The administration of former President/unindicted criminal Donald Trump was the most corrupt in our history.
Well, if we give him a second term, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
In a blockbuster two-part report, Axios outlined Trump’s plans to cement even greater corruption as the cornerstone of his White House. Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile? No, give him the presidency and he’ll take our country.
If he gets back in office, Trump is planning to strip employment protections from as many as 50,000 government civil service workers so he can fire them and replace them with hand-picked loyalists if he sees fit, Axios reported. Those he doesn’t fire would face the intimidation of possible dismissal if they don’t toe the line.
Multiple well-funded, Right-wing organizations right now are putting together databases of potential hires so the Republicans’ efforts to destroy our democracy and rule of law will be up and running even before Trump’s first official day in office.
The plan involves something called Schedule F, which Trump implemented by executive order late in his term. It was rescinded by President Joe Biden after a few days in office. Now, the disgraced, twice-impeached, ex-president is ready to bring it back if he gets his grubby hands on the keys to the Oval Office again.
Trump’s executive order called for tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy to be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections. This is in addition to the approximately 4,000 “political” appointments a president gets to fill.
This could affect the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department – including the FBI – national security, intelligence, the State Department, and the Pentagon, according to Axios.
As for the groups doing Trump’s dirty work, Axios reports that these organizations are linked to Trump’s most trusted advisors. Most of them have senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll.
“The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported,” the story said. “These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.”
How potentially dangerous is this? One of these groups – the Center for Renewing America -- has said that it intends to release a series of policy papers detailing various aspects of their plans to “dismantle the ‘administrative state.’”
That’s a favorite term of Trumpist sleazeball Steve Bannon. It means: “We’re going to get rid of as many honest people in government as we can, replace them with corrupt stooges, and tear down anything that safeguards our democracy.”
The proclaimed target in all this is the Trump-named “deep state.” While it assigns it sinister intention, it’s really his name for elected officials and government employees whose character he can’t corrupt to the point that he can get away with anything he wants.
With Trump and the Republicans, it’s always about projection. They’ll call their opponents what they themselves really are. It’s easier to follow if you just apply that simple rule of thumb.
The two-part series is written by Jonathan Swan. It goes into stunning and frightening detail about the Republicans’ underhanded actions. I’d strongly advise reading them.
You can read the first part here.
You can read the second part here.
The implications here are obvious. The deeper Trump and the GOP can sink their tentacles of corruption into our government the more successful they’ll be in retaining and expanding their power. The more they’ll be able to impose an agenda on our country that most Americans don’t agree with. And the more they’ll be able to enrich themselves at our expense.
The more honest people they can eliminate from important positions, the less opposition they’ll have. Folks who might try to save our democracy by being whistleblowers or anonymous sources to news reporters won’t be there anymore.
And don’t sleep on other Republican presidential hopefuls. Do you think that stable of Trump acolytes won’t jump at the chance to use this corrupt mechanism put in place by the former guy’s supporters to increase their own reach of power?
Do you think a wannabe fascist like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s already shown no qualms about using the power of his office to punish those opposing him, wouldn’t have an orgasm over the chance to purge so many folks he sees as “the enemy?”
Back when Trump was in office, after corrupt and gutless Senate Republicans acquitted him in his first impeachment trial, he appointed hatchet man John McEntee to run the White House personnel office. His job was to weed out government workers not sufficiently loyal to the president and replace them with people who were just find-and-dandy working in an increasingly lawless administration.
According to Axios, McEntee now lives in California and is working on building a dating app for conservatives funded by billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel.
You can bet he’d be very happy to help Trump swipe left on anyone who would stand in his way of building an even more corrupt operation. One designed to be even harder to take down.
That’s our future -- unless we do something about it.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see more of my writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody.