A Blueprint To A Pogrom.

They are already laying out a map to guide the overthrow of the democracy, and it is not pretty.

Trump’s 2025 authoritarian playbook and what it means for democracy

PBS OnPoint

By Paige Sutherland and Meghna Chakrabarti

February 26, 2024

Donald Trump has openly admired authoritarians around the world.

Now, he’s pledging to rule like one.

Today, On Point: An examination of the promises, powers and plans of a second Trump presidency.

[…]

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Donald Trump on the presidential campaign for this election year. Now, as you heard, Trump says that if he wins, he will not be a dictator, except for day one. But how many leaders can history truly provide who've been satisfied with being dictator for a day? Perhaps the word dictator though is too distracting to understand Trump's true and stated intent.

Authoritarian autocracy would be closer to the truth. A leader claiming absolute rule without caring for others opinions or established systems of government. Donald Trump, in other words, sounds very much like another ruler he's expressed deep admiration for, Hungary's Viktor Orbán, who now leads a country that, according to several Hungarian and political science experts we've spoken to, looks like a democracy, but only if you squint very hard.

Our guests today have compiled, in detail, Donald Trump's statements, promises, and plans of his supporters in packs and think tanks. And they've put their findings together in a new publication called The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025, how an authoritarian president will dismantle our democracy and what we can do to protect it.

Aisha Woodward is one of the authors of this new publication. She's the head of constraining executive power team and policy strategist at Protect Democracy, a non-profit, non-partisan, anti-authoritarian group. Aisha, welcome.

[…]

CHAKRABARTI: Let's take a moment to listen to Donald Trump from March 21st of just last year, when he's talking about the plans he has in mind, not just him, but him and he and his supporters to reshape the federal government if elected.

TRUMP: Here's my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all.

And corruption, it is. First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the president's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.

CHAKRABARTI: Aisha, Trump is very, in a very savvy way using some trigger words there for his supporters. Deep state corruption, rogue bureaucrats.

But what exactly is he talking about there?

WOODWARD: So he's referring very specifically to an executive order that he did release in October of 2020 that would have created a new Schedule F within the Federal Civil Service. Now, the Federal Civil Service is over 2 million nonpartisan expert personnel who carry out the business of government every day.

And in Trump's executive order, he aimed to reclassify tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of those folks into positions in which they could be fired based on their loyalty to him or his agenda. So going back to something Genevieve said a moment ago, part of one of our concerns is that it's not just a promise without much substance.

This is work he tried to start in his first administration. Now he ran out of time before the end of the year to really make headway on this and Joe Biden rescinded this executive order right away in January of 2021. But to go back to this idea of plans, he and some of the infrastructure and ecosystem that is building up around him, such as the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, are putting in place plans to be able to resuscitate that executive order and push it out the door as soon as day one.

And what this would mean is that instead of having people hired based on their merit and expertise and experience in serving the public, people would be hired based on their loyalty to the Trump agenda, and in fact, the Heritage Foundation is running a kind of personnel recruitment effort right now where the chief criteria for being put in the mix for a potential appointment in a second Trump administration is your political ideology and commitment to the Trump agenda.

Let switch to what Project 2025 is (Take this with a grain of salt because it is from Wikipedia),

Project 2025 (officially the Presidential Transition Project) is a collection of policy proposals to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to Washington, D.C., to replace existing federal civil service workers it characterizes as the "deep state", to further the objectives of the next Republican president. Although participants in the project cannot promote a specific presidential candidate, many have close ties to Donald Trump and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign. The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power over the executive branch — upon inauguration.

The development of the plan is led by the The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, in collaboration with over 100 partners including Turning Point USA led by Charlie Kirk; the Conservative Partnership Institute including former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as senior partner; the Center for Renewing America led by former Trump-appointee Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought; and America First Legal led by former Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller.

