Trump has big plans for a second term. Critics say they pose a threat to democracy.
Ben Adler, Senior Editor – November 20, 2023
Donald Trump in 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is developing plans to use the federal government to punish his political opponents if he wins a second term next year, and critics — including some prominent Republicans, even some staffers from his first term — say these plans would imperil American democracy.
On the campaign trail, Trump has made numerous public references to exacting revenge upon detractors and rivals, including promising to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden for unspecified crimes. Earlier this month, in a speech and in a post on Truth Social, he referred to left-wing Americans as “vermin.”
Historians said such dehumanizing of one’s political opponents is frequently used by fascist dictators. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded by saying, “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
According to the Washington Post, Trump has privately said he would direct the Department of Justice to investigate officials from his first term who have since criticized his tenure, including:
Former White House chief of staff and retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly
Former Attorney General William P. Barr
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark A. Milley
Former Trump White House special counsel Ty Cobb
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley in 2022. (Ting Shen/Xinhua via Getty Images) (Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images)
According to his advisers, Trump intends to fire up to tens of thousands of career government professionals and replace them with his allies, and will refuse to spend congressional appropriations on programs he opposes.
The New York Times has reported that Trump’s plans to crack down on illegal immigration will include:
Using military funds to erect detention camps
Using a public-health emergency law to shut down asylum requests at the border
Ending birthright citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants
Trump also reportedly plans to send the military into Mexico to combat drug cartels, with or without the Mexican government’s permission.
A number of high-profile Republican elected officials, conservative legal scholars and veterans of Trump’s first term in office have said Trump’s intentions would weaken the justice system and threaten the rule of law. Here are some of the most notable criticisms:
Former Rep. Liz Cheney. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)
“He cannot be the next president, because if he is, all of the things that he attempted to do, but was stopped from doing by responsible people around him at the Department of Justice, at the White House Counsel’s Office, all of those things, he will do. There will be no guardrails.”
“His policies are not centered around improving the lives of his supporters or Americans in general, it’s centered around consolidating power for Trump, and that way he can wield it to enact that revenge on anyone he deems as an enemy. And that is what is scary.”
“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy. The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”
National security adviser John Bolton in 2018. (Evan Vucci/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
“He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space. It’s all connected with how things benefit Donald Trump. … In a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from NATO.”
“Donald Trump represents a failure of character, which is changing, I think, in many respects, the psyche of our nation and the heart of our nation. And that’s something which takes a long time — if ever — to repair.”
Bankruptcy at an Illinois retirement community has financial impact on residents and families too
Robert McCoppin, Chicago Tribune – November 15, 2023
Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/TNS
At age 88, World War II veteran Robert Kroll moved to Friendship Village of Schaumburg, Illinois, a retirement community where he would be taken care of until death, and so his children would get their inheritance after he died.
He paid an entrance fee of $124,000, plus about $2,400 a month, to guarantee that he would always get housing and medical care even if he ran out of money, with the understanding that his family would get 90% of his remaining entrance fee after expenses upon his passing.
Kroll died in 2019, but his family still hasn’t gotten their money back. In June, Friendship Village, citing problems caused by the COVID pandemic, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in which officials say operations will continue as usual, but with some debts unpaid. A company has bid $115 million to buy the facility, but the bankruptcy proposal includes only $2 million to pay back families of former residents — about 10% of what is owed.
“Our family has been waiting for four years with no resolution,” Kroll’s daughter, Michelle Barnes, told the Tribune. “I wanted to share our story to help inform the public and put pressure on our politicians to change the laws in Illinois that will protect seniors from this type of deception in the future.”
Her dispute is over Friendship Village’s policy of only paying back entry fees upon the resale of a resident’s unit. The facility — the largest not-for-profit retirement community in Illinois, with 815 units — didn’t resell Kroll’s one-bedroom unit, so hadn’t paid his family back.
Now that Friendship Village has entered bankruptcy, families of former residents are unlikely to ever receive full repayment, which Barnes and other families see as a betrayal of what they were promised.
Friendship Village officials say the contracts were clear about the arrangement, which had worked well for decades since the retirement community opened in 1977.
“We never expected this to happen,” CEO Mike Flynn said.
Friendship Village provides a full continuum of care from independent living to assisted living and skilled nursing residences. It has a three out of five star overall rating from Medicare.gov, and residents and others the Tribune interviewed spoke highly of the staff and facilities there.
But in 2020, COVID was particularly deadly for older victims, and prompted Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to close general access to nursing facilities. That prevented Friendship Village from showing its units to new customers, and prevented the sale of what normally was a turnover of some 100 units a year. Some expenses increased while demand for nursing homes dropped.
The owner of Friendship Village, Evangelical Retirement Homes of Greater Chicago, estimated allowed claims by bondholders total almost $132 million, for current residents $78 million, and for former residents $20 million. But the bond debt is secured, meaning its repayment is backed by the collateral of the property itself.
