Axios Offers a Preview of Trump's Coming "Imperial Presidency"

You had my interest, but now you have my attention.

Former President Trump, if re-elected, plans to immediately test the boundaries of presidential and governing power, knowing the restraints of Congress and the courts are dramatically looser than during his first term, his advisers tell us.

Why it matters: It's not just the Supreme Court ruling on Monday that presidents enjoy substantial legal immunity for actions in office. Trump would come to office with a Cabinet and staff pre-vetted for loyalty, and a fully compliant Republican coalition in Congress -- devoid of critics in positions of real power.

That's a big reason many Democrats worry President Biden is making one of the biggest gambles in U.S. history by staying in the race amid acute concerns about his age.

The big picture: Trump promises an unabashedly imperial presidency -- one that would turn the Justice Department against critics, deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally, slap 10% tariffs on thousands of products, and fire perhaps tens of thousands of government staff deemed insufficiently loyal.

I've got a funny feeling in my pants. It feels like love. No, hate.

It feels like a sexy mixture of love and hate.

He'd stretch the powers of the presidency in ways not seen in our lifetime. He says this consistently and clearly -- so it's not conjecture.

You might like this or loathe this. But it's coming, fast and furious, if he's elected.

My dick's so hard it can scratch diamond.

Thanks to Monday's Supreme Court ruling, Trump could pursue his plans without fear of punishment or restraint.

What to watch: To hear Trump and his allies tell it, this is how early 2025 would unfold if he wins:

1. A re-elected Trump would quickly set up vast camps and deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally. He could invoke the Insurrection Act and use troops to lock down the southern border.

2. In Washington, Trump would move to fire potentially tens of thousands of civil servants using a controversial interpretation of law and procedure. He'd replace many of them with pre-vetted loyalists.

3. He'd centralize power over the Justice Department, historically an independent check on presidential power. He plans to nominate a trusted loyalist for attorney general, and has threatened to target and even imprison critics. He could demand the federal cases against him cease immediately.

4. Many of the Jan. 6 convicts could be pardoned -- a promise Trump has made at campaign rallies, where he hails them as patriots, not criminals. Investigations of the Bidens would begin.

5. Trump says he'd slap 10% tariffs on most imported goods, igniting a possible trade war and risking short-term inflation. He argues this would give him leverage to create better trade terms to benefit consumers.

6. Conversation would intensify about when Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Sam Alito, 74, would retire.

Lists of potential successors are already drawn up.

President Biden said last month that "the next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees."

If Trump were to win and the two oldest justices retired, five of the nine justices would have been handpicked by Trump.

Top Democrats privately predict Republican majorities in the House and Senate if Biden loses.

Most of Trump's most prominent critics -- Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, et al. -- will be gone. Even the few who remain, including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), will be substantially less powerful.

...

What they're saying: Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a top prospect as Trump's VP, told us Trump would have more allies -- and more loyal allies -- in Congress this time.

"You have to ask yourself: How many true allies of the agenda existed in the United States Capitol in January 2017, and how many will exist in January of 2025?" Vance told us.

...

The freshman senator said that while Trump was "very much a newcomer to politics" when he ran the first time, he now "understands how to pull the levers of power much better, because he's coming at this as a subject matter expert."

The media would investigate, report, and illuminate all of it -- but probably with less impact. A second Trump term would start with TV ratings in the tank, mainstream media shrinking, and public attention shattering into dozens of information ecosystems, many built around popular and often partisan celebrities.

So the ability to do more with fewer real restraints is real -- and hard to change.

The bottom line: Think of Trump 2025 as a better prepared, much better organized, much more powerful version of Trump 2017 -- minus Republican brakes and any mystery about immunity.

They're continuing the "Trump can now send out hit men to kill his enemies" lie.

I kind of hope they believe it. I want them to be afraid.

The Daily Caller writes conservatives are drawing up lists of the worst Deep State operatives (in other words: AP's sources for leaks) and is planning to terminate them with extreme prejudice.

I mean fire them, not kill them. (Although the left is insistant that Trump now has that right; should we take them at their word?)

A "highly unusual and potentially chilling effort" is underway to reign in the Deep State and put an end to government actors subverting the will of American voters, Republican or Democrat.

Stop it guys, you're getting me too excited.

"Seasoned political operative" Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are making a list. They better check twice. And they're gonna find out who's, well... really just who's naughty.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, Jones is taking a deep dive into the "backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees." First up: Department of Homeland Security. The mission, dubbed Project Sovereignty 2025, is to compile a list of 100 potential saboteurs within the Deep State, and post their names publicly to let the world know who they really are.

This might sound drastic, but nothing could be more warranted.

...

The goal of posting the 100 names, according to the AP, is to expose who might impede "a second-term Trump agenda"-- and who is "ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings."

To the Democratic handmaidens in the bureaucracy, this is all deeply disturbing. The mission reportedly "stunned democracy experts and shocked the civil service community."

As for Trump getting to pick more justices: I sure hope he gets them right this time.

Josh Hammer has some suggestions to avoid any more ugly surprises.

First, do the actual research. Gorsuch's stunning defection in the 2020 Bostock decision, for instance, in which he read sexual orientation and gender identity into Title VII, was entirely predictable based upon his prior similar ruling in a 2009 9th Circuit case called Kastl. And if there isn't a huge body of case law because a prospective nominee hasn't been an active judge for very long, that's a good indication not to pick that person. Only demonstrable, proven track records can suffice.

Second and related, dive deep into a prospective nominee's record to verify full-spectrum, across-the-board conservatism. Conservatives are sick of one-trick pony lawyers and jurists, for instance, who obsess over regulatory issues and gutting the administrative state while having little to say when it comes to the core civilizational issues affecting sovereignty, life, religion and human sexuality.

Third, it is imperative that conservatives vet nominees closely for a willingness and eagerness to overrule bad cases and correct course as aggressively as possible. The right must only consider those who take a properly constrained view of stare decisis (precedent) in constitutional interpretation, will liberally grant writs of certiorari to hear flawed lower-court cases affecting key issues, and who will not search for ways to avoid tough rulings--as the court did this week when it punted on the Big Tech censorship case of Murthy v. Missouri on standing grounds and dismissed as improvidently granted the Idaho abortion case of Moyle v. United States.

Finally, the prospective nominee's personal life should be closely scrutinized. There is not a single more important proxy than the "spouse test." It is no coincidence that Thomas and Alito are the two most steadfast of the current justices; their wives, Ginni and Martha-Ann, are exceptional, conservative women. Beyond the spouse test, a nominee must attend a theologically conservative house of worship; a rainbow flag-flying church or synagogue must be an automatic disqualifier.

That last one is a really good point. There is one major factor into which nominal Republicans stayed strong and which went cuck since 2015: Whether their wives were AWFL harridans, or whether their wives were #based. Some #based wives dragged their cuckish husbands kicking and screaming back to the right side of things.

But the weak men, the ones with ballbuster liberal wives, the weaklings: they all went cuck.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:00 PM

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