Or Maybe Dave Eggers? Margaret Atwood?
Is the reason DeSantis and Nikki Haley pulled their punches at the debate Wednesday night because they’re afraid of Trump getting revenge if he ever gets back into the White House? They sure seemed like cowards when Christie tee-ed it up for them... more than once. There are other possible explanations-- 2028 runs or even a job for Haley-- but fear of an unhinged, unfettered autocrat makes the most sense to me.
A few hours after the debate, David Graham wrote that even if we’ve become inured to Trump’s unhinged rhetorical, we need to stay aware that his message as grown darker... and that he’s not bluffing. Does this sound ominous at all? “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections. The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
Have you watched enough movies about World War II to recognize where Trump went for that Veteran’s Day message, a promise of a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically. “This sort of language isn’t entirely new,” wrote Graham. “Trump spoke in Manichaean terms throughout his first campaign and term, encouraging chants to lock up Clinton in 2016, and in 2018 referring to undocumented immigrants as ‘animals’ who would ‘infest our country.’” This kind of dehumanization is very dangerous, especially when it’s addressed towards his low-info, low-IQ MAGA base.
Graham has noticed that Señor T has changed and warned that “The fact that Trump’s ideas have become more authoritarian is not yet fully appreciated. One reason is people have heard Trump say outlandish things for so long that they can’t identify what’s new, or they’ve become numb. Another is venue: Once Trump left the White House and stopped tweeting, his vitriol became less noticeable to anyone who didn’t attend his rallies, seek out videos of them, or join Trump’s own Truth Social network. Even when a comment is so extreme that it does break into the mainstream, what happens next is predictable. The first time Trump says something, people react with shock and compare him to Hitler. The second time, people say Trump is at it again. By the third time, it becomes background noise— an appalling but familiar part of the Trump shtick."
This is just the sort of ‘normalization’ that Trump’s critics warned against from the start, but it’s also a natural human response to repeated exposure. The result is that Trump has been able to acclimate the nation to authoritarianism by introducing it early and often. When a second-term President Trump directs the Justice Department to lock up Democratic politicians or generals or reporters or activists on flimsy or no grounds at all, people will wring their hands, but they’ll also shrug and wonder why he didn’t do it sooner. After all, he’s been promising to do it forever, right?
Last time there were “adults” to prevent his worst excesses. If he wins next year, there won’t be any. It would take someone like Stephen King to write a more horrific look at a second-term Trump cabinet than the one Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei sketched out yesterday. The two imperatives would be “pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries... Trump would fill the most powerful jobs in government with men like Stephen Miller, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Kash Patel— with the possible return of Steve Bannon. If Trump won in 2024, he'd turn to loyalists who share his zeal to punish critics, purge non-believers, and take controversial legal and military action.”
They wrote that Trump hasn't settled on specific roles for specific figures, and hates it when his staff and friends speculate otherwise. It's not in his DNA to do detailed personnel planning, and a lot depends on the last few people he's talked to.” That may well be true but Jared Kushner has be running around for at least 2 months telling everyone he knows that Trump will appoint him Secretary of State if he wins. Take a breathe and imagine that.
He’s talking openly to his friends about possible running mates, including JD Vance, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kari Lake, Kristie Noem, Byron Donalds, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Tucker Carlson (Melania’s pick), although many people close to Trump discount Carlson “because they assume he'd never pick someone who could outshine him. And Trump's staff is convinced (correctly) that Carlson can't be controlled. But the two men talk a lot.”
Future dictionaries would describe a Trump regime as the definition of a kakistocracy.
Others likely to wield power in a second Trump term share a lot in common with Carlson. They're full, proud MAGA warriors, anti-GOP establishment zealots, and eager and willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get Trump's way. They include:
Stephen Miller: He could be your next attorney general and, if not that, get a Cabinet-level role to greatly influence immigration policy.
He was the architect of Trump's most controversial immigration plans in the first term— including family separation— and has written and spoken extensively about unprecedented plans to detain, purge and punish undocumented immigrants if put back in charge. He's eager to test the boundaries of what courts and the military can do to make this happen fast.
Miller currently heads a nonprofit dedicated to suing the Biden administration and promoting "America First" causes, and has been leading efforts to recruit an army of right-wing lawyers to staff a MAGA-dominated executive branch
Carlson told Axios that Miller would be his first choice to lead the Justice Department: "He's a serious person and he understands how the system works."
Mike Davis: Donald Trump Jr. has floated Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), to be Trump's interim attorney general— saying it would be a "shot across the bow of the swamp."
In his public auditions for the job, the bombastic Davis has promised a "three-week reign of terror" in which he would "put kids in cages" and jail prosecutors and journalists who have gone after Trup — even telling MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan that he has "his spot picked out in the D.C. gulag.
A source close to the Trump campaign told us A.G. is the office where Trump is "most likely to make a shocking pick," with the defiant view: "You want to weaponize DOJ, motherfucker?'"
Steve Bannon: In the early days of Trump's first term, he was arguably the most powerful man on staff, plotting personnel and policy decisions from his Capitol Hill townhouse. Then, he was ousted and frozen out. Now, thanks to his popular podcast and pro-Trump fervency, he's back.
He could be the next White House chief of staff, an idea Carlson and a few others are pushing hard with the former president.
Carlson tells Axios that Bannon would diligently implement promises after Trump lost interest. "Steve believes: If you said we're building a wall, we're building a wall," Carlson said.
Bannon has proud authoritarian beliefs and sees everything as an existential war between good (Trump) and evil (Democrats, establishment Republicans, the media).
Kash Patel: A protege of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) who led efforts to discredit the Russia investigation, Patel came to be viewed as a political mercenary in Trump's war against the intelligence community. The former Pentagon official would be considered for a top national security job in the next administration, possibly even running the CIA or NSC.