The facility has more than 200 creditors, including dozens of residents and family members, many owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Because Friendship Village is deemed a not-for-profit business, it does not pay property taxes. It did pay $23 million in employee compensation in 2022, including $406,000 to its prior CEO, Stephen Yencheck. Bankruptcy attorney Bruce Dopke reported he’s been paid $350,000 for legal services, and would be paid for any additional costs. Before bankruptcy, the company had a prospective buyer, but the deal fell through.
The amount available to repay debtors depends on the amount offered by a buyer in auction. The highest bid was recently reported at $115 million by Encore Healthcare Services of New York.
“It would have been nice if somebody stepped up and honored the entrance fee refund,” Flynn said. “That didn’t happen, but at least they’re getting something.”
Besides former residents like Kroll, current residents are also worried about their investment.
Ed and Toby Gordon, age 88 and 87, respectively, moved into Friendship Village in January, in part to be close to their daughter, Michelle Miller, and because they knew they would need more care. They paid more than $300,000 as an entrance fee, Miller said. Under the bankruptcy proposal, residents who die or leave would be repaid over about 16 years.
Miller is upset that her parents did not know about the facility’s dire financial situation.
“My parents should have known how bad those numbers were,” she said, “because they could have been renters instead.”
Residents are concerned that they won’t get the continuing care they expected and won’t get the refunds they were guaranteed. “A lot of people are just scared and don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” she said.
Friendship Village issued a statement reassuring residents that they will be taken care of.
Within the new ownership contract, the statement read, “there are provisions to take care of the current residents who entered the community under an entrance fee agreement for the rest of their lives, regardless of the level of care needed. There is also a benevolent fund that has been doubled by the new owner for those who run out of money through no fault of their own.”
In response to complaints even before the bankruptcy, state Rep. Michelle Mussman, a Democrat whose northwest suburban district includes Friendship Village, introduced a bill that would require repayment of entrance fees in order of those who leave, rather than upon resale of each individual’s unit.
But after getting pushback from the industry, Mussman is taking a step back and talking to stakeholders. Chronological repayment may not be as fair to residents who paid for more desirable units that sell faster, and may impair the ability to care for residents still living there, Mussman said.
“It’s not perfect,” she said. “We’ve not been able to find the right combination that would work.”
Angela Schnepf, president and CEO of LeadingAge Illinois, which represents the senior care industry, said entrance fees are like an insurance policy. The community takes on the risk of caring for residents even if they run out of money, while residents carry the risk of not getting their fee back until their units sell.
She said some residents see the queue system as paying other residents when their own unit sells.
“If their neighbor gets their refund sooner just because they put their unit up for sale sooner, they find this very unfair,” Schnepf said.
If retirement communities were forced to pay back before selling units, she said, it might put them at financial risk.
But under the current arrangement, current and former residents are at risk because of the bankruptcy. A creditors’ committee continues to investigate the management of funds in the case.
The next court hearing to consider the bankruptcy terms is set for Nov. 22 in federal court in Chicago. The proposed repayment plan is subject to a vote by creditors and is scheduled to be ruled on Jan. 17 by U.S. Judge Timothy Barnes.
More broadly, the problems facing Friendship Village also face Life Plan or Continuing Care Retirement Communities in general.
Several such not-for-proft communities nationwide have fallen into financial distress recently and been acquired by for-profit companies, said Dan Hermann, president and CEO of Ziegler, which has provided financing to senior living businesses, including Friendship Village.
The for-profit companies can offer efficiencies by providing their own ancillary services such as pharmacy and tech work, and tighter staffing.
An underlying problem, Hermann said, is that Illinois for years has had low reimbursement rates for Medicaid residents, which make up a significant portion of some retirement communities like Friendship Village.
Donald Trump is talking like a Nazi again. Over the weekend, in both a speech and a subsequent social media post, he referred to his enemies as “vermin”—a favorite word of fascists and antisemites of yore—and channeled Hitler, declaring that America’s biggest enemies were domestic foes that needed to be “rooted out” and destroyed. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day,” he said. “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
As if doubling down on the authoritarianism, Axios reported on Monday morning that Trump and his allies had formulated a plan to purge the federal government of ideological opponents. Trump and his allies “are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential foot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024,” wrote Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Although they note that this plan—which they’ve taken to calling “Agenda 47”—has an “authoritarian sounding” name, Allen and VandeHei (the latter of whom has harbored some authoritarian sentiments of his own), ever eager to ingratiate themselves, observe that those in charge of this plan “are smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.” For sure!
Finally, to underline the weekend of goose-stepping, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung responded to the criticism by tellingThe Washington Post that those “who try to make [the] ridiculous assertion [that Trump is channeling Hitler] are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Not exactly a posture aimed at reassuring those who are alarmed by the increasingly fascistic bent of the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
The response to Trump’s “vermin” comments and the revelation of the “Agenda 47” plan have led to a deserved round of hand-wringing about Trump’s authoritarianism, the threat his political project poses to American democracy, and the media’s role in covering both. In 2016, the press failed to adequately capture the sum total of this threat, partly because Trump’s political career was seen as a doomed project and partly because it was still too abstract. Seven years later, Trump’s rhetoric is substantially darker and we’ve had plenty of hard evidence of his willingness to push past the acceptable boundaries of our democracy in his continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as well as in the Capitol riots that this rhetoric inspired.
