In a recent town hall, Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump: “You would never abuse power as retribution against anybody–” Trump cut him off, and without much thought at all, delivered a line many pundits are still trying to decipher:
This statement was received by uproarious applause by the audience, and desperate attempts by Hannity to excuse or somehow clarify the insane sentence that had just left the former president’s mouth. It may seem ridiculous to pick apart and assign any meaning to any single statement that comes out of Trump’s mouth–if we did this, he would’ve been arrested long ago for threatening to shoot someone on fifth avenue, and he would’ve died from injecting bleach into his bloodstream. Although Trump’s apparent dictator-for-a-day fantasy is not all that surprising taken on its own, the attitude and confidence with which he delivered his response to Hannity’s question is symptomatic of something larger.
Simply put, Donald Trump is obsessed with vengeance. In one of the first speeches of his 2024 campaign, he proclaimed, striking an almost biblical tone:“I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” In fact, it seems that he has based his entire campaign around the idea of a revenge tour, making repeated claims that he would finish the work he began in his first four years, only to a more extreme extent. This narrative of revenge is not new in Trump’s life, in which he has cast himself as both the victim and eventual victor in every major life event. He has, on multiple occasions, claimed that one of his most important rules of business is to “get even.” So, according to Mr. Revenge himself, what does retribution look like in what millions of his supporters consider to be the greatest electoral fraud of our generation? In short, a fascistic rash of investigations, mass firings, and military law.
Privately, Trump has confided in various sources that he would like to launch investigations into one time loyalists who turned their back on him and his administration, including former joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley and officials in the FBI and Justice Department. Trump also vowed in a Truth Social post to nominate a special prosecutor to not only investigate, but “go after” President Biden and his family.
The Trump campaign is working closely with a think tank called Project 2025, which has begun preparing everything from policy positions to executive orders for when Trump retakes office after a theoretical win in 2024. According to internal reports, one of their primary plans is to put the country under military law on the first day of Trump’s term through the Insurrection Act, which allows for the military to be used domestically during times of civil unrest, insurrection, and rebellion. Trump toyed with the prospect of invoking the insurrectionist act to suppress George Floyd protests in 2020, but never did it.
The true crown jewel of the plans created by Project 2025 include the Schedule F classification of federal workers. Shortly before he left office in 2020, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying approximately 50,000 federal workers who hold positions that have some influence over policy as “Schedule F” employees. Biden quickly repealed this executive order when he came back into office, but one of Trump’s and Project 2025’s most prominent plans include reinstating this executive order, and firing thousands of employees deemed “bad apples” who fall under this Schedule F classification, replacing them with Trump loyalists. Their terminations would have no formal recourse.
The exact implications of these firings is unknown, although the employees included under the Schedule F classification are considered some of the most important to the standard operation of the U.S government, including the basic implementation of laws. As much as Trump might hate to admit it, the functioning of our country would grind to a halt without the so-called “deep state” to carry out the legislation passed into law, and Project 2025’s idea of hiring people with a fundamental distrust of the organization they would be working for certainly doesn’t bode well for governmental stability.
Although this is one of their central tenants, this Schedule F policy is just one of Project 2025’s policies. They recently released a 920 page, 30 section book outlining precise, conservative policy for every section of the U.S Government for the next president to use as a guide.
So, it seems Trump’s line about being a dictator on day one doesn’t have to be deciphered at all. In fact, what he really meant has been outlined meticulously by think tanks and hundreds of conservative masterminds that are desperately praying for his victory: he intends to dictate exactly what they want on the first day of his presidency, and every single day after until there is no government left to run at all.
please-clap.com 