Posting the rest of the article now

A radical plan for Trump’s second term

Part 6 of 10

But Trump’s poisonous retaliation against anyone he detects as not totally “with him” has also shifted allegiances with some who once had his back. The question of personal loyalty — so prized by Trump — has become a two-edged sword.

One former senior adviser noted that Jan. 6 was the crucible for these loyalties and that the treatment Trump meted out, especially to his own vice president, changed the landscape.

“How do you talk about loyalty for so long, and then you do that to Mike Pence?” the former adviser said. “Who is going to put themselves in that situation other than a totally power-hungry person who has no moral compass or any desire to implement solutions to the problems we’re all facing?”..

“Even if you’re a true believer, you see what happens to people. Are there any Senate-confirmable individuals who would consider taking a chance on this? You’ll either be saddled with legal fees or have your reputation destroyed.”…

Seeking “courage”

In a second term, Trump would install a different cohort at the top than in 2017. He has said what he wants, above all, is people with “courage.”

Under the courage criteria, he has singled out Jeffrey Clark for particular praise. Trump has also praised Patel, who would likely be installed in a senior national security role in a second term, people close to the former president said. If Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director, these sources said. If not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House.

People close to the former president said Richard Grenell has better odds than most of being nominated as Trump’s secretary of state. Grenell was one of Trump’s favorite officials at the tail end of his first term. As Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, he declassified copious materials related to the Trump-Russia investigation.

Grenell currently works as an executive and on-air analyst for the pro-Trump television network Newsmax. Grenell told Newsmax earlier this year: “I’m not going to stop until we prosecute [Trump’s former FBI director] Jim Comey.”

Speculation about the futures of these high-profile MAGA personalities obscures the detailed footwork going on in preparation for 2025.

Crowdsourcing power

One important hub of 2025 preparations is the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), an organization whose nonprofit status under the tax code allows it to conceal its donors’ identities. CPI is a who’s-who of Trump’s former administration and the “America First” movement.

Founded by former firebrand GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — the bane of Mitch McConnell’s existence when he served in Congress — CPI has become the hub of the hard right in Washington.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI last year. The group’s senior staff includes Edward Corrigan, who worked on the Trump transition team’s personnel operation; Wesley Denton, who served in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget; Rachel Bovard, one of the conservative movement’s sharpest parliamentary tacticians; and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The group runs its operations out of a brownstone a short walk from the Capitol building and the Supreme Court. They recruit, train and promote ideologically vetted staff for GOP offices on Capitol Hill and the next Republican administration. The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus meets at CPI headquarters.

CPI has become a fundraising powerhouse over the past few years, raising $19.7 million last year. The group has been buying up D.C. real estate. It leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups it is helping to incubate and has even bought a farm and homestead in eastern Maryland that it uses for training retreats and policy fellowships.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term

>>16781183

A radical plan for Trump’s second term

Part 7 of 10

In March, the Federal Election Commission released data showing Trump’s political action committee, “Save America,” had more cash on hand than the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined. This is partly because of the strength of Trump’s online fundraising machine. It is also partly because Trump does not like to share his PAC’s money.

It was, therefore, a meaningful act when Trump authorized a $1 million donation to the CPI. This was by far the Trump committee’s largest donation to political allies in the second half of 2021.

CPI will wield substantial influence on the makeup of a potential second-term Trump administration. It has a team working on a database of vetted staff that could be fed immediately to the next GOP presidential nominee’s transition team.

CPI is not, however, spending much time thinking about Cabinet-level appointments. CPI staff know Trump well enough to understand nobody will have much influence over his splashy Cabinet picks. Their focus is on the crucial mass of jobs below.

CPI’s immediate priority is preparing to put its vetted people in new GOP congressional offices at the start of 2023. Over the past five years since CPI’s founding, the group has been adding personnel to a database that now contains thousands of names.

The CPI team is reckoning on Republicans likely winning back the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterms. That would deliver a tremendous staffing opportunity. These anticipated victories could open hundreds of new staff jobs on Capitol Hill next year — from congressional offices to key committees.

CPI’s goal is to have at least 300 fully vetted “America First” staffers to supply GOP congressional offices after the midterms. These new staffers would theoretically gain valuable experience to use on Capitol Hill but also incubate for a Trump administration in 2025.

Another influential group is Vought’s Center for Renewing America — designed to keep alive and build upon Trump’s “America First” agenda during his exile.

Vought kept a relatively low media profile through much of the Trump administration but by the end Trump trusted him as somebody who would rebuff career officials and find edge-of-the-envelope methods to achieve Trump’s ends.

When Congress blocked Trump from getting the funds he needed to build the southern border wall, Vought and his team at the Office of Management and Budget came up with the idea of redirecting money from the Pentagon budget to build the wall.

In the final week of the Trump administration, Vought met with the former president in the Oval Office and shared with him his plans to start CRA. Trump gave Vought his blessing. CRA’s team now includes Jeffrey Clark and Kash Patel as well as other Trump allies including Mark Paoletta and Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.