Emphasizing Trump’s authoritarianism—and the related damage he can do to the fabric of the country—will be a necessity both for the press and for Joe Biden. Trump is rather transparently announcing his intentions to purge and weaponize the federal government against his political opponents, immunize himself against legal prosecution, and manipulate the levers of power to preserve his own for as long as possible. Given the threat of physical violence that so often accompanies his words, this is more or less open fascism. But declaiming against it will not be enough to defeat him.
“This is not normal” was a potent rallying cry during Trump’s presidency—it was arguably the defining admonition of that period. In many ways, Trump’s abnormality has only metastasized since voters evicted him from the White House. His rhetoric has grown more extreme. He is facing multiple criminal trials and will likely head into the presidential election as both his party’s nominee and as a convicted felon.
But Trump very much is a normal Republican now. That is true in many frightening ways, certainly. Trump’s political rivals have begun to echo his authoritarianism. Vivek Ramaswamy has arguably an even more insane plan to force the federal bureaucracy to submit to his will (he has suggested firing everyone whose social security number ends in an odd number). Ron DeSantis has called for shooting migrants. Nikki Haley has advocated for invading Mexico. Trump’s positions are the norm in the GOP now, and they will remain that way for the party’s foreseeable future: The GOP has, in eight years, been remade in his image.
But Trump has also become a normal Republican in the traditional sense, in that he’s more or less ended up embracing the long-standing policy positions of his GOP forebears. During his first term in office, his most important legislative accomplishment was a gigantic tax cut for corporations and the rich. Even though it is unlikely that he will staff his second-term office with the same kind of establishment figures—think Rex Tillerson and Steven Mnuchin—who briefly defined the early part of his presidency, one can rightly assume that he will continue to pursue regressive, supply-side economic policies, especially considering that this is what Republicans in Congress will want to do. The domestic agenda of a second Trump term would likely involve the greatest hits of Republican fiscal policy: tax and entitlement cuts, as well as the elimination of various environmental, labor, and economic regulations.
For all the talk of Trump’s abnormality, the fact that he’s always marched to the recognizable, old-school beats of the GOP drum has always been the less celebrated aspect of his time in politics. So there’s a danger in continually casting him as a pathbreaking sort of politician. Voters don’t like the status quo. They’ve repeatedly voted to reject the economic dogmas that have defined Republican policymaking for several consecutive elections. They thought that this was what they were getting from Trump in the first place—and the media did a much better job of selling Trump as a change-of-pace candidate, and clung to the notion that he was an economic populist long after he’d demonstrated no real interest in refreshing the Republican brand.
Democratic messaging needs to account for both Trump’s unique authoritarian leanings and his embrace of vintage Republican ideas. To solely advance the idea that Trump is a unique political figure in American life—a wild departure from the norm—runs the risk of implanting the idea that he is a politician bent on shattering the status quo during a time when many might prefer the short sharp shock of change. Ideally, you want to capture Trump as a chaos agent whose plans to sledgehammer the system won’t lead anywhere fruitful or new, but will more deeply entrench the unpopular ideas for which the GOP has long been known.
The clearest and most potent position for Democrats is to push on reproductive rights—it embodies the new post-Dobbs dystopia with the Republican Party’s decades-long effort to bring it about. Trump has, of late, escaped much attention for his abortion policy, in part because he’s skipped the Republican debates and in part because many of his opponents have adopted even more extreme positions. (Trump claims to oppose a nationwide abortion ban, though it seems highly likely he would sign one if he was given the chance.) More to the point, no one in the country is more responsible for the repeal of Roe v. Wade than Donald Trump, who appointed the three justices to the Supreme Court necessary to do the deed. Still, there is nothing new under the sun. Here we see a normal Republican doing normal Republican stuff. It is both odious and unpopular: Republicans have repeatedly lost elections when abortion is on the ballot. It will be again in 2024.
For Democrats, campaigning against Trump’s reelection will be an exercise in threading a needle between the new threats he poses and bad, old ideas to which he clings. This is something Democrats did successfully in the 2020 presidential election and then refined to great effect in the 2022 midterms; voters said that abortion and threats to democracy were the two issues that were front of mind as they tamed the “red wave” that was supposed to sweep Republicans into power. With less than a year before the election, both Biden and the press are doing a better job of making the case that Trump is a unique danger to the Republic. They should spend a little time reminding voters that he’s just as bad in other, more banal ways, as well.
Joe Scarborough Warns Trump Is ‘Going Full-On Hitler’ After Weekend Rhetoric
Josephine Harvey – November 13, 2023
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Donald Trump is “going full-on Hitler” after the former president referred to political opponents as “vermin” over the weekend.
The “Morning Joe” host took it as a warning ahead of the 2024 election.
