An unnamed Republican source close to former President Donald Trump is confirming that reports of the former president wanting to establish a far-right, authoritarian government in a second term are not hyperbole.
In a recent Rolling Stone article, reporters Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng spoke with several unnamed GOP-aligned sources who are in Trump's orbit, and they made no efforts to assuage concerns that Trump would drastically reshape the federal government if he took power again. Rather, these sources instead confirmed that reports of a term-limited Trump eliminating all guardrails that would stand in the way of him wielding absolute unchecked executive power and pursuing vengeance against his political opponents are accurate.
"Of course we aren’t f—ing bluffing," a source identified as a "close Trump adviser and former administration official" said. Another told the publication that, "yes, we do really want to burn it all down," referring to the more moderate wing of the GOP that may seek to hamstring Trump's worst impulses in a second term.
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Sarah Matthews, who was a deputy White House press secretary in the Trump administration, has since turned on the former president and endorsed his chief rival, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, in the 2024 GOP primary. She told Rolling Stone that if he wins a second term, Trump won't have people around him to curb his most authoritarian impulses, like Generals James Mattis and John Kelly, who served as Secretary of Defense and White House chief of staff, respectively.
"When he first came into office, Trump didn’t know what he was doing. But now, he understands the levers of government in ways that he can manipulate it and game the system. I take him and his people at their word when they say they’re not bluffing," she said. "The personnel he’s going to surround himself with now, it’s going be a bunch of Yes Men who will not push back on some of his more radical ideas. That’s something that is super concerning to me about what a second term would look like."
One major element of a potential second Trump term is the far-right Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" initiative. A key plank of Project 2025 is the passage of an executive order dubbed "Schedule F," which would bulldoze all existing guardrails in place for the federal civil service and drastically increase the number of presidential appointees serving in federal agencies from roughly 5,000 to more than 54,000.
Those potential new federal employees are already being vetted by Heritage Foundation staff. Even though Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita has said that proposals from outside groups are not accurate and that only Trump himself would be deciding on executive policy and staffing, Project 2025 brought on former Trump White House Presidential Personnel Office Director John McEntee as a senior adviser.
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Additionally, Russ Vought — who leads Project 2025 partner organization Center for Renewing America — is rumored to be a favorite candidate to be Trump's White House chief of staff should he win the November election. In recent writings, Vought described contemporary America as being in a "post-Constitutional time," which means extremely broad interpretation of the Constitution in order to justify far-reaching executive power.
Vought notably wrote the section of the Project 2025 playbook on "the executive office of the President of the United States," and the Schedule F executive order is his brainchild.
"[W]e need to be radical in discarding or rethinking the legal paradigms that have confined our ability to return to the original Constitution," Vought wrote in a 2022 essay.
Click here to read Rolling Stone's report in its entirety (subscription required).
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