Vought plans to release a series of policy papers, beginning this year, detailing various aspects of their plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”

Vought has other far-reaching intentions.He has told associates it was too onerous in the past for Trump officials to receive security clearances, so he plans to recommend reforms to the security clearance system. He also wants to change the system that determines how government documents become classified.

“We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,” Vought told Axios.

America First Legal was launched by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term

>>16781198

A radical plan for Trump’s second term

Part 8 of 10

But Miller has also been doing another job in preparation for 2025 that has not previously been reported. He has been identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.

Trump’s close allies are intently focused on the recruitment of lawyers. Trump frequently complained that he did not have the “right” lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office.

He grumbled that they were “weak” — that they always and reflexively told him his demands were illegal and could not be implemented. Trump would occasionally compare his White House lawyers unfavorably to his late New York attorney — the notorious mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Yet he deferred removing them.

Other senior officials, including Miller, believed the federal agencies were clotted with cowardly general counsels too worried about their Washington reputations to risk throwing their support behind Trump’s policies. Instead, the Trump team suspected, these general counsels allowed the career attorneys to steamroll them.

Miller has his eye out for general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.

One model of such a lawyer is Chad Mizelle, who served as the acting general counsel at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Miller formed a close working partnership with Mizelle and spoke glowingly of him to colleagues. Together they helped execute the most hardline immigration and border security policies in recent history.

In his new role, Miller has been working with Republican state attorneys general and closely watching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff. The lawyers in Paxton’s office are a useful proxy for the type of attorneys Trump would likely recruit to fill a second-term administration.

Paxton has over the past few years filed some of the right’s most aggressive and controversial lawsuits, including a federal suit to overturn elections in battleground states Trump lost. His effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled Texas had no standing to sue. On May 25, the Texas State Bar filed a professional misconduct lawsuit against Paxton related to his efforts to help Trump subvert the 2020 election.

Paxton’s office has been using the legal equivalent of a blitzkrieg in the Biden era — suing fast and often to obstruct Biden’s agenda at multiple points — most frequently immigration, the environment, and COVID-19 measures.

As of July 17, Texas had filed 33 lawsuits against the Biden administration, by far the most lawsuits of all the Republican attorneys general during the Biden administration, according to Paul Nolette, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University who tracks state attorneys general.

A senior member of Paxton’s team, Aaron Reitz, outlined their mentality and strategy on the conservative “Moment of Truth” podcast in November. It is a blueprint for the mindset that would likely pervade a second Trump term.

“Just blitzing in every front where you can,” Reitz said, describing the Texas attorney general’s approach. While he said they do not want to file bad lawsuits against Biden, “the sort of hyper-caution that I think too often Republicans demonstrate, not just in the legal space but political and elsewhere, the time for that is over. We need to understand what time it is and … fight our war accordingly.”

Reitz said what animates himself and Paxton is “an abiding belief that we, as a movement, are at war with the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch.”

At the Texas attorney general’s office, “our soldiers are lawyers and our weapons are lawsuits and our tactic is lawfare,” Reitz added.

A large portion of the broader conservative movement infrastructurehas also shifted to benefit Trump’s 2025 administration-in-waiting.

Most conservative groups take pains to claim they are neutral between prospective GOP presidential candidates. But these same groups are increasingly hiring people for key roles who are loyal to the former president or who support his “America First” views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.

Subtle shifts inside the vaunted Heritage Foundation provide an instructive example. For decades, Heritage was the conservative movement’s intellectual North Star, playing a significant role in shaping the personnel and policies of GOP presidents dating back to the Reagan administration.

When Trump emerged in 2016 with his “America First” ideology, he tore up the GOP’s playbook, especially on foreign policy and trade. Some inside Heritage at the time recoiled at these apostasies.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term

>>16781212

A radical plan for Trump’s second term

part 9 of 10

During the Trump administration, many conservatives perceived the group as sliding into irrelevance as they were detached from Trump and his movement. Recently though, some former Heritage allies watched in horror when the group broke with GOP hawks and opposed Congress’ $40 billion aid package to Ukraine for its fight against Russia.

Jessica Anderson, head of Heritage’s lobbying operation, released a statement explaining the controversial decision. Its title: “Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last.”

Heritage is not institutionally tied to Trump. But under its new president, Kevin Roberts, the organization appears to be moving closer than any previous iteration of Heritage in allying itself with the Trumpian “America First” wing of the Republican Party.

Roberts has developed a closer personal relationship with Trump than his predecessor did. Trump even visited Amelia Island in Florida to speak to Heritage’s annual leadership conference in April. In addition to courting Trump, Roberts has also opened his door to the “New Right” — individuals and organizations whose views differ dramatically from many of the Bush era conservative policies Heritage has traditionally supported.

Roberts said in an interview to Axios he plans to spend at least $10 million collaborating with at least 15 conservative groups to build a database of personnel for the next Republican administration. He was careful to say the list is intended to support whoever is the GOP nominee, but he has appointed a former top Trump personnel official, Paul Dans, to run the operation, and a glance down the list of allied organizations shows it is heavy on stalwart Trump allies.

Roberts said these allied groups will be able to edit the personnel document with their own notes — a Wikipedia-like process. Tellingly, the Conservative Partnership Institute has signed onto the Heritage effort.