“You look at the language of Donald Trump, you look at what Donald Trump says he’s going to do, and you go back to Maya Angelou saying that ‘when somebody tells you who they are, believe ‘em the first time,’” Scarborough said on his morning show Monday, quoting the late civil rights activist.
“We have to believe him, and we also have to believe that this is the most important election probably since 1864,” he added. That election, during the Civil War, saw Abraham Lincoln elected to a second term.
In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump vowed to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”
“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within,” the leading contender for the Republican 2024 nomination added.
He made similar remarks during a Veterans Day rally in Claremont, New Hampshire.
Last month, Trump drew rebuke after he said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” another phrase that echoes language used by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Florida voters are ‘hoodwinked’ alright. But not by women seeking abortion access | Opinion
Fabiola Santiago – November 2, 2023
The debate over abortion rights in Florida isn’t, as Attorney General Ashley Moody has alleged before the state’s highest court, too hard for voters to understand.
She underestimates us.
The issue boils down to basics: Who gets to make one of the hardest and most personal decisions a woman has to confront in her life? A choice that affects her physical and mental health forever.
Under the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican politicians decided last legislative session that they have the ultimate say — imposing on Florida’s 10.8 million women a near-ban on abortion, without giving any consideration of the opposition.
For years, the Florida GOP has been inching toward total control of this vital healthcare right, first coming after Planned Parenthood with bogus accusations, then banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy in 2022, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
With a Republican super-majority in the Legislature in place — and emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning Roe vs. Wade’s constitutional protection — the governor and lawmakers went quite far this year.
They passed, and DeSantis signed in a telling private ceremony in his office, a near ban by instituting a six-week limit on access. The restriction means that by the time many women find out they’re pregnant, they no longer can legally get an abortion in the state — and that any doctor performing the procedure could go to prison.
Now, DeSantis and Moody are trying to keep voters from fighting back, Kansas-style, by putting abortion on the ballot — and winning constitutional protection.
Did Republicans really think women and their male allies would sit back and allow politicians to take over bodily rights, family decisions and healthcare choices — without pushing back?
Now, the 15-week ban is under legal challenge in the state Supreme Court — and it’s not the only one.
A petition to put an abortion rights amendment on the November 2024 ballot that would prevent the outright ban the GOP ultimately wants — ensuring constitutional access against political whim — has gathered an impressive 500,000 of the 891,523 voter signatures needed by the Feb. 1 deadline.
The committee behind the petition, Floridians Protecting Freedom, has raised almost $5 million in six months. Both are strong indicators of voter support.
But, Moody claims, the ballot initiative is an effort to “hoodwink” voters and she calls the all-American democratic practice of activism to secure rights, “war.”
Florida voters are being hoodwinked alright. But it’s not by women seeking access to safe, legal abortion.
It’s by a Florida GOP doing the bidding of the wealthy, ultra-conservative Christian lobby buying political power — and doesn’t care if studies show that the women most affected by abortion bans are poor and dark-skinned.
By going straight to the state’s conservative Supreme Court to ask for a repeal of the petition, Moody shows that she’s running scared of voters’ will and complex points of view on abortion. She’s afraid they’ll exercise their say and vote in favor of constitutionally protecting abortion in Florida — as they did in 2018 when 65% voted to restore the voting rights of felons who done their time.
She has put forth no valid legal argument for seeking to quash people’s right to make their voice heard by unilaterally taking the proposed amendment off the ballot — especially before the committee has completed gathering signatures.
It’s not a democratic move on Moody’s part, but Florida’s autocratic Republicans are beyond caring about democracy and its institutions.
It’s their way or the highway, voters need not opine and neither should Democratic lawmakers. The abortion debate proved there’s no room for bipartisanship or working to reach a consensus.
Republicans assume that Florida is a blindingly red state, and people will keep voting for them in support of an increasingly intrusive, extremist agenda. That’s how it’s been in recent elections, but in the case of abortion restrictions, families are experiencing what it’s like to live under someone else’s choice when it’s their daughter, wife or girlfriend’s life on the line.
That’s when the public debate becomes deeply personal — and choice matters.
If Moody — or any other woman, for that matter — doesn’t want an abortion, she doesn’t have to get one. Under restrictions, women and families have no choice.
It is that simple.
No party, no politician should be making the decision for the woman who feels that having one more child may kill her. Or, for the teen swept away by hormones and false promises of eternal love whose future suddenly is a question mark.
With extremist DeSantis vying for the GOP presidential nomination and the privilege of leading the nation, Florida’s abortion rights debate becomes a matter of national importance.
DeSantis, who as Trump did nationally has stacked the courts with conservatives — at least two critical appointees, highly inexperienced — only serves a narrow sliver of the population. In other words, his view of governance is minority rule over the diverse majority.
If Florida’s attorney general prevails with the state Supreme Court and silences voters’ voice on a topic as crucial as abortion, she will have set a dangerous precedent.
If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda
Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Donald J. Trump’s ambitions. His allies are planning to install more aggressive legal gatekeepers if he regains the White House.
Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman – November 1, 2023
Top Trump allies, including Russell Vought, seated in the middle, have come to view the Republican Party’s legal elites — even leaders with impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step.Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.
The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.
Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influentialFederalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.
These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the former president and are likely to serve in a second term.
The interviews reveal a significant break within the conservative movement. 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 Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.
Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and 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.
Two of the allies leading the push are Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former senior adviser, and John McEntee, another trusted aide whom the then-president had empowered in 2020 to rid his administration of political appointees perceived as disloyal or obstructive.
The nonprofit groups they are involved in are barred by law from supporting a candidate, and none of the work they are doing is explicitly tied to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Miller and Mr. McEntee remain close to the former president and are expected to have his ear in any second term.
Mr. Trump himself, focused for now on multiple criminal and civil cases against him, appears disengaged from these efforts. But he made clear throughout his term in office that he was infuriated by many of the lawyers who worked for him, ranting about how they were “weak” and “stupid.”
By the end of his term, lawyers he appointed early in his administration had angered the White House by raising legal concerns about various policy proposals. But Mr. Trump reserved his deepest rage for the White House and Justice Department legal officials who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people who spoke with him. Casting about for alternative lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, Mr. Trump turned for that effort to a group of outside lawyers, many of whom have since been indicted in Georgia.
People close to the former president say they are seeking out a different type of lawyer committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump. They want lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House who are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause. This new mind-set matches Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is waging a “final battle” against demonic “enemies” populating a “deep state” within the government that is bent on destroying America.
Several of Mr. Trump’s key allies — including Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser — are drawing up lists of lawyers they plan to hire if the former president returns to the White House in 2025.Credit…Cooper Neill for The New York Times
There were a few lawyers like that in Mr. Trump’s administration, but they were largely outnumbered, outranked and often blocked by more traditional legal conservatives. For those who went to work for Mr. Trump but grew disillusioned, the push to systematically install Trump loyalists who may see the law as malleable across a second Trump administration has been a cause for alarm.
John Mitnick was appointed by Mr. Trump as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department in 2018. But he was fired in 2019 as part of a broad purge of the agency’s leaders — whom Mr. Trump had installed — and was replaced by one of Mr. Miller’s allies.
Inside Trump’s 2025 Plans
Here’s how the former president and his allies are planning to wield power in a second term.
The Biden administration is trying to Trump-proof the federal work force, hoping to thwart the former president’s plan to fire civil service workers if he gets back in the White House.
Mr. Mitnick predicted that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term, and that instead it would be “predominantly staffed by opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”
In many ways, the Federalist Society has become synonymous with the Republican establishment, and its members’ most common interests — including pushing an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and federal statutes — can be distinct from the whims and grievances of Mr. Trump himself. Its membership dues are low, and politically ambitious Republican lawyers of various stripes routinely join it or attend its events. Many of the more aggressive lawyers the Trump allies are eyeing have their own links to it.
But after both the legal policy fights inside the Trump administration and the refusal by the group’s most respected luminaries to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the phrase “Federalist Society” became a slur for some on the Trump-aligned right, a shorthand for a kind of lawyerly weakness.
Hard-right allies of Mr. Trump increasingly speak of typical Federalist Society members as “squishes” too worried about maintaining their standing in polite society and their employment prospects at big law firms to advance their movement’s most contentious tactics and goals.
“Trump and his administration learned the hard way in their first term that the Democrats are playing for keeps,” said Mike Davis, a former congressional aide who helped shepherd judicial nominees during the Trump administration and has become a close ally of the 45th president. “And in the Trump 47 administration, they need much stronger attorneys who do not care about elite opinion who will fight these key cultural battles.”
The chilling of the relationship between Mr. Trump and Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, embodies a broader rift between Mr. Trump and conservative legal elites.Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times
A Fraught Union
When Mr. Trump wrested the 2016 Republican presidential nomination from the party’s old guard, it was unclear whether social conservatives would turn out in the general election to vote for a thrice-married New Yorker who had cultivated a playboy reputation and once described himself as “very pro-choice.” But Mr. Trump won their support by essentially striking a deal with legal conservatives: He agreed to fill Supreme Court vacancies from a list of prospects compiled by a small number of movement stalwarts.
This group helping to shape the judiciary included Leonard A. Leo — arguably the most powerful figure in the conservative legal movement and a leader of the Federalist Society — and Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign general counsel and first White House counsel. With a seat already open after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the move worked: Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped secure Mr. Trump’s narrow victory.
Along with the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mr. Leo and Mr. McGahn — and later Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s second White House counsel — created an assembly line for turning Federalist Society-style lawyers into appeals court judges and Supreme Court justices.
But the union between Mr. Trump and the conservative legal establishment could be more fraught than it sometimes appeared. As his presidency wore on, Mr. Trump attacked and sidelined many of the lawyers around him. That included Mr. Leo.
One episode, described by a person familiar with the incident, illustrates the larger chill.
