'Full, unrelenting cascade of horror':  New Republic writer says Americans have forgotten how bad the Trump years were

“It will come like a tidal wave.”

That’s the prediction made by senior defense analyst and former naval aviator Brynn Tannehill in her latest piece at The New Republic: “People Aren’t Facing Up to the Horrors a New Trump Term Would Bring.”

The tidal wave, Tannehill predicts, is the “full, unrelenting cascade of horror that will be a Trump second term for people who are unwelcome in a country reshaped by a religious right minority.”

“People forget just how awful the Trump presidency was: daily chaos, naked power grabs, corruption, pandering to religious extremists, weaponization of government for personal vendettas, degradation of our democracy, and the constant assault on the rights of women, persons of color, and LGBTQ people,” she begins. “In the past week both The New York Times and The Economist have helpfully reminded us that the next Trump administration will be even worse, because this time they’re coming in with a plan.”

Tannehill says Trump is “coming back with the entire conservative apparatus at his back, having spent four years in the wilderness methodically planning how to permanently alter the political and legal landscape of the country to favor an anti-democratic minority.”

“Central to this is the plan to reinstitute Schedule F for federal employees, which would allow the administration to fire any federal employee with policymaking authority. In practice this means that a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.”

Indeed, as NCRM reported last week, based on that New York Times deep dive, Donald Trump and his top allies are planning to massively reorganize the entire executive branch to hand him unprecedented power and decimate the constitutional basis of checks and balances, should he win re-election next year.

A key figure in the entire reorganization of the executive branch of the federal government is John McEntee. Last year Axios described him a “young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah” who Trump had enlisted after his first impeachment acquittal in early 2020 to “activate the plan for revenge.”

“Baby-faced assassin,” is how The Guardian in February of 2020 described McEntee, who was “at the heart of Trump’s ‘deep state’ purge.”

McEntee was Trump’s Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, where he initiated loyalty test interviews in hope of ensuring executive branch employees across all agencies were entirely loyal to Trump.

Tannehill posits: “Imagine an FDA filled with far-right Catholic appointees looking for every imaginable way to end access to birth control, abortion, and gender-affirming care—and likely succeeding. Other agencies, like Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and the Pentagon, would also be looking for ways to ban or severely limit access. Odds are that all three services will be effectively unavailable in the country before the end of Trump’s next term.”

In fact, under then-President Trump, Health and Human Services established the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the HHS Office of Civil Rights. OCR was headed by Christian right activist Roger Severino, who is now at the Heritage Foundation – which is one of the top organizations mapping out the pieces, including personnel, for Trump’s second term. At HHS Severino decimated Obama-era protections for LGBTQ people.

Tannehill warns if Trump gets a second presidential term, he will pull the U.S. out of NATO, reverse the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” kick all transgender service members out of the U.S. Armed Forces – and possibly all LGBTQ people, and women, as well.

“With Trump in power and weaponizing the government against ‘enemies of the people,’ he will likely use the Federal Communications Commission, FBI, IRS, and DOJ to silence critics and end investigative journalism as we know it.”

Trump reportedly announced his run for re-election in an attempt to avoid being prosecuted for a myriad of alleged crimes. While that did not work, if he wins re-election next year, the federal lawsuits likely will disappear.

“It’s also worth pointing out,” Tannehill observes, “that Trump is not willingly going to leave office ever again.”

“He’s already under several felony indictments for stolen classified materials, and more appear to be coming for his role in attempting to steal the 2020 election and for the January 6 insurrection. Given the typical timelines of such trials, he’s unlikely to be in prison by the 2024 election. He’s smart enough to know that as long as he’s in the White House, he can’t be prosecuted for anything. The moment he leaves office, he’s going right back to trial and maybe to jail.”

Trump’s plan then would be, “Fire everyone who might prosecute him, and never leave office again.”

“The United States is probably about to have a ‘fuck around and find out’ moment that’s lethal to our form of government as we know it,” she warns. “The rapidity of the collapse is going to be terrifying. It will rival the end of the Weimar Republic in terms of its swiftness, and how far it swings away from democracy and human rights. It will come like a tidal wave. So much so fast that civil rights organizations won’t have the resources to fight more than a fraction of it, and the result will be like sandcastle walls trying to hold back a tsunami.”