Two years ago, Axios reported that Trump-aligned conservative groups had been hard at work vetting potential Trump administration employees, and that sources close to the ex-president “anticipate needing an alternate labor force of unprecedented scale—of perhaps as many as 10,000 vetted personnel—to give them the capacity to quickly replace ‘obstructionist’ government officials with people committed to Trump and his ‘America First’ agenda.” In June, making it clear that all of this is about retribution and not who the best person for the job is, Trump declared in a speech in Michigan: “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country…We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
As conservative Geoffrey Kabaservice, a conservative who wrote the book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, told Politico, Schedule F is “an attempt to eviscerate government and replace it with Trump stooges.”
Pardons for January 6
Trump has pledged to pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted of federal crimes following their participation in the attack on the US Capitol, and that many will receive an “apology.” As quick refresher, the Capitol attack left multiple people dead and approximately 140 members of law enforcement injured as a result of being attacked with bats, flagpoles, stun guns, and pepper spray.\
Education, the Trump way
Trump has said he wants to get rid of the Department of Education and have states “run the education of our children.” Naturally, he’s vowed to cut federal funding for schools that teach critical race theory or what he calls “transgender insanity.” He’s also said he’ll bring back his “1776 Commission,” which was notably devoid of any actual professional historians, to promote a “patriotic” curriculum. “What Trump is trying to resurrect is something that was thoroughly discredited by the professional historical community in a totally apolitical context,” James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, told The Washington Post. “There’s lots of places to look and see what happens when history education gets stripped of its professional integrity in the interest of a political party.”
Oh, and he wants parents to be able to fire principals.
Transgender care will be under assault
Trump has threatened to punish doctors and hospitals who provide gender-affirming health care to minors, and said he’ll ask Congress to pass a nationwide law banning the practice in “all 50 states.” (“I will revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” he declared at CPAC last year.) He’s also said he’ll sign federal law that will only recognize two genders, and would ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.
Prosecutions for him: out. Prosecutions for his enemies: in.
Trump has not outright said it, but we can likely expect, with virtual certainty, that should he win the election, he will disappear the federal cases against him for his handling of classified documents and subverting the 2020 election. (Or, depending on how far they’ve progressed, attempt to pardon himself.) But not everyone will be so lucky. Trump has vowed to “appoint a real special ‘prosecutor’ to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the USA, Joe Biden, the entire Biden crime family, & all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & country itself!” A few months later, he was asked, “If you’re president again, will you lock people up?” He responded: “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”
