Commentary
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that former President Trump, like any potential president for that matter, would be thinking about the make-up of his administration.
And it shouldn’t surprise you that the leftist media is already critical of the transition plan and began panning the process devised more than a year ago by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
On April 20, 2023, New York Times political reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, neither a fan of Trump, authored a piece attacking the establishment of a personnel database they wrote was “akin to a right-wing Linkedin.” As a reporter for AXIOS, Swan won an Emmy for his 2020 interview with Trump, while Haberman was part of the TIMES team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for its focus on the Russian collusion that was proved later to be a hoax.
On January 21, 2024, Lulu Garcia Navarro wrote an essay, Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism,’ for The New York Times Magazine.
The following month, Carlos Lozada wrote, What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term, in the February 29, 2024 edition of The New York Times.
More on the plan later
Earlier this month, in a piece written for the Associated Press, Michelle L. Price chose to write about former Trump officials not interested in returning but fails to mention that Trump probably doesn’t want them back anyway.
She reports that former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has called Trump a “threat to democracy,” while former national security advisor John Bolton has declared him “unfit to be president,” and former Vice President Mike Pence cites “profound differences.” “Yet, the critics remain a distinct minority,” Price adds.
While I can name at least a dozen of his top performers who I believe would be willing to return to the Trump America First team, former New Jersey Governor, failed presidential candidate, and self-appointed Trump trasher, Chris Christie, told the audience of Hugh Hewitt’s talk show, “He’s not going to be able to find anybody good to work for him.”
During a December 2023 appearance, Christie told Hewitt that If Donald Trump is elected in 2024, he would expect the cabinet to be populated with “deranged sycophants.”
Biden Responds
Fully aware of Trump’s view of the Washington Swamp, especially those in the highly questionable Department of Justice offices of the attorney general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Biden has announced a plan to protect bureaucrats from being fired by a potential second Trump administration.
Kiran Ahuja, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, has finalized a rule that protects the 2.2 million federal employees (yes, 2.2 million) of the civil service by preventing the removal of their status and protections involuntarily, stating that “federal employees should be hired based on their skills and expertise, not on political considerations.”
The Plan: Project 2025
Having been a member of the Heritage Foundation for the past 15 years, I am pleased of its presidential transition effort, Project 2025, with its aim to reduce and reshape government.
As I have above, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, notes that “Leftist mainstream media has been hand-wringing pieces about Project 2025,“ pointing out that they “should be worried about the organized, systematic approach we’ve taken toward dismantling the deep state.”
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next administration,” the Project 2025 Team announced.
The project is the effort of a broad coalition of conservative organizations that have come together to ensure a successful administration begins in January 2025. With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we can take back our government.
Two former members of Trump’s first administration, Paul Dans, chief of staff in the Office of Personnel Management, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to the president and associate director of Presidential Personnel, are heading up the project for Heritage.
You might say Project 2025 is an offspring of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” an 887-page book published last year, edited incidentally by Dans. As New York Times’ Lozada noted, this “is not the kind of book meant to be read straight through from beginning to end.
Success will depend largely on the goal of establishing a list of up to 20,000 potential administration recruits from the project’s database, described akin to a right-wing LinkedIn. Trump himself has gone on record about the terrible staffing on his first team. I have a feeling he already has a database of his own ready to make job offers.
PLEASE NOTE: In my April 14, 2024 blog, I published an illustration of a young couple sitting on a porch and I stated in the caption that the source was unknown. A kind subscriber informed me that the illustration was painted by James Griffin, however, whoever added the caption over the illustration still remains unknown.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
