“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.”
“Vance is perhaps the GOP’s leading practitioner of responding to questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by pivoting to Mexico and fentanyl. “What are we talking about?” he asked at a voter forum in February 2022 as the invasion was imminent. “We’re talking about a border 5,000 miles away between Ukraine and Russia. That’s what our leaders are focused on. If we had leaders half as concerned about their own border as they were about the Ukraine-Russia border, we would not have a border crisis in this country.””
“”A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance said in a Fox News interview at the Republican National Convention on Monday. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that’s what [Trump] did when he took out [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Soleimani.”
Vance praised Trump for trying to “enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states” to fight back against Iran. In a speech to the Quincy Institute in May, Vance tried to sell a U.S.-Israeli-Arab alliance as a way for the United States to “spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”
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Instead, Trump ended up overseeing a massive U.S. military buildup in the region during his term and nearly went to war with Iran.
Vance even wants to add another counterinsurgency to America’s “forever war” roster. In July 2023, he told NBC News that he would “empower the president of the United States, whether that’s a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels” in Latin America.
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Trump and Vance also share the establishment view that the United States needs to get ready for a conflict with China over Taiwan. At the convention, Vance told Fox News that China is the “biggest threat” to America, and he has voiced support for building up the Taiwanese military with American weapons in the past.”
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“The stance that puts Trump and Vance most at odds with the foreign policy establishment is their opposition to U.S. military aid for Ukraine. In a February speech to the Senate, Vance complained that the “experts have a new thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely, and it is called the conflict in Ukraine.” He has also written about the munitions shortages that the war is causing, a rare moment of honesty by a politician about the limits of U.S. power.
Vance told Fox News at the convention that Trump will “go in there, negotiate with the Russians and the Ukrainians, [and] bring this thing to a rapid close.” He also said that the war simply wouldn’t have started if Trump were in office. Yet in practice, Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine were just as hawkish as those of his successor. In fact, Trump was the first U.S. president to send weapons to Ukraine—a fact that he bragged about at the time.
And tellingly, at the presidential debate in June, Trump blamed President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan for causing the Ukrainian conflict. “He was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment,” Trump said. “When [Russian President Vladimir] Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to go in.'”
It’s not really an argument against war—just a promise to be better at it than the last guy.
Many Democrats and Republicans want to have their cake and eat it too. They know that Americans are fed up with endless military conflict, but they want to make their opponents look weak. Liberal criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy were just as incoherent as conservative criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy.
But wanting to win harder is not a strategy. And America’s problems are not simply a lack of gumption. Vance may be more willing to acknowledge the limits of U.S. power than his competition. When it comes to actually applying those insights, he falls far short.”
“JD Vance wasn’t picked as Donald Trump’s running mate because he can deliver Ohio. It’s already in the tank for the GOP. And he wasn’t tapped because he’s the most qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. The entirety of his government experience consists of less than two years in the Senate.
Vance’s ascension is owed to something else entirely. He is the embodiment — and one of the most articulate defenders — of a belief system that has gradually taken hold of the Republican Party, one that prizes cultural and ideological warfare and rewards the warriors who are most effective in taking the fight to non-believers.”
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“Vance has experience where it counts for the Trump era GOP, in the social media trenches and on cable TV hits. His Marine Corps service — Vance is the first post-9/11 veteran on a major-party ticket — insulates him on foreign policy, and offers a measure of credibility to isolationist views that once might have been dismissed as a product of a lack of seasoning.
He projects cool anger, and knows the enemy as well as anyone in the party because he’s lived and circulated among them, as a venture capitalist, a celebrated author and a Yale Law School graduate. He doesn’t deliver his home state so much as send a message to the restive regions that the GOP aspires to keep in its fold — the Rust Belt and Appalachia.
Trump spoke to these aspects of Vance’s background in announcing his pick Monday on social media, ticking off LinkedIn bullet points that individually served as dog whistles to the faithful.”