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"Freedom is over if Donald Trump gets elected! It's that simple! No other issue matters!" [1]
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Date: 2023-08-12
Morning Joe contributor and famous brand manager, Donnie Deutch, said, “Do you not understand that if Donald Trump wins, nothing else matters because it’s over? Morning Joe… Just to take a little example, Morning Joe might exist anymore because Donald Trump has said, as all autocrats say, what they all do and he has said, ‘If I am elected, I want the FCC reporting directly to me and he will cancel the show! You need to think that extreme. It’s over! Freedom is over if Donald Trump gets elected. It’s that simple. No other issue matters. Every other issue sprinkles down from that, how you feel about the economy or however you feel about whatever issue you are dealing with, we cannot afford autocracy. Our forefathers fought for two hundred years fifty years ago is over. That’s what’s at stake in this election. Everything else is a subtext of that!” [starts about 20:15]
The New Republic gives the details:
Donald Trump is planning to completely overhaul how the government works if he wins the 2024 presidential election, which would clear the way for him to do pretty much whatever he wants. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, told The New York Times. One of the central parts of Trump’s fascist plan to consolidate power is to bring independent agencies under presidential control, including the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust law and consumer protection rules. Trump has already said he would launch a criminal investigation into President Joe Biden if he takes back the White House. But his new plans would go a step further and centralize power under the executive branch.
Another example of the fascist threat that Donald Trump poses:
If Trump Is Reelected, His Aides Are Planning to Purge the Civil Service Officials are looking to revive a controversial order issued in Trump's waning days and have already identified 50,000 federal positions to target. Former aides close to President Trump are working to revive and expand his signature proposal to upend the federal civil service, according to a new report, and are working in conjunction with the former commander in chief to quickly purge thousands of federal employees if he were to return to office. The plan, as detailed to Axios and confirmed by Government Executive, would bring back Schedule F, a workforce initiative Trump pushed in the 11th hour of his term to politicize the federal bureaucracy. The former officials and current confidantes are, through a network of Trump-loyal think tanks and public policy organizations, creating lists of names to supplant existing civil servants. They have identified 50,000 current employees that could be dismissed under the new authority they seek to create, Axios reported and Government Executive confirmed, though they hope to only actually fire a fraction of that total and hope the resulting “chilling effect” will cause the rest to fall in line. In October 2020, just before the presidential election, Trump signed his controversial executive order creating a new class of federal employees excepted from the competitive service. The order sought to remove career federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” jobs from the General Schedule into a new job classification where virtually all of their civil service protections were absent, essentially making them at-will employees.
From The Guardian
If Trump wins, he’ll turn the justice department into a vendetta machine A second Trump presidency would kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye. We must protect the attorney general’s independence If Trump wins, he’ll turn the justice department into a vendetta machine Robert Reich A second Trump presidency would kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye. We must protect the attorney general’s independence Tue 27 Jun 2023 06.11 EDT Last week Donald Trump said that, if re-elected, he’d appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”. In other words, if Trump is re-elected, you can kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye.
NY Times says
By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 18, 2023 Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands. Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control. Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him. Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
PBS has Laura Barron Lopez discuss one of Trump’s speeches with authoritarian expert Ruth Ben Ghiat and even though it is brief, it is extremely enlightening !
Laura Barrón-López: Strip tens of thousands of career civil servants of protections and replace them with political hires and exert political influence over the Justice Department, these are some of the agenda items under discussion among former President Donald Trump and his allies if he retakes office in 2024, according to recent reports by The New York Times and The Economist. For more on what this would mean for our democracy and the power of the executive branch, I'm joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. She's a history professor at New York University and an expert on authoritarianism.
Laura Barron Lopez then asks Ruth Ben Ghiant what it would mean for Donald Trump to “identify pockets of independents and seize them” which I take to mean that he would replace all the civil servants with Trump lackeys and select people based solely upon loyalty and not ability, knowledge, or experience,.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, NYU History Professional: Yes, in studies of authoritarianism, it's autocratic capture, autocratic capture. And what this Trump adviser has described is that. When you remake government, you remake civil service. So you purge people who will not be loyal to you. So, loyalty becomes a requirement, not expertise, and you restaff government with people who will do your bidding and, in this way, hugely centralizing and increasing presidential power. And I was also struck by his language, seizing, looking for pockets of independence, and seizing them. And this also negates the idea of an independent civil service and independent institutions. This is a bedrock of democracy. And the word seizing, this is not the language of democratic reform. This is the language of authoritarian takeover.
Then he threatens to fire all glob justalists, members of the deep state, and war-mongers from the executive branch. She points out that Donald Trump ran for office in order to capture power over the judicial branch in order to protect himself from accountability for committing numerous serious crimes and points out that Donald Trump is following a well-worn path of authoritarians when he is doing this. Berlusconi in Italy, Netanyahu in Israel, Putin in Russia did the same. Then they discuss how Trump’s views have become orthodoxy within Republican Party circles and this is called autocratic capture.
Again, this dialogue between Laura Barron Lopez and Ruth Ben Ghiant is not long and it is full of insight. I strongly recommend it.
If we don’t have freedom and democracy, then we can’t influence government towards any of our policy goals. So, logically speaking, freedom and democracy come first. This is an existential threat to our democracy!
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