In January 2020, Mr. Leo was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Mr. Trump strode up to his table. The president stunned Mr. Leo, publicly berating him and accusing him of recommending the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to investigate ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
Taken aback, Mr. Leo protested that he had actually suggested someone else for the position — Mr. Cipollone. Mr. Trump walked away without apologizing.
Nearly a year later, when Mr. Trump was trying to enlist legal assistance for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, he reached out three times to Mr. Leo. But Mr. Leo declined to take or return Mr. Trump’s calls, and has since only dealt with him through others.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I have nothing to say regarding his current efforts, but I’m just grateful that President Trump transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in his first term.”
Mr. Mitnick’s experience underscores the style of lawyering that Trump allies saw as too cautious. His role as the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security put him in the path of increasingly aggressive policy proposals from a top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller.
In 2019, the White House purged the leadership ranks of the Homeland Security Department, firing Mr. Mitnick. Mr. Trump ultimately installed as his replacement Chad Mizelle, who had been out of law school just seven years but was a close Miller ally.
Like numerous other positions filled later in Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Mizelle was appointed as “acting” general counsel, sidestepping a Senate vetting and confirmation process that would most likely have closely scrutinized whether he was qualified for the job.
With Mr. Mizelle acting as the department’s top lawyer when the Covid-19 pandemic arose, the Trump administration seamlessly invoked emergency powers to flatly refuse to consider the petition of any asylum seeker arriving at the southern border.
Seeking ‘America First’ Lawyers
Mr. Miller has stayed close to Mr. Trump and is expected to play an even more important role in shaping policy if Mr. Trump returns to power.
While out of office, Mr. Miller has been running a foundation focused on suing the Biden administration and recruiting a new generation of “America First” lawyers, with some from attorney general and solicitor general offices in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. “America First” Republicans are often opposed to both legal and illegal immigration, protectionist on trade and skeptical of international alliances and military intervention overseas.
One first-term Trump lawyer who would most likely serve in a second term is Mark Paoletta, who served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and worked closely with Mr. Vought, the agency’s director. The O.M.B. team saw itself as an island of facilitators within an executive branch they believed was too quick to tell Mr. Trump that his ideas were unachievable or illegal.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell Vought, a former senior Trump administration official.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
Together, Mr. Vought and Mr. Paoletta came up with the idea of having Mr. Trump declare a national emergency and invoke special powers to spend more taxpayer money on a border wall than Congress was willing to appropriate.
Mr. Paoletta also believed that Mr. Trump could have exerted greater personal control over the Justice Department, although Mr. Paoletta said in an interview that he did not advocate using the presidency’s command over federal law enforcement for partisan and personal score-settling. He and other advisers likely to follow Mr. Trump back into power view White House authority to direct the Justice Department as proper under the so-called unitary executive theory. It holds that presidents can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that pockets of independent decision-making authority are unconstitutional.
“I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.,” Mr. Paoletta said, adding: “It’s not an independent agency, and he is the head of the executive branch. A president has every right to direct D.O.J. to look at items that are his policy priorities and other matters of national importance.”
Mr. Trump is not known for pondering legal philosophy. But he has found common cause with lawyers who have a sweeping view of presidential power.
In his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family — shattering the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. More than any legal policy statement on his campaign website, retribution may be the closest thing to a governing philosophy for Mr. Trump as he seeks a second term.
‘Legal Creativity’
Mr. Trump has rarely looked closely at a lawyer’s area of specialty. Instead, he has often looked at whether a particular lawyer can help him gain something he wants. He spent much of his first term railing against the lawyers who worked for him and wondering aloud why none of them could live up to the memory of his notoriously ruthless mentor, Roy Cohn, who represented Mr. Trump in his early business career in New York.
When he sought to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump was unsatisfied with his government lawyers, including his second White House counsel, Mr. Cipollone, who largely rejected his efforts to subvert the results. Mr. Trump turned to a different set of outside lawyers.
Those lawyers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, John C. Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney K. Powell, all of whom have since been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case that charged the former president and 18 of his allies with conspiring to overturn his election loss there in 2020. Ms. Powell, Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis have pleaded guilty.
Mr. Trump was also infuriated that the justices he had put on the Supreme Court declined to repay his patronage by intervening in the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump criticized the court, Mr. Leo with the Federalist Society is said to have told associates he was disappointed that the former president’s rhetoric made his judicial appointment record look “transactional,” aimed at advancing Mr. Trump’s personal interests rather than a broader philosophical mission.
Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, was criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state. Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh
In the same way, Mr. Trump had a falling-out with his attorney general, William P. Barr, who refused to falsely say that the Justice Department had evidence of widespread voter fraud. After Mr. Barr resigned, his deputy and successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, also refused to throw the department’s weight behind Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Trump then explored the idea of installing Jeffrey Clark — an official who was willing to raise concerns about purported election fraud — as acting attorney general.
Mr. Clark has also been indicted in the Georgia case, but remains in favor with Mr. Trump and has met with the former president at his private clubs. Over the summer, at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Clark attended a fund-raiser for the people who have been imprisoned for rioting at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Clark will most likely be in contention for a senior Justice Department position in any second Trump administration, depending on the outcome of his legal travails. He has written a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent,” that amounts to an intellectual blueprint for direct presidential control of federal law enforcement.
