Historian issues dark warning about impending chaos under the next GOP president

The Republican Party is preparing to implement a radical agenda by seizing control of federal agencies, eliminating thousands of experienced professionals, and replacing them with Donald Trump loyalists.

Trumpists are already developing plans for the former president's possible return to the White House with the intention of stripping employment protections from senior civil servants to remake the government in Trump's image, in a reversal of the Reaganite effort to weaken federal agencies to give power to the free market, wrote historian Andrew Gawthorpe for The Guardian.

"Rather than sidelining or eliminating federal agencies, Republicans now want to do something much more disturbing: seize effective control of them in order to persecute their enemies and implement a radical agenda," Gawthorpe wrote.

"This would allow them to be replaced with a 'cadre' loyal to Trump’s America First agenda, most of them likely to be 20- and 30-somethings with no experience in government who would owe their newfound prominence to Trump alone," the historian added. "Ideologically zealous and loyal to a fault, they would set about trying to reshape the government in Trump’s image."

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Trump hollowed out many agencies during his first term, especially the State Department, but the former president seemed to consider the government to be a political foil more than a tool to advance his own power, but a new plan reported by Axios shows that his allies don't intend to let him repeat that mistake in a second term.

"The conservative movement as a whole increasingly dreams of turning the state against its enemies," Gawthorpe wrote. "The people at the heart of the movement today are more likely to idolize the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán than they are Ronald Reagan. They aren’t animated by the belief that the job of government is simply to get out of the way – instead, they want to use it to impose a radical agenda on American society."

Full control of the government would allow Trump -- or another Republican president -- to punish immigrants, American Muslims or anyone who opposes their agenda while rewarding their political allies, but Gawthorpe said the volatility of the conservative movement made this authoritarian consolidation hard to predict.

"Given the scale of the federal government and the sheer weirdness of conservative politics, other consequences are hard to fathom," he wrote. "Be it vaccines, Disney movies, or whatever else is agitating the Fox News faithful, the government would be much more responsive to their views. At the same time, the things that actually matter -- from nuclear safety to protecting the country from terrorist attacks -- would go neglected. A civil service bent to the will of the modern conservative movement would not be a place that respected science, rationality, or legality. Precisely what might give under the weight of an attack on these principles is difficult to predict. But something definitely would."