Trump’s Tyranny of Toadies

The scary question is when do we reach the tipping point where Project 2025 has so infested agencies, institutions and courts with MAGA cronies, that our country will be unable to thwart a second January 6-type insurrection? It’s unclear where that fateful line is, but it surely exists.

It was dispiriting to watch Jay Clayton waffle on democracy in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He hopes to be confirmed for director of national intelligence, yet he refused to explicitly say that Joe Biden fairly defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

His inability to fully affirm the peaceful transfer of presidential power is disqualifying and proves him manifestly unfit for the job. It arguably makes Clayton a national security threat too.

President Donald Trump gave a ridiculous prime time speech last week that unconvincingly cast doubt on the integrity of America’s elections. If Trump decides he wants to overturn the results of the upcoming midterms, can we be sure Clayton, with the power that comes with DNI, would uphold the rule of law over the desires of Trump?

Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) rightfully slammed Clayton’s pathetic efforts to appease Trump’s delusional election conspiracies. “You should be embarrassed that you are unable to answer that question forthrightly. You’re sitting there silently, unwilling to answer a fundamental question of fact about the recent history of our democracy, which goes directly to your willingness to speak truth to power.”

Adding to concerns that Trump won’t respect election results was a despicable speech by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. On July 16, he gave remarks at a State Department-hosted international conference in Washington, D.C., titled the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In front of representatives from 60 nations, he grossly mischaracterized left-wing political violence as America’s top threat.

“This is a fatal cancer to civilization, and the greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat.”

Perhaps, inadvertently projecting MAGA’s grand strategy, Miller continued:

“It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering, in order to establish complete and total control, control through psychological and physical and actual terror.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who often tries to project a relatively sane image, eerily echoed Miller’s demonizing rhetoric:

“They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist or Marxist. It’s always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation – an overwhelming need to tear down, to wreck, what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world through violence and through terror. They despise the west because the west is great.”

Rubio added that his political foes are “an encroaching darkness,” “the enemies of civilization,” and pledged, “We will dismantle these networks brick by brick.”

The menacing rhetoric by Miller and Rubio was not about stopping terrorism—it was about potentially justifying it against political adversaries. As The Guardian pointed out, “the focus was solely on crushing leftist violence…The officials did not mention episodes of rightwing attacks, such as the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.”

Only months before we head to the polls, Trump and his henchmen are making a hard sell that elections are rigged—unless they win—and only one group of real Americans can be entrusted with power. They are desperately peddling this poison as Trump’s approval ratings circle the toilet. The president is also terrified that if Democrats win, he will be impeached for his endemic corruption.

I am deeply concerned that if Trump attempts a second coup there may no longer be enough patriots of good character left in government to stop him. Since 2022, Project 2025 has set up a massive job recruiting effort to stock agencies with MAGA bootlickers. They have created a system that has been called a “conservative LinkedIn” to ensure ideological conformity.

The Washington Post reported in May 2024 that The Heritage Foundation’s database “was approaching 10,000 resumes.” Oracle built a secure database to house the personnel files of some twenty thousand potential Administration staffers.

Those aspiring to be on the MAGA gravy train have to toe the line. Zealous Project 2025 investigators are sleuthing to ensure there is no daylight between an applicant and Trump. “You need negative information and blacklists” a person involved in the project told The Washington Post.

The New Yorker reported that Ginni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has assembled lists of “bad people” in the government for Trump to fire or demote. Government officials on the lists were often identified as either pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

The American Accountability Foundation has investigated the personal profiles and social-media posts of federal employees to determine who might lack fealty to Trump. The Center for Renewing America is also involved in this process.

The Conservative Partner Institute (CPI), which was founded by former Tea Party Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is leading much of Project 2025’s dystopian effort. Having raised nearly two hundred million dollars in 2022, C.P.I. had the capacity to spin off a constellation of non-profit groups that serve as career gatekeepers. The financially empowered organization also bought approximately fifty million dollars’ worth of real estate in and around Washington, including multiple properties on Capitol Hill.

