The plans
The Post on what Trump is planning for us:
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymityto describe private conversations.Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
More like terrifying and unconstitutional. Not surprising, to be sure, but still terrifying.
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act…
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
We can only hope his head explodes first.
And he’s currently leading in the polls. Scary times in the US.
Leading by a huge margin. It’s terrifying.
Foucault was right, it *is* really about power…
Keep an eye on the state elections here in Virginia tomorrow. The Dems have been running ads focused on abortion rights (Gov. Trumpkin wants to ban abortion after 15 weeks) while the gop has been focusing on crime rates. If the message of the Democrats gets their voters out, that could be a good sign for next year.
Oh, does he have plans for increasing the numbers of police officers employed my the municipalities of the Old Dominion? Or is it just executing shoplifters? Betting it’s the latter…
Despite the lead he has in current polls, I’ll note that these are very early times and early polls are very unreliable. For my part I suspect he will not win, simply from the fact that Biden won their last clash and Trump has only had bad news since then.
If Trump dies of a heart attack any time in the next few years, how many of his supporters will think it was an assassination?
I’m not too worried about the current polls. Right now, Democrats and Dem-leaning voters are discouraged and unenthusiastic. There’s a weird phenomenon where Republicans insist everything is good when a Republican is president and everything is awful when a Democrat is president, but Democrats insist that everything is awful when a Republican is president (because of his awful policies), but also that everything is awful when a Democrat is president (because to suggest anything else must mean you are satisfied with the status quo, and don’t you know there are X million people in poverty and there’s a climate emergency etc etc?)
The Israel-Gaza crisis isn’t helping, either, because it splits the Dem coalition much more than the Republican one.
I’m still hopeful that when push comes to shove and all the wistful hopes that the Democrats will run Johnny Unbeatable, the candidate who matches their ideological preferences and who the GOP can’t successful smear (he is Unbeatable, after all!) have run into the cold reality that it’s a choice between Biden and Trump, most of those folks will do the right thing.
Though this is exactly why third party candidates make me nervous.
@7,
Oh, the conspiracy theories surrounded Trump’s death will be amazing. It won’t matter if he chokes on a cheeseburger on live TV, people will be declaring that the Deep State activated the nanobots in the Fauci Vaccine to murder him.
I feel like Trump is a symptom of a much larger problem. To many people, he’s not a threat. To them, he’s what they want. They don’t believe in a free democracy. They actively want to live in a fascist state. That idea frightens me more than any single individual like Trump.
@James – yeah, you have to wonder at people who “hate the government” but have signs supporting the cops no matter what they do.
A lot of Trump voters believe in democracy as they define it. Which translates to a fascist dictatorship for everyone else…neighbors, coworkers, everyone they hate…and a democracy for them. A lot of people seem to define democracy as they get what they want. Bad definitions lead to bad consequences.