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The must-read reporting over the weekend was Jonathan Swan’s series at Axios exploring the efforts of former President Donald Trump’s supporters and other Trump-friendly Republicans to prepare to staff a potential Trump second term.
During the presidential nomination competition in 2015-2016, Republican party actors generally opposed Trump, in part because they considered him a risky general election candidate and in part because they were not convinced he would be reliable on matters of public policy.
When push came to shove, however, the elected officials, party professionals, interest group activists, party-aligned media figures and others who might have prevented his nomination chose not to challenge him, mainly because by the time of the Republican National Convention in July they were convinced he was willing to abide by party preferences in most policy areas. Notably, Trump had shown that he was willing to add conventional Republicans to his campaign, and the pattern continued into the presidency. Trump’s White House was always a disorganised mess, and he had quite a number of White House staffers and executive branch choices who wouldn’t have been part of a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio presidency. But there were plenty of conventional choices, and most of the unusual ones were Republicans on the fringes of the party, not (in most cases, at least) Trump’s personal loyalists.
Four years of a Trump presidency, however, have turned the fringes into the party mainstream, and the fringes have evolved in Trump’s direction.
Swan describes efforts already underway for staffing a second Trump administration along with criteria for selecting personnel. Trump himself is described as obsessed with the 2020 election, and what he mainly cares about is finding people who affirm his false accounts of fraud; anyone unwilling to falsely claim that Trump won the election need not apply for any position.
But as the hearings of the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol of January 6, 2021 have demonstrated, practically no one from the Trump campaign, nor anyone in the administration who knew anything about elections, believed Trump’s lies, which is why he wound up bringing in outsiders to make his case. That means that anyone eligible for a future Trump administration job is either a sycophant willing to pretend to believe dangerous nonsense, or a fool who believes dangerous nonsense after it’s been revealed that those who propagated it didn’t even believe it.
The second, overlapping qualification for a job appears to be true belief in the Trump agenda. In some cases, that means the narrow set of issues on which Trump seems to have impulses: Against overseas alliances, against traditional allies and for foreign authoritarian governments, against immigration and immigrants, against international trade. But it also means embracing the lawlessness that Trump embodies and thus wanting to dismantle the Justice Department and undermine loyalty to the rule of law.
—Bloomberg