White House Presidential Personnel Office, directed by 29-year-old Johnny McEntee (dark tie at top far right), originally hired as Trump’s body man, fired by John Kelly (who may be the cabinet member who is said to have called McEntee a “fucking idiot”) and rehired in early 2020 (when Kelly was gone) as director of the personnel office, where he was famous for enhancing the staff with “the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find,” including Instagram influencers, alongside a cohort of guys who looked like Dungeons & Dragons players, but also as the president’s top loyalty enforcer (Barbara Ledeen and Virginia Thomas were just volunteers). White House photo via Jonathan Karl’s excellent book excerpt in the Atlantic.
I’ve come up with a corollary to the Wilhoit rule, on the admirably efficient division of labor in the modern conservative movement, between
libertarians, who work for the laws that protect, but do not bind, the ingroups to which they belong, and
authoritarians, who work for the laws that bind, but do not protect, the outgroups they need to keep out
so that the two generally never come into conflict with each other, except from time to time when an amateur gets involved—
“Lock her up! No, not me!” Not that President Biden has ever made any actual effort to jail a political opponent; he, and his attorney general Merrick Garland, have been almost insanely careful to separate themselves from any connection to the investigation of Trump’s alleged crimes, to the point where some people have been virtually accusing Garland of being a Trump accomplice for a couple of years now (“Why doesn’t he DO something?”), although they may now be calming down in the wake of two federal indictments of The Former Guy.
But it’s not really Junior’s fault, when you think about it. The thing is that normally they’re like offensive and defensive teams in football, not even on the field at the same time; the authoritarians are for government, when they’re ruling or campaigning to rule, and the libertarians are for opposition, to the government tyranny that reigns, in their opinions, when they’re not in power. But in the present situation, the principal Republican candidate for the presidency is on the authoritarian offensive as a campaigner (bragging on the horrors he hopes to inflict on the people his voters hate) but also on the libertarian defensive as a literal criminal defendant under three indictments so far, and a fourth likely to drop next week (arguing that his own sacred liberty is being threatened with the horrors the current government wants to inflict on him), and it’s really confusing things.
In that context, we need to talk about policy issues coming up in the Trump 2024 campaign that haven’t been getting enough attention, not that the Trumpies are making any effort to hide them, as Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman reported for The New York Times, in what must be the most comprehensive coverage so far:
Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.
It’s a plan that’s been somewhat public, in fact, since they first trotted out the central element in an executive order of October 2020, signed by Trump two weeks before the election, which reclassified tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of civil servants as employees under “Schedule F”, giving the president authority to fire them all (with certain theoretical limitations, for whistleblowers, and members of protected classes including political affiliation), and replace them with his own nominees who would not be subjected to the rigors of the traditional hiring process. Also, as lifelong Republican Ronald Sanders, chair of the Federal Salary Council, said in his resignation letter over the issue
Its stated purpose notwithstanding, the Executive Order is nothing more than a smokescreen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process.
That’s what it actually is, a program to overturn the 1883 Pendleton Act and restore the corruption that prevailed under the “spoils system” from Andrew Jackson to the assassination of President Garfield, to allow the president to control the hiring and firing, not only of the “politicals”, but of the “career” employees as well, in particular departments of interest to the president. The Pendleton Act has always had exceptions (there are already schedules A through E; most of the excepted positions are in intelligence or national security, but there are others, including the one Congress made for its own employees), but this one is in such total opposition to the purpose of the law. And an apparent plan to establish a Napoleon-style (maybe Napoleon III–style) dictatorship.
Trump favorite Johnny McEntee was supposed to be handing in his list of “positions that could be reclassified as Schedule F” on 19 January 2021, but never got around to it, and of course three days later, Joe Biden was president and rescinded the order—he had no interest in turning the federal civil service into his personal tool.
But now Trump is running for president again, and Schedule F is a real part of the campaign, in his plan to do just that:
“Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” the former president declared in March at his first rally. He has also vowed "retribution" for his political enemies, saying that if he gets back into the White House "their reign is over."
He also has surrogates talking about it, notably Russell Vought, Mick Mulvaney’s successor as director of the Office of Management and Budget (and evidently a key figure in Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine for Hunter Biden “dirt”—he blew off a congressional subpoena to testify about it), who talked to NPR yesterday morning and sounded completely demented:
INSKEEP: Should civil servants be personally loyal to the president?
VOUGHT: Civil servants should be oriented to accomplishing the agenda of a president, not the office of the president, not their institutions, Office of Management Budget or the EPA or Department of Justice. They should be working for the agenda of a president that gets elected by voters. And that is not the case.
Let’s just pause to note that their offices are created and funded by Congress, the First Branch, who also get elected by voters; while the Second Branch has a lot of power, no doubt (exercised through the “politicals” directly dependent on the president), it exists in the latitude that Congress has allowed. This extreme version of the “unitary executive” theory isn’t just wacky, it’s entirely false.
VOUGHT: The notion of an independent agency - whether that's a flat-out independent agency like the FCC or a agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice - we're planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely.
INSKEEP: You mentioned the Justice Department. Of course, the president already nominates and gives directions, policy directions, to whoever may be attorney general. Do you think the president also should be able to direct the outcomes of specific criminal investigations?
VOUGHT: Well, he certainly should be able to identify his priorities with regard to what the Department of Justice is pursuing and ensuring that the agenda that he ran on can be executed within the Department of Justice.
INSKEEP: All this leads to a bottom-line question, which we put to Vought. Should the president have the power to order the Justice Department to drop its own indictment of him? Here's how he answered.
VOUGHT: I think he has the power to expect that when he brings in an administration that, that administration is not weaponized against him.
“Power to expect”?
Unfortunately, Inskeep is (understandably!—it’s this week’s news!) so interested in the indictment that he doesn’t notice the deeper question: Does Vought think the president has power to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies? To carry out Trump’s publicly declared goal of “retribution”? “I will totally obliterate the deep state. We will obliterate the deep state. And we know who they are. I know exactly who they are.”
The only coherent answer Vought could have given would be “Yes.” That’s “the agenda that he’s running on”, and nobody is entitled to stop him—you can just hope and pray he won’t be “unwise”:
VOUGHT: I am suggesting that the president has the authority under the Constitution to conduct law enforcement. I am not predicting that a president that is exercising those authorities is going to make unwise decisions and unwise instructions to his appointees to be able to make partisan decisions that the American people who put him into office would find offensive or odious.
As to Trump’s complaints (again, false as far as I’m concerned) that the Justice Department has been illegally weaponized against him, I’d love to know what Vought would say to that.
Republicans have had the virtue of not hiding their light under a bushel since Gingrich. They are very clear on who their enemies are and what they want to do about them. Tump's only innovation is to say the things usually kept to private discussions as loud as possible, punishing enemies rather than spreading freedom or some other boilerplate claptrap.
The Unitary Executive seems like bog-standard monarchism, but I wonder if the attraction of people like Bill Barr is that it's just so much more efficient, a nice streamlined fascist Leader at the top of our "not-a-democracy" republic. The fact that Barr debased himself so much to protect The Presidency, occupied by a man he clearly loathes, shows how much he's committed to the bit. I really like how you've outlined the push/pull roles of libertarians and authoritarians working together to aim the constraints of the System at other people and away from themselves.
God, that photo's incredible, isn't it? Worth a hundred million words.
(This reminds me that in the early days of JPEGs some wag wrote about how, from a data standpoint, "a picture REALLY IS worth a thousand words." I actually think this is a deep and profound idea.)