He declined to comment. On a conservative podcast last year, Mr. Clark said that “extraordinary times call for extraordinary, responsive legal creativity.”
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Trump allies sour on the group that pushed his SCOTUS takeover because their lawyers aren’t radical enough: report
Brent D. Griffiths – November 1, 2023
Trump’s allies have soured on a legal group that is behind his biggest legacy.
According to The New York Times, Trump allies are distancing themselves from The Federalist Society.
The conservative legal group helped Trump takeover of the Supreme Court.
Former President Donald Trump’s allies are reportedly souring on the conservative legal group that helped him cement a takeover of the US Supreme Court and reshape lower courts for years to come.
According to The New York Times, Trump allies that have begun the planning for his potential second term have begun to distance themselves from the Federalist Society, one of the key outside groups that vetted and assembled Trump’s list of then-potential Supreme Court nominees in 2016. After his surprise election, Trump’s White House worked virtually hand in glove with the organization and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to confirm over 200 federal judges.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official told The Times.
But Trump allies now view Federalist Society lawyers as “squishes,” according to The Times. One of the major points of contention is that the former president does not think the society did enough to help him after the 2020 presidential election. Leonard Leo, who is co-chairman of The Federalist Society, ignored Trump’s calls after the election as the president frantically sought to find lawyers who would back his challenges, according to The Times. Trump is also incensed that the Supreme Court, including his three nominees, did not intervene in his favor to overturn the election.
The current turn illustrates how if Trump is able to return to the White House, he may rely on increasingly fringe figures and legal views to push a second administration into even more provocative actions.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, who was previously a keynote speaker for the society, has warned that Trump will focus on retribution and chaos if he returns to the White House. Barr and Trump’s relationship cratered after the election when Barr made it clear he would not support Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud that would have flipped the election.
Representatives for Trump and the Federalist Society did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
House GOP unveils $14.3 billion Israel aid bill that would cut funding to IRS
Caitlin Yilek – October 30, 2023
Washington — House Republicans want to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting funding to the IRS, teeing up a collision with the White House and Democratic-controlled Senate over how to support a key U.S. ally.
The House GOP released a $14.3 billion standalone measure on Monday that would pay for aid to Israel by cutting the same amount in funding that was allocated to the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act, one of President Biden’s signature pieces of legislation.
“We’re going to have pays-for in [the bill],” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News on Monday. “We’re not just going to print money and send it overseas.”
The Republican bill sets up a battle over support for Israel, with Mr. Biden and Democrats in the Senate wanting to pair aid for Israel with tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, which some House Republicans oppose. The White House asked Congress for a $105 billion aid package two weeks ago, which included $14 billion for Israel and $61 billion related to Ukraine.
Johnson, who supports separating the aid packages, acknowledged that the cuts to the IRS would be unpopular among Democrats, but said he planned to call Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a “direct” and “thoughtful conversation.”
“I understand their priority is to bulk up the IRS,” Johnson told Fox News. “But I think if you put this to the American people and they weigh the two needs, I think they’re going to say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents.”
The president signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in 2022, and it included hundreds of billions of dollars for Democratic priorities related to climate change, health care costs and taxes. It also boosted the IRS’ funding by $80 billion, allowing the agency to hire thousands of agents and revamp decades-old technological systems. Experts said the upgrades and hiring boost were long overdue and would improve the agency’s ability to process tax returns, but the provision was highly unpopular among Republican lawmakers.
When it comes to aid for Ukraine, Johnson has said he wants more accountability for the billions of dollars the U.S. is spending to help repel Russia’s invasion, specifically asking the White House to detail where the money is going and what the end game in the conflict is.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the bill a “nonstarter” and said it would “set an unacceptable precedent that calls our commitment to one of our closest allies into question.”
“Demanding offsets for meeting core national security needs of the United States — like supporting Israel and defending Ukraine from atrocities and Russian imperialism — would be a break with the normal, bipartisan process and could have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead,” she said in a statement Monday.
Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, said Monday that offsetting emergency aid with cuts to the IRS sets a “dangerous precedent.”
“House Republicans are setting a dangerous precedent by suggesting that protecting national security or responding to natural disasters is contingent upon cuts to other programs,” the Connecticut Democrat said in a statement. “The partisan bill House Republicans introduced stalls our ability to help Israel defend itself and does not include a penny for humanitarian assistance.”
GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Monday she would prefer to pair aid to Ukraine and Israel.
When asked whether she was concerned about offsetting emergency spending with budget cuts, she said, “Right, the question is where does it end?”
The House Rules Committee plans to take up the GOP’s Israel bill on Wednesday.
New GOP House speaker proposes aiding Israel with IRS funds meant to nab rich US tax cheats
Peter Weber, The Week US – October 31, 2023
House Speaker Mike Johnson.