One staffing group CPI created was the Washington, DC-based Personnel Policy Operations (PPO). When people like Jay Clayton refuse to answer whether Biden won, it is because nonprofits like PPO fervently enforce Trump’s election denial.

“If those currently holding positions of authority in these organizations don’t think it is feasible that there was election fraud in 2020, they should be removed from their position and replaced with someone serious,” Joe Guy, PPO’s director of development, wrote in a 2024 op-ed in The Federalist.

Troup Hemenway, PPO’s President, added in a Newsweek op-ed, “Time is too short for an administration to waste on self-sabotage and human resources debacles. Seeking to avoid such problems in the future, conservative organizations have now become laser-focused on the staffing challenge.”

PPO is a particularly slimy organization. On the front end it hires shameless apparatchiks to carry out Trump’s dictates. It these cronies act unethically or break the law, CPI funnels money into PPO’s “Courage Under Fire” program to cover their legal costs. PPO is essentially a partisan piggy bank to protect unpatriotic behavior.

The alumni who received such funds include, John Eastman, the attorney who advised Trump on efforts to reject electoral votes, Jeffrey Clark, who sought to have the Justice Department challenge the 2020 election results, Mike Roman, a Trump campaign official involved with alternate-elector efforts, and Peter Navarro, who was convicted of contempt of Congress.

Once these Project 2025 organizations have their handpicked worker bees in place, they do enormous damage to our institutions—like worms eating an apple from the inside out. It often starts with gutting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs—and then leaning on DEI opposition as a crutch not to hire or promote minorities.

A perfect example is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has failed to advance the stellar careers of women and black service members, while also discriminating against transgender troops. The New York Times reported:

As defense secretary, he has promised to install a new promotion system that will be “ruthlessly meritocratic” and “focused squarely” on “warfighting ability.”

In practice, though, his approach has made it harder for Black and female officers to get promoted to senior ranks, even when their records are exemplary.

“When I think about my career in uniform, in almost every instance where there has been poor leadership or people in positions they’re not qualified for, it was based on either the reality or the perception of a ‘diversity hire,’” Hegseth, a former major in the Army National Guard, wrote in his 2024 book “The War on Warriors.”

MAGA goons also control the workforce by eliminating enforcement mechanisms designed to punish abusive employers. For example, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration undercut a major investigation against military contractor BAE Systems, which was accused of systemic racism and sexual harassment:

They walked through the shipyard, where they found sexist and racist graffiti, the investigators said in interviews.

When women refused demands by some managers for sex acts in exchange for overtime pay, managers would retaliate, the investigators said. Their report cited actions such as “lowering performance evaluations, inequitable distribution of overtime hours, job assignments, and retaliatory write-ups.”

The government was zeroing in on a resolution to propose to the company, BAE Systems: to make seven-figure payouts to workers and to adopt reforms — or risk losing its roughly $8 billion in annual federal contracts.

Then, the inquiry was suddenly halted (After Trump was inaugurated).

“I wasn’t even allowed to contact the workers,” said Sam Maiden, who led the investigation of BAE and retired from the government last year. “We were so angry that they wouldn’t get the remedy that should have come to them.”

Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, just launched a sinister plan to cut off hundreds of billions in grants from programs the Trump administration disfavors. This would include agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Transportation Department.

The New Yorker reported:

The funds Vought seeks to control “represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends” and would put the “entire financial partnership between the federal government and the states under political control, without an act of Congress,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, noted in a recent Substack post.

“This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote recently.

“By this guidance, America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station,” Colette Delawalla, who founded and heads the group Stand Up for Science, said in an interview. “The same goes for every type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring.”

The scary question is when do we reach the tipping point where Project 2025 has so infested agencies, institutions and courts with MAGA cronies, that our country will be unable to thwart a second January 6-type insurrection?

It’s unclear where that fateful line is, but it surely exists. What is beyond dispute is that Project 2025 instituted a sophisticated, lavishly funded employment apparatus to get us there. We can only hope Trump is so despised on Election Day, that he no longer has enough public support to indulge his autocratic whims and Project 2025’s worst authoritarian fantasies.

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