The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Plans A More Radical Second Term

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

The former president and his allies have made clear they don't want obstacles that stymied them in their first term to get in the way during a potential second term. Overhauls of the civil service, the judiciary & more are planned, among others. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This episode was edited by Casey Morell. It was produced by Jeongyoon Han. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Preston, and right now I'm finishing up my fall semester at the University of Oklahoma. This podcast was recorded at 12.35 p.m. on Tuesday, December 5th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be procrastinating studying for any of my finals. Okay, here's the show. That is such a fun time to be in college at the end of winter break because you have such a long stretch before you go back to school. I don't miss finals, though. I don't miss finals either.

I'm super happy that I'm not doing that. I miss long breaks, though. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the Trump campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And after a tumultuous first term in office, what would a second term be like under President Trump? Here's the former president and current Republican frontrunner speaking in Iowa over the weekend. We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will drive out

the globalists. We will cast out the communists. We will throw off the sick political cast. Franco, you've been reporting on this, and there are a lot of plans in motion. So let me start here. Who are the architects of the plans? Yeah, there's a bunch of people who are working on different things specifically to kind of get Trump some more power if he gets into the White House. And those groups include, or the big one at least, is the Conservative Heritage Foundation. It's leading this kind of government-in-waiting effort. It's called Project 2025. They've actually organized dozens and dozens of conservative groups who are drafting up these big plans to kind of – with the kind of vision for conservatives. They actually wrote this book.

I'm actually holding it up right now. 900 pages long. Looks like Black's Law. It is a big, heavy, dense book. And the people involved in the effort, the authors of this book, largely are Trump, former Trump officials. Guys like Russ Vought, who is the budget those involved in these efforts, again, most of them, many of them, a lot of a lot of overlap. And they're very clear to say, look, Trump is the best embodiment of the work they're trying to do. I just stole the book from Franco and one of my favorite things is just open to a page and read from a random book. But just thumbing through this, it's really interesting because it is almost like,

you know, a briefing book for a, you know, White House press secretary. You know, they're always like kind of, you know, thumbing through something and there's always like these talking points. You open to this, it's 2025 Presidential Transition Project

and it's countering China's development challenge. And it's all these bullet points about it. Climate change, diversity, equity and inclusion agenda, protecting life in foreign assistance. I mean, this is highly specific stuff and the kind of things that are intended toated. They weren't ready to staff a government. They weren't ready in so many ways. And this time around, they're sending a very different message that not only is Trump ready, but they have plans for almost every facet of the federal government. Yeah, they were definitely not ready. And they openly admit that the people were put in place

were not the right people for their team. And not only that, many of the, I mean, their biggest argument, though, that they make is that the people who were already in office were working against them. I mean, the big point of this effort is to gain more power for Trump should he get back there. And how they want to do that is overhauling the government. They're not shy about what they want to do and how they're going to do it. How they plan to do that is overhauling the government. They're not shy about what they want to do and how they're going to do it. How they plan to do it is to get rid of tens of thousands of federal employees and replace them with Trump loyalists. They complain. And then in the last administration, too often they were blocked or slow walked by the bureaucracy, by career officials. I mean, this is fundamentally a recruitment effort by conservatives to get more conservatives into the government.

Paul Danz, he's leading Project 2025 for the Heritage Foundation. He called it a conservative call for conservative warriors. This is your calling. This is your moment in life. We're talking to you. You can't just sit there on the sidelines anymore and kvetch about this. What does that mean? I mean, Trump has talked about the deep state for years. That's not a new term or an idea coming from him. But when they say that this time around, they're going to go after the deep state, what does that mean practically? How would he do that? So the deep state is those thousands and thousands of career officials who work in an administration regardless of the person in charge, regardless of civil workers, civil workers, federal employees.

