JD Vance plans to build a government of Trump loyalists and allies

Donald Trump’s Allies A comprehensive plan was developed If he takes power again, he will reshape the executive branch of the federal government, with plans that include firing tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with hand-picked “Make America Great Again” allies.

But just how far Trump will go to overthrow what he calls the “deep state” is less clear.

In choosing JD Vance as vice president, he was essentially choosing someone who could inspire him to go further.

“If I were to give him one piece of advice for a second term, Vance says In the 2021 podcast:

“Fire every mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.”

This is not idle talk. Vance is somewhat unusual for a politician — perhaps because he has not been in politics very long — in his interest in big ideas. He is deeply influenced by thinkers from the “liberal movement.” The New RightThey want to seize and change a social system that they believe is dominated by the left.

Much of this will involve a returning president like Trump clearing out any resistance to him or checks on his power in the executive branch.

Trump has long been surrounded by those who have urged him to take action to reshape the executive branch, such as Steve BannonEarly in his brief tenure in the White House, he called for “deconstructing the administrative state.” Such plans initially didn’t make much progress in the chaos of Trump’s first term. Trump grew increasingly frustrated by what he saw as resistance to his agenda among permanent federal employees and his inability to put “loyal” people in place.

Meanwhile, young conservatives outside the administration — like Vance — wonder why President Trump is having trouble implementing his agenda, and Left-wing movement The country’s position on social justice issues. Many of them tend to accept the interpretation of New Right writers.

The New Right has developed an institutional theory to explain why conservatives can’t get what they want. According to this theory, the left has ultimate power because they control important institutions, from the media and academia to tech companies and the federal bureaucracy. The task facing the right is to fight for and seize control of these institutions.

A particularly extreme New Right thinker is the blogger Curtis Yarvin. People I introduced in 2022Yarvin believes that the new right-wing president should “retire all government employees” — fire them all — and rebuild the government. (He also supports overthrowing American democracy and replacing it with a monarchy.)

Vance quoted Yarvin approvingly during the podcast episode when he discussed Trump’s decision to fire “every public servant.” He said, “There’s a guy named Curtis Yarvin who wrote some of these articles.”

As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally began to try to take action against the so-called “deep state”: he issued an executive order known as “Schedule F.”

The order laid the groundwork for reclassifying up to 50,000 career civil service positions as political appointments, which could then be fired by Trump and replaced by him. However, he left office before the order could be implemented, and Biden quickly rescinded it.

There is a great fear that Trump will revert to this policy in a second term, replacing large numbers of nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to follow his extreme or corrupt agenda.

This move could be implemented in a variety of ways, from more limited and less disruptive to more comprehensive and more disruptive. Given Trump’s intermittent interest in policy and implementation details, I think this move will depend on the people in his administration, as he may be led by the nose. Advisers who worry about chaos and political backlash may advise restraint.

Vance won’t do that. He will become a point person in the Trump administration pushing him to take bigger steps.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said it was inevitable that the courts would “block” Trump’s attempt to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on to say, Trump should “stand up before the nation like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'”

To wit: Vance urged Trump to overhaul the executive branch, even though the Supreme Court said it would be illegal to do so.

This interest in disruption makes more sense when you consider that Vance’s top political backers include several prominent figures on the Silicon Valley right — e.g. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — They also hate the left and want a complete overhaul of left-dominated institutions.

Thiel may be the intellectual figure who has had the greatest influence on Vance. In 2011, when Vance was a student at Yale Law School, he attended a speech by Thiel at the school. Vance was shocked at the time. Call later The speech was “the most important moment of my time at Yale Law School,” and Thiel “is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met.” Did it soon Thiel’s acquaintance, eventually at a Thiel founded investment fund, and later received $15 million from Thiel to support his Senate campaign.

Thiel has written about his disappointment with the American system. Written in 2009“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also supports many New Right figures, including Yarvin, whose startup He funded(“He was completely enlightened,” Yawen later said. Thiel wrote In an email, he said, “Just proceeding with extreme caution.”)

At the same time, Musk put his “capture the institution” strategy into practice when he acquired and reshaped Twitter. Becoming a more right-wing friendly platformMusk cut The company laid off about 80% of its employees and abandoned most of its content moderation and hate speech policies, leading liberals to flee.

Will Trump and Vance try something similar — a crackdown on permanent civil servants, even if the courts try to stop them?

We don’t know for sure, but Vance’s choice raises the odds for the biggest mess yet for the federal government.

“We are in the late republic,” Vance Said in a 2021 podcastalluding to the fall of the Roman Republic. “If we’re going to fight it, we’re going to have to get pretty crazy and go pretty far and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are not comfortable with.”