“Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.
In picking J.D. Vance as his vice president, he’s picked someone who will egg him on to go very far indeed.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.”
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“As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
That is: Vance urged that Trump radically remake the executive branch even if the Supreme Court said doing so was illegal.”
“At the behest of Trump and his allies, the RNC approved a new GOP platform, one free of calls for federal abortion bans or any explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. The Republicans’ official agenda also forswears any cuts to Medicare and Social Security, including increases to the retirement age. All of these stances contradict longstanding conservative movement goals, and all three bring the Republican Party into closer alignment with public opinion.
Meanwhile, Trump used some of the RNC’s primetime speaking slots to signal sympathy for nonwhite voters, younger Americans, and union members. The biracial model and rapper Amber Rose gave a speech that invited young, historically liberal voters to rethink their skepticism of Trump and his party. “The truth is that the media has lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time I believed those lies,” Rose declared, explaining that she eventually realized, “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me. These are my people.”
The RNC’s outreach to union voters was even more concerted. On the convention’s first night, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien enjoyed the most prominent speaking slot. The union leader did not actually endorse Trump and spent much of his address on diatribes against corporate greed that received tepid support in the convention hall.
To all but the most attentive viewers, however, O’Brien’s status as the keynote speaker overshadowed the absence of a formal endorsement: By all appearances, the head of one of America’s largest unions was vouching for Trump’s commitment to workers’ interests.
Taken together, the RNC’s four-day infomercial for Trump’s GOP was far more professionally orchestrated and broadly accessible than its 2020 and 2016 predecessors, which often seemed to be made by and for Fox News addicts.
Yet other aspects of the convention betrayed the strange, illiberal, and authoritarian character of Trump’s politics. As well-managed as the Trump campaign has been to this point, it cannot escape the inherent liabilities of the man it’s trying to sell.”
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“Vance is among the most openly authoritarian Republicans in Washington. He has said that he would have helped Trump overturn the 2020 election results, raised money for January 6 rioters, called on the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation against an anti-Trump Washington Post columnist, touted plans for consolidating the president’s authority over the federal bureaucracy, and argued that Trump should simply defy any court orders that obstruct such a power grab.
Traditionally, presidential candidates use their VP picks to assuage potential concerns that swing voters might have about them or balance out the ticket demographically. Vance’s selection, by contrast, exacerbates Trump’s biggest political liabilities: the perception that he is an authoritarian extremist whose election would threaten abortion rights.
Nevertheless, Trump picked him precisely because Vance’s current ideology closely mirrors his own. According to the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, the Trump campaign had initially planned to pick a milquetoast, unthreatening running mate, such as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. But Trump was eventually persuaded that he needed a fellow true-believing populist to help him enact his most far-reaching ambitions.”
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“The Republican nominee’s acceptance speech was the longest ever given, meandering across 92 bizarre and tedious minutes. This excess was a direct reflection of the authoritarian nature of Trump’s candidacy. The nominee of a healthy democratic political party must balance their own narcissistic appetite for attention against the interests of the various constituencies they represent.
Having consolidated his personality cult’s control of the GOP, Trump faced no such constraint. His speech did not stretch to marathon length because of its abundance of substantive content. Rather, it consumed so much time because Trump allowed himself to supplement nearly every passage with pointless and tiresome ad-libbing, after detailing his own narrowly averted assassination in painstaking detail.
A less weird and authoritarian Republican nominee might have also drummed up panic about undocumented immigration. But they probably wouldn’t have paused in the middle of such demagogy to ask the crowd, “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs?” and then say, incongruously, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump’s endless, self-indulgent rambling was alienating enough in and of itself. Even more unnerving was the spectacle of an increasingly bored crowd struggling to humor their dear leader with increasingly strained outbursts of enthusiasm.”
“Hasina’s exit on an India-bound military helicopter came after crowds broke a curfew and stormed the prime minister’s residence in the capital Dhaka, following weeks of bloody protest.
The movement that ultimately toppled her started with students frustrated at their lack of job prospects and snowballed to include ordinary Bangladeshis facing increasingly tough economic conditions. But the jubilant scenes in the capital Dhaka come at great cost; around 300 people have been killed since the protests started in June, and the country’s future remains uncertain as a military-backed caretaker government steps in.
After a decade and a half in power, Hasina’s legacy is complicated. On the one hand, her government built modern infrastructure and improved development opportunities, especially for the poor. But she also increasingly cracked down on the press, as well as the opposition, and as time went on, many forms of dissent.
Army General Waker-uz-Zaman announced Monday that the military had taken control of the government; parliament is being dissolved, and the government is formulating a plan for fresh elections.
“The country is going through a revolutionary period,” Zaman said in a national television address. “We request you to have faith in the army of the country. Please don’t go back to the path of violence and please return to nonviolent and peaceful ways.”
Though a people-power movement has won a victory in driving Hasina out, the young democracy is entering a period of major uncertainty; indeed, what happens next for Bangladesh is anyone’s guess.”
“Bangladesh’s prime minister resigned and fled the country Monday, after weeks of protests against a quota system for government jobs descended into violence and grew into a broader challenge to her 15-year rule. Thousands of demonstrators stormed her official residence, a day after nearly 100 died in the unrest.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s departure threatens to create even more instability in the nation on India’s border already dealing with a series of crises, from high unemployment and corruption to climate change.”
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“The protests began peacefully as frustrated students demanded an end to a quota system for government jobs that they said favored those with connections to the prime minister’s Awami League party, but the demonstrations have since morphed into an unprecedented challenge to Hasina and the party.
The 76-year-old — who was the longest-serving female head of government — was elected for a fourth consecutive term in a January vote that was boycotted by her main opponents. Thousands of opposition members were jailed in the lead-up to the polls, and the U.S. and the U.K. denounced the result as not credible, though the government defended it.
Hasina had cultivated ties with powerful countries, including both India and China. But under her, relations with United States and other Western nations have come under strain, as they have expressed concerns over human rights violations and press freedoms in the predominantly Muslim nation of 170 million people.
Her political opponents have previously accused her of growing increasingly autocratic and called her a threat to the country’s democracy, and many now say the unrest is a result of that authoritarian streak.
Hasina arrived Monday in a city in India on the border with Bangladesh in an army helicopter, according to a military official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information to the media. It was not clear where she would go next.
As she fled, people stormed her residence, taking furniture and pulling food from the refrigerators.
Protests have continued even after the Supreme Court last month ruled that the quota system — which set aside up to 30% of government jobs for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh’s war of independence against Pakistan — must be drastically cut. The government attempted to quell the demonstrations with force, leaving nearly 300 people dead since mid-July.”
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” Hasina repeated her pledges to investigate the deaths and punish those responsible for the violence. She said she was ready to sit down whenever the protesters want. Earlier, she had said protesters who engaged in “sabotage” and destruction were no longer students but criminals, and that the people should deal with them with an iron hand.”
“A new voting method, AADV (Approve/Approve/Disapprove Voting), was proposed in 2020. Each voter has the option to approve of either one or two of the candidates, and also has the option to disapprove of one candidate. Each candidate’s approvals and disapprovals are separately summed. Disapprovals are then subtracted from approvals to obtain the net approvals for each candidate. The candidate with the most (positive) net approvals is declared the winner. If no candidate achieves positive net approvals, NOTA (None Of The Above) has won. If NOTA should win, all candidates are disqualified and a new election must be held with new candidates.”