A refresher:  The Heritage Foundation is the Federalist organization that picked Trump judges for him like the judge in Texas, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

This is really bad stuff they want to do, 

PROJECT 2025: HOW TRUMP LOYALISTS AND RIGHT-WING LEADERS ARE PAVING A FAST ROAD TO FASCISM

Religious Dispatch

BY PETER MONTGOMERY

MARCH 15, 2024

Former President Donald Trump, nursing personal grievances against “deep state” officials and White House staff who thwarted his plans to stay in power after his 2020 defeat, has made it clear that his second term would be far more dangerous to American democracy than his first.

The presumptive GOP nominee’s 2024 campaign-trail bombast—including promising to be a dictator on “day one,” to “close the border,” and “drill, drill, drill”[1]*—is reminiscent of his 2016 campaign’s authoritarian rhetoric. He has also adopted the rhetoric of fascists in denouncing his political opponents as “vermin”[2] and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”[3] At right-wing events and on the campaign trail, he rallies his followers with promises of revenge against elites who ruined their shared dreams of a second Trump term. “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he thunders. “I am your retribution.”[4] He has vowed to “obliterate the deep state,”[5] throw off “the sick political class that hates our country,” and “come down hard” on media outlets critical of him.[6] In the words of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor and author of a book about strongmen in modern history,[7] “He wants to convert American democracy into some kind of autocracy.”[8]

Project 2025, an unprecedented collaboration[9] among former Trump officials and the Right’s legal and political infrastructure, would enable Trump to make good on his threats, were he to return to power. This should be a cause for alarm. While some commentators dismissed his 2016 campaign statements as hyperbole,[10] as President, Trump willingly cast the Constitution aside and mobilized his followers to political violence to keep him in power after losing the 2020 election.

A plan to ‘Take the reins of government’

Project 2025 was launched in 2022 by the Heritage Foundation,[11] a longtime marketer of conservative ideology that moved sharply into the MAGA camp in the Trump era.[12] That June, Heritage announced[13] it had recruited nearly two dozen organizations to “position the movement to take the reins of government”[14] under the next president, following a presumed Republican victory. By the end of 2023, the Project 2025 advisory board[15] had grown to nearly 90 groups[16] representing Trump loyalists, book banners, Christian nationalists, anti-abortion activists, opponents of LGBTQ rights, vote suppressors, and anti-regulation corporate interests. Participating groups include longtime powerhouses like the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council and the Religious Right legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom. They are accompanied by newer advocacy groups created by former Trump administration officials, including the Center for Renewing America and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, which alone took in $44 million in 2022.[17]

He believes that as president that he can do anything he wants to do,

Conservative legal advocates have long pushed a “unitary executive theory” of presidential power, which holds that presidents have virtually dictatorial powers over the executive branch of government.[28] Whether he understands the theory deeply or not, Trump instinctively embraces its core idea. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he told cheering supporters in 2019.[29] Project 2025 even sets the stage for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy U.S. military forces against American citizens who protest his actions, as some far-right leaders urged in 2020.[30] It would, as University of Oregon scholar Joseph Lowndes has noted, eliminate “barriers that thwarted many of his authoritarian impulses.”[31]

You know that there is a case before the Supreme Court about this, that he is above the law.

Central to Project 2025’s strategy for fighting that war is recruiting, vetting, and training thousands of MAGA-minded ideological warriors. In Dans’ words, they are “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army: aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.”[42]

The group’s database of potential political appointees includes more than 4,000 names, a start on Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ stated goal of 20,000 vetted true believers ready for a Republican transition team to draw on so that they can “begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”[43] The vetting process, Axios reported, “drills down more on political philosophy than on experience, education or other credentials.”[44]

You know who else does this? Dictators. People like Hitler, Putin, Xi, and Viktor Orban (Who Trump praises as great ‘leader of Turkey’) 

This is scary stuff and what is scarier stuff is that all of his cult followers eat this stuff up!

When Someone Shows You Who They Are, Believe Them 

Maya Angelou

*****

*The references are from the original article, you can read them there.