'Autocratic instincts': Columnist reacts with dismay to revelation of Trump's presidential plans

Former President Donald Trump laid out plans to dramatically expand presidential power if re-elected to the office in 2024 — and it paints a dark picture for the future of democracy, Philip Bump wrote for The Washington Post Monday.

Trump's vision for a second term was outlined by the New York Times.

Reacting to it, Bump wrote that the former president, "never understood that the presidency was not his or that the government was not the Trump Organization. He had little familiarity with basic functions of government or the rules that bound government activity so he acted as though they didn’t exist. And, as the New York Times reported on Monday, that’s his vision for a possible second term in office: overhauling the government so that it is not enduring but subjugated."

Among Trump's plans for restructuring the government is to put independent agencies like the FCC under his direct presidential control; to revive a long-banned practice of "impounding" money Congress passed for programs the president disagrees with; and to reclassify federal workers in a way that lets him fire anyone in the civil service for political reasons, a plan he had already started to implement before being ousted in 2020.

Trump's vision would likely make the government work less effectively, wrote Bump, by eliminating years of institutional knowledge and turning over the whole workforce routinely — something America solved with civil service reform in the 19th century. However, "it’s also easy to see the appeal to Trump, whose autocratic instincts are unsubtle. It would turn him from a president — one who presides over government — into the CEO of a private organization once again with all that entails."

And former White House personnel chief John McEntee, who was overseeing the civil service changes in 2020, made very clear what the goal is: “Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

The endgame, Bump warned, is to reduce the currently regulated, divided powers of the executive branch to the one man elected to lead it.

It is nothing less, he concluded, than the "collapse of the idea of a democratic government with temporary stewards, an extension of his own misunderstanding of the position he once held to a wide array of federal departments. If polling is any indicator, much or most of his party wouldn’t object."