5 months ago
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The newspapers are now fairly awash with stories of what the coup-attempting Donald Trump, now under indictment for over 90 alleged federal and state crimes, has planned for a second term. For Trump himself, the main goal is revenge against his enemies. He has been loud in his assertions that he will seize control of the Justice Department in order to investigate and imprison those who have opposed him.
For Trump's many Republican allies, however, the goal is nothing less than a full purge of the government. Both Trump and those who used him believe the first Trump administration’s failures were caused by the unwillingness of government workers and appointees to embrace new hard-right policies that they believed strayed well into the territory of criminal acts. Trump repeatedly fired his own appointees when they resisted his most extreme demands. In their own attempts at public redemption, aides and appointees regularly went to the press with their own stories of how they slow-walked or distracted Trump during the many times when, out of either incompetence or malice, he again demanded his administration do something illegal.
For Trump's allies, then, the goal is to make sure the administration is stocked only with loyalists who will carry out potentially illegal orders—by culling any potential administration hires who have expressed past resistance to such extremism. And, for better or worse, none of those allies are even attempting to hide it.
Axios has one of the more detailed looks at current efforts to staff up a potential second Trump administration. It's an all-encompassing effort to find loyalists willing to embrace "Agenda 47," the authoritarian remaking of government that Trump and his allies have envisioned.
