly disavowed the architects of Project 2025, any distance between him and the scheme is a mirage. We know, for example, that at least 140 people who once worked for his administration have contributed to the plan, which was orchestrated primarily by the Heritage Foundation. Vance even wrote the forward to a book written by Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Trump has to fill a second administration somehow – and for years, his allies in Washington, D.C., have been strategizing for just such an occasion. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” said Russell Vought to a pair of undercover British journalists this summer. Vought, a former Trump official, is widely considered to be a candidate for Trump’s prospective chief of staff. He added that “we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”

Trump Is Deteriorating, Helping J.D. Vance and Project 2025

[beemovieerotica]

Trump has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.

The Biggest Lie Trump–Biden 2024 Rematch Voters Are Telling Themselves

Americans have a normalcy bias. It leads them to believe anyone who tells them that everything is awesome and that a system is “holding”—even as that system is hanging together by way of dental floss...And many journalists have a normalcy bias so acute they wouldn’t know how to cover an authoritarian takeover if it meant that one of the two presidential candidates threatened jail for his political opponents—even as he continues to refer to these journalists as “the enemy of the people.” It also means that they tend to cover “Trump convicted on 34 felony counts” in terms of “how much would this story make us deviate from covering a normal election?” It turns out that we’re normalizing the abnormal, covering the election as a horse race between democracy and illiberalism without mentioning illiberalism or considering the stakes and the consequences, and repeatedly applying a false equivalence to Trump and Biden. We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do...The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.