'A catastrophe': Expert pulls the lid off Trump's next-term 'master plan'

Former President Donald Trump has a "master plan" to use the office of the presidency to get revenge on everyone he believes has wronged him, warned Georgetown University public policy professor Donald Moynihan in The New York Times on Monday.

"A second Trump administration would be very different from the first," wrote Moynihan. "Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts."

The first part, he wrote, is to install a "deep bench of loyalists" into government positions, something for which the Heritage Foundation is already helping him recruit. The second part is to bring back his proposed "Schedule F" designation, demolishing merit-based hiring in the civil service and making tens of thousands of career government workers subject to dismissal and replacement based purely on loyalty to the president — effectively replacing their oath to the Constitution with an oath to Trump.

Doing this, writes Moynihan, would be "a catastrophe for government performance."

The third and final part, he warned, is to "create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval," installing loyalists in key government lawyer positions that would otherwise block his plans as unconstitutional.

Ultimately, wrote Moynihan, "When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts."

"American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome," wrote Moynihan. "The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power."