House Republicans on Monday proposed giving Israel $14.3 billion in emergency military aid, but their bill would pay for that aid “by cutting IRS funds aimed at cracking down on rich tax cheats and improving taxpayer service,” The Washington Post reported. The aid package is the first substantive legislation released under new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). And if it passes in the House, it stands no chance of making it through the Senate.
President Biden requested $14.3 billion to help Israel in its war against Hamas but he paired it with $61 billion in aid for Ukraine plus another $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. The Senate is following that approach of bundling the aid together in one package, with bipartisan support. The House GOP bill not only removes the Ukraine aid, but also attempts to take another bite out of the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion for increased enforcement of tax laws among noncompliant wealthy individuals and companies, plus money for the IRS’s new free online tax filing service.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the $80 billion spent on IRS enforcement would reduce the deficit by nearly $200 billion. The White House said the House GOP’s latest attempt to “help the wealthy and big corporations cheat on their taxes” would grow the deficit. Mark Mazur, a former assistant treasury secretary, said the proposed cuts are “like if you take a dollar from the IRS and throw a $5 bill out the window.”
Johnson defended his “first draft of this bill” on Fox News, saying the priority of Democrats may be “to bulk up the IRS” but most Americans would “say standing with Israel and protecting the innocent over there is in our national interest and is a more immediate need than IRS agents.”
House GOP’s Israel Aid Plan Would Add Billions to Deficit: CBO
Yuval Rosenberg – November 1, 2023
Jack Gruber/USA Today
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to cut IRS funding to pay for the cost of a $14.3 billion aid package to Israel would add billions to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.
The nonpartisan budget scorekeeper projected that rescinding more than $14 billion in IRS funding as the House GOP proposes to do would scale back the tax agency’s enforcement and consequently decrease revenues by $26.8 billion from 2024 through 2033. The revenue loss would far outweigh the spending cuts, resulting in a net increase in the deficit of $12.5 billion from the IRS portion of the plan — and the aid to Israel would bring the total cost of the bill to nearly $27 billion.
IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said Tuesday that the cuts to his budget in the House bill would increase the deficit by far more, estimating it would add $90 billion over 10 years — a figure that The Washington Post reports is “based on IRS modeling that shows a 6-to-1 ratio of money spent on tax enforcement to revenue collected.”
House plan is DOA in the Senate: The CBO score was seen as a blow to the House plan, particularly given that if the new speaker had not included the IRS cuts, the aid for Israel would likely pass the House with strong bipartisan support, potentially jamming the Senate and lawmakers who favor packaging aid to Israel with more money to support Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Johnson dismissed the CBO estimate, telling reporters: “We don’t put much credence in what the CBO says.”
In truth, the CBO report is likely little more than a formality at this point since Johnson’s plan — if it can even pass the narrowly divided House — would be doomed in the Senate, where Democrats oppose the IRS funding cuts and are looking to combine aid to Israel with the Ukraine assistance and other emergency funding requested by President Joe Biden.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday called the House plan “totally unserious and woefully inadequate” and criticized its fiscal effects. “Here, the House is talking about needing a pay-for to reduce the deficit – and they put in a provision that actually increases the deficit. Why? Because they don’t want their super-rich, mega-wealthy friends to be audited by the IRS, like every other citizen is,” Schumer said. “So the House GOP proposal is not going to go anywhere. It’s dead before it even is voted on.”
Schumer urged Johnson to start over in a more bipartisan fashion, but the speaker reportedly told a gathering of Senate Republicans that military aid to Israel must move as a standalone bill because a larger package cannot pass with the support of the House Republican majority. Johnson reportedly also told the senators that he backs more aid to Ukraine but that it would need to be paired with reforms to border security. The speaker, relatively unknown to his Senate counterparts, reportedly also said that he’s focused on passing what he can through the House and would worry later about reconciling those bills with Senate versions.
With the November 17 deadline to avoid a government shutdown approaching, Johnson also said he will look to pass a stopgap spending bill that runs through mid-January rather than the mid-April timeframe he had previously said was also a possibility.
Biden threatens a veto: The White House has made clear that the House plan is unacceptable to President Joe Biden, who would veto it if it somehow lands on his desk.
In a lengthy and forceful statement issued Tuesday evening, the White House slammed the GOP plan as unnecessarily politicizing aid to Israel, excluding essential humanitarian assistance and failing to meet the urgent needs of the moment. “It inserts partisanship into support for Israel, making our ally a pawn in our politics, at a moment we must stand together. It denies humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations around the world, including Palestinian civilians, which is a moral and strategic imperative. And by requiring offsets for this critical security assistance, it sets a new and dangerous precedent by conditioning assistance for Israel, further politicizing our support and treating one ally differently from others,” the White House said. “This bill is bad for Israel, for the Middle East region, and for our own national security.”
The bottom line: Even with the new CBO score, Johnson and House Republicans plan on passing their Israel aid bill on Friday, setting a confrontational tone for the series of budget battles that lie ahead — and making clear that they have priorities that take precedence over deficit reduction.