How they would do that is this thing that's called Schedule F. And Trump actually enacted this through executive order at the end of his term. Biden flipped it as soon as he walked in the door. But what it does is your political staff and you have your career staff. The political staff changes. There's like 4,000. They change each administration. But these guys, these are kind of like the nuts and bolts. They're the ones who have the knowledge of how this works. I mean, the government is a complex place. There's a lot of wealth and knowledge in these years of experience. But Trump and his allies, they are looking to change all that I mean, Ronald Reagan famously ran on that. It's a concept that seems built in to the architecture of the Republican Party. But what Trump is trying to do here is sort of take an idea and take try to take away some of the guardrails of democracy, some of those checks and balances that exist within the system, so they can insert loyalists into the government, so that they can take out federal workers who might not agree with their

policies that they can't get enough through. And in a very divided political time, it's very frustrating, I think, for, yes, for conservatives, also for Democrats, that things are so tight, things are so close, that it's hard to get a lot done without compromise or legislation that can be pushed through in something that's not as efficient as saying, I'm an executive, I'm an all-powerful executive who can push through their agenda with some teeth and do that by taking away, frankly, faith in journalists by saying that law enforcement is out to get you. convinced a significant portion of Americans that these things aren't really as necessary as maybe you thought they were 10, 15, 20 years ago, because they're biased against you and me because of the things that I want done. Franco, part of this is the quote deep state in that Trump would like fewer federal workers or more federal workers that are more loyal to him and his agenda. There's also a view, correct me if I'm wrong, that independent agencies should be more responsive to the White House and the president, that he should have more control over that.

And also that the departments should be more directly responsive to the whims and wills of the president. And when I think of that, I think clearly about the Justice Department, which is part of Trump's deep state that he seems pretty most eager to reform. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a big part of this is curtailing the independence of federal agencies. And this group of insiders feel like some of these independent agencies shouldn't be independent, and they should be working more at the will of the president of the United States. They argue that he was elected. He is the leader of the country, and he's the leader of the United States. They argue that he was elected. He is the leader of the country and he's the leader of the administration. They feel he should have the ability to enact an

agenda. And the Justice Department is one of those examples. I mean, Trump has said very, very clearly on the campaign trail in the same speech that we just played in Iowa, that he plans to overhaul the DOJ. But he's doing it in a way where he wants to overhaul the DOJ, not only put in his people, but put in his people and put in his lawyers so that he can go after his political opponents. I mean, he specifically cited the prosecutors who have launched indictments against him and that he wants to reverse that and use the DOJ to go after those people who have been prosecuting him. I mean, it's pretty dramatic. that they're independent, that the Justice Department is independent from a president, that a president doesn't have influence over it, so that people can have confidence in that body as being fair in the prosecution of the law and these consequences that wind up being meted out, whether it's for somebody who committed a low-level crime or somebody as high up as the

president of the United States. But Trump clearly has been irritated by the fact that the Justice Department at times didn't go along with what he wanted done. Think about January 6th, the aftermath of that, or even before that, where he was really trying to install these fake electors across the country, looking for Justice Department officials to go along with these schemes. And many, if not most of them, rejected that, fought him on it. And he wants to smooth that over and say, I don't need these guys. I want my guys in place so that I can get done what I want to get done and have law enforcement be an arm of weaponization that he can use to boost himself.

You know, the government as it's designed is meant to have a system of checks and balances on the president. But what Trump is articulating is a system of fewer checks and fewer balances on the president. And that is, frankly, a radically different view of how America should work. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about this when we get back. If U.S. representatives were elected proportionally, would it be easier for Congress to get its work done? This is not the moment to suggest that Congress is getting its work done. It's just not. But what if you could vote for one party, your neighbor could vote for another?

And both candidates would have a good chance of getting elected in a multi-member district. A hypothetical look at a different way of distributing power. That's in our latest bonus episode for NPR Politics Plus supporters. And we're back. And part of Trump's objective in a second term would be to change how the federal government works. But his campaign is also focused on policy issues, specifically, Franco, I'm thinking issues like immigration that he's running pretty heavily on right now. Yeah, immigration is a big one. You know, a lot of these things were in the courts for a long time, but they were implemented in the meantime.