In 2021, Patel authored an illustrated children's book about the Russia investigation in which "King Donald" is a character persecuted by "Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight."
Trump took a shine to Patel in his first term but was talked out of making him a deputy director of the FBI or CIA by senior officials — including former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his memoir that it would happen "over my dead body."
Former CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign over a plan to install Patel as her deputy in the final weeks of Trump's presidency, when he became convinced the intelligence community possessed documents that could damage his political enemies.
Steve Bannon said this week on his "War Room" podcast that Patel would "probably" be CIA director in a second term.
Patel told Bannon: "One thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go-round is we've got to put in all of our compatriots from top to bottom. And we've got them for law enforcement ... [Defense Department], CIA, everywhere. ... Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens."
To avoid a confirmation battle, Patel also might have a National Security Council role where he could do special projects for Trump — or even be national security adviser.
Johnny McEntee: Trump's loyalty vetter and enforcer, headed presidential personnel in the first term. McEntee might return to that role with even more power. He also could be Trump's gatekeeper as head of Oval Office operations, or could be Cabinet secretary, riding herd on the White House liaisons to each department.
A former colleague described McEntee to us as "Trump's utility player — a guaranteed loyal ally, wherever you place him, who'd make sure the Trump agenda was being implemented."
The 33-year-old former UConn quarterback was empowered by the end of Trump's term in a way his predecessors never were — tasked with systematically purging officials deemed insufficiently loyal and making significant staffing changes without the consent of agency heads.
By late 2020, McEntee had explicit lists of top officials to fire and hire in a Trump second term, reaching far down the federal bureaucracy in a mission to truly "clean out" the "Deep State." That project has continued outside of government with a $22 million presidential transition project led by the Heritage Foundation.
"The president's plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn't been done since F.D.R.'s New Deal," McEntee told the N.Y. Times, arguing the current system "was conceived of by liberals" and must be completely overhauled
In the final days of the Trump administration, McEntee sought to orchestrate the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Germany and Africa — a last-minute gambit by the president stifled by guardrails that likely wouldn't be present in a second term.
Jeffrey Clark: a former assistant attorney general for Trump who could get a top Justice Department slot— is the rare person to be considered for a future administration while under indictment.
In the weeks after the 2020 election, the little-known environmental lawyer urged top DOJ officials to announce they were investigating baseless claims of election fraud, which they rejected.
Trump then considered appointing Clark as acting attorney general as the pair plotted to overturn the election results, prompting DOJ leadership to threaten to resign en masse.
Clark was charged as part of the Trump racketeering case in Fulton County, Ga., over his attempts to have DOJ send a letter to Georgia officials declaring that fraud may have altered the outcome of the 2020 election.
Prosecutors say the statement was false and furthered the conspiracy to overturn the election. Clark pleaded not guilty.
Ric Grenell: former ambassador to Germany, and Trump's acting director of national intelligence— would be on the short list for secretary of state.
Grenell infuriated European diplomats with his "America First" broadsides during his time in Berlin, and has basked in his reputation as an online troll beloved by the MAGA movement for his willingness to go on the attack.
Career intelligence officials have labeled Grenell— who declassified Obama-era intelligence in an effort to reshape perceptions of the Russia investigation— the least-experienced and most overtly political appointee ever to serve as head of the intelligence community.
In Grenell's last Cabinet meeting before his exit, Trump praised him as an "all-time great acting [official], at any position."
Former national security adviser Robert O'Brien, a more traditional conservative who remains in Trump's good graces, would be a more confirmable pick for secretary of state.
Susie Wiles: Some in Trumpworld assume the most likely chief of staff is Wiles, the longtime Florida political operative who's running Trump's campaign.
The campaign so far has avoided the gusher of leaks that have been hallmarks of Trump operations. She's seen as an adept Trump enabler who would serve loyally, with discipline. By bridging the campaign and the administration, she'd provide continuity.
Trump's pell-mell style could push him to a wild-card choice for chief. "Everyone he knows is a direct report," said one former Trump administration official.
John Ratcliffe: the former Texas congressman who was Trump's final DNI, would be considered to head the CIA, for a return to DNI, for defense secretary or even for vice president.
Ratcliffe, a China hawk, was one of Trump's fiercest allies in Congress during the first impeachment inquiry. He later used his authority as the nation's top intelligence official to declassify information aimed at calling into question the origins of both COVID and the Justice Department's Russia investigation.
Jamie Dimon: Trump is open to a few more mainstream picks if they bring celebrity or pizzazz. For example, Trump would consider JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, a Democrat, to head Treasury. "He wants a big name," a source close to the campaign said. "And he loves billionaires."
It's not clear Dimon would take the job— he's been talking privately with Nikki Haley about the global economy as she tries to knock off Trump for the nomination. Dimon told the N.Y. Times DealBook conference that Haley would be "a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump."
Dimon added: "He might be the president, and I have to deal with that, too."
Sen Tom Cotton (R-AR): a former Army infantry officer known for his hard edge, and who wrote a New York Times op-ed in Trump's first term supporting use of the Insurrection Act against civil disorder— would be considered to head the Pentagon.
Lee Zeldin: a former congressman from Long Island who deployed to Iraq as an Army paratrooper— is another confirmable option for the Pentagon.
Like Cotton, Zeldin is considered more confirmable than many others in the mix.
Jared Kushner: who was a huge power center in Trump's West Wing, has mostly kept his distance from the campaign so far — but might well return to the White House if his father-in-law wins again, with a continued interest in Middle East policy.
Because Kushner would be talking with Trump's authority to world leaders anyway, one option would be secretary of state.