The Trump-blessed think tank America First Policy Institute did not sign onto the Heritage initiative, preferring instead to promote its standalone personnel project. This, too, will have a strong Trumpian flavor.

AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. More than half a dozen Trump Cabinet officials are affiliated with AFPI and Trump loyalists fill the group from top to bottom.

Rollins brought in Michael Rigas to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Rigas ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s HR department. AFPI’s official position is that the group is developing their personnel database for whichever Republican wins the nomination. Such is Trump’s appreciation for AFPI that his PAC wired $1 million to the group in June 2021.

Even the billionaire-funded Koch networkis playing a friendly behind-the-scenes role. While the Koch network overall has often been at odds with Trump, the network’s anti-interventionist foreign policy aligns neatly with Trump’s “America First” ideology.

In this narrow field of alignment, connections have been forged between Trumpworld and Kochworld, especially via the head of Koch’s foreign policy program, Dan Caldwell.

During the last year of the Trump administration, the Koch network built close ties with Trump’s personnel office. Trump’s final nominee for the ambassador to Afghanistan, Will Ruger, was a Koch candidate. The Koch talent pipeline — on foreign policy if nothing else — would likely get a serious hearing in a second-term Trump administration.

Startups including American Moment have sprung up to develop lists of thousands of younger “America First” personnel for the next GOP administration. Founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas, American Moment is dedicated to the idea of restaffing the government. Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance serves on its board.

Sharma said in an interview that he and his team have dozens of informal talent scouts on college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.”

They have plugged into the younger staff populating hard-right offices on Capitol Hill and seek to attract a steady flow of young ideologues through events and a podcast.

American Moment says it has, so far, around 700 “fully vetted” personnel to potentially serve in the next administration. Sharma’s goal is to have 2,000 to 3,000 “America First” would-be government staffers in his database by the summer of 2024.

By then, the next Republican presidential nominee will be standing up their transition team and looking for staff to occupy not just senior jobs but the junior and mid-level positions American Moment wants to specialize in filling.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term

>>16781225

A radical plan for Trump’s second term

==Part 10 of 10=

Sharma is prescriptive about what gets a person on his list. He wants applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legalimmigration into the United States. He favors people who are protectionist on trade and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. They must be eager to fight the “culture war.” Credentials are almost irrelevant.

“Reagan hired young, he hired ideological, and he hired underqualified,” Sharma said. “That gave him an enormous amount of soft power in the conservative movement for 40 years since, and many of those people are still in charge today.”

In the background, the former staff members of Trump’s final personnel director John McEntee have stayed in touch and are working loosely together across a number of groups in preparation for 2025.

One of these new organizations, "Personnel Policy Organization" or "PPO" — an homage to McEntee’s PPO — is a nonprofit led by McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway. PPO says its mission is to “educate and defend conservative, America First civil servants and their advisors.”

A person familiar with the group’s work told Axios the group is helping to do “quality control” on other groups’ personnel lists and is “developing plans to provide a suite of policies and services to conservative officials and outside advisors to ensure that they are able to stand firm against attacks by the media or left-wing governmental actors, and offensive steps to take against left-wing officials.”

All of this amounts to a giant crowdsourcing effort for 2025.

CPI’s Edward Corrigan worked at Heritage during the 2016 presidential election cycle. After Trump’s surprise victory, he moved into an office at Trump Tower to join the transition team frantically sourcing and vetting personnel.

Heritage had assembled personnel lists starting in 2015, as it does for every election cycle, but Corrigan said the challenge for Heritage back then was that no one knew which candidate they were recruiting for.

“Back then most people assumed it was going to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, but it ends up being Trump,” Corrigan told Axios in an interview. “And so that creates a challenge because you don’t actually know” what is needed for the person to fit in.

“And so in 2024 if Trump is the nominee,” Corrigan added, “it gives you a huge advantage in that you know the kind of people that Trump’s going to want to pick.”

One uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology.

Now, they are functioning as a series of task forces for a possible Trump administration. They are rookeries for former Trump staff. They are breeding grounds for a new wave of right-wing personnel to run the U.S. government.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term

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>>16780805 (You), >>16780825 (You), >>16780840 (You), >>16780847 (You), >>16780895 (You), A radical plan for Trump’s second term - axios.com

What fascinating about this article, it appears they identified every obstruction personnel of the last admin and problems with government structure so all the non profits created by various members if his admin brainstormed, it seems for more than two years to address every issue that prevented many of the American First blockades. This seems like a complete stratgy planning like the military to do with each and every shortcoming of his last admin to make sure it never happens again. Very impressive indeed

https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1550513608106414088?s=20&t=2VD4vSTWa5AMQQaszEendw

https://twitter.com/RichardGrenell/status/1550498444166328320?s=20&t=2VD4vSTWa5AMQQaszEendw

Karen Fann endorsed a candidate endorsed by Planned Parenthood

https://twitter.com/DominofromAZ/status/1550194958790844416?s=20&t=2VD4vSTWa5AMQQaszEendw

Speech and Debate clause

https://twitter.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1550456354866864128?s=20&t=XpbIfH9CyE2okgQE-Lt-CQ