But it's also foreign aid. It's the wall. It's withholding funding for Ukraine for something to use for political action. What they want to do in many cases is bypass Congress so that they can kind of push through their agenda without kind of the checks and balances that we were talking about before. Although I would have to note that if Trump were to win a second term, it's also likely that Republicans would have had a good year and you would have more Republicans in Congress. But the checks and balances on Donald Trump in Congress are fewer and fewer by the day. It's hard to imagine in a next Congress, if he were to win, there wouldn't be as much pushback from Capitol Hill because the people that push back in a first term have either lost or aren't running again. And their power is the shrinking lane of the Republican Party. Yeah, I think undoubtedly there's fewer people now in the Republican Party who are willing to take him on. You know, a lot of people, I think, are exhausted.

A lot of people are retired. A lot of people were defeated. And they're seeing what the consequences are of crossing Trump if you are a Republican. It also, you know, you mentioned some of the things that President Trump would want to do would likely be challenged in courts. But also that's a really inefficient way to run a country, too, in real time. Like the judicial system is slow. It doesn't always result in easy and efficient answers for governing. So it just seems the sum total of how aggressively Trump would try to do all these different things in terms of government management and policy implementation and executive order could be kind of chaotic. I mean, his first term had a lot of moments of chaos, too. No, I mean, they, I mean, in his first term,

I mean, they had career officials who would say, hey, that's not legal or that's outside of your executive authority. And they still pushed through and tried to implement some of these things. Some of those were rolled back by the courts. They went through the appeals courts. They went to the Supreme Court. They really, you know, took up a lot of time in the court system. What they want to do now, though, is kind of change it even more and get more Trump loyalist lawyers involved. I think you're going to see this in a much higher degree because that is specifically what they're trying to do in order to test the system and push the system to areas that no other president has gone before.

One of the extraordinary things to me about this moment is how clearly and aggressively they're running on all of these ideas. But how many people who worked in government, who worked in even Trump's first administration, or worked in Congress who are jumping up and down and saying, like, this is a danger. Like, all of this is dangerous. And former Congresswoman Liz Cheney from Wyoming, she spoke to Morning Edition this week. She has a book coming out, but she's out there talking about this very aggressively. There was an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal recently where they suggested that even if

Donald Trump were elected, it wouldn't be that bad because, of course, we have these institutions and we have these traditions and we have the separation of powers and that people could somehow count on that to restrain him. And one of the main messages of my book is, no, you can't. You cannot count on those institutions to restrain him. Domenico, we have this conversation a lot, like, is democracy on the ballot in 2024? And in so many ways it is when you talk about like two candidates that have really different visions of how America should work. Yeah, I mean, I think the election in a lot of ways is about what is America? What does it mean to be American? And what is the vision going forward for what the country is going to be?

And there are some people who really are in favor of Trump's approach because Trump has really waged this campaign against a lot of these institutions. And clearly, the Biden administration feels differently. You know, Biden saw himself as a transitional figure, somebody who could at least put a pause between Trump and whatever comes next. And, you know, I think that it's going to be interesting to see how this campaign is going to be run. Yeah. I mean, the people that left and the people who are angry, the former Trumpers who are raising concerns, those are people who believed in the existing institutions. The people who are involved now who are pushing for Trump, they're the ones who want to change the institutions. I mean, it's significant. I also think it's important to remember, like, you know, there's Donald Trump, there's Joe Biden, there's Liz Cheney, there's sort of the elites of politics. But the fact that Trump is running on, frankly, a more authoritarian, more aggressive executive, there's a lot of Americans who are aligned with him.

I mean, you look at the polls, he's running very competitively. Like, this is not just about him. This is about a significant chunk of this country that believes that, yeah, maybe we do need to start doing things differently. All right. That is it for us today. But I am certain this is not the last word on this. And a note to our listeners, we're going to be in your feeds a little late tomorrow night. There is another Republican primary debate. So we'll be watching so you don't have to. And we'll have something up in your feeds later in the evening. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the Trump campaign.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.