I keep telling people that 2020 was a failed dry run for permanent authoritarian GOP government in America and basically all of Trump's orcs and goblins are ready to make sure we lose it all next time. When Steve Bannon speaks, every liberal, Democrat, progressive and human being better 100% pay attention, because like the megalomaniacal supervillain he is, he's giving his evil plan away ahead of time.
Scores of former Trump political appointees gathered at a GOP social club Wednesday night to hear Steve Bannon detail how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure government.
"If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," Bannon said in a telephone interview with NBC News. "I gave 'em fire and brimstone."
Bannon, who ran former President Donald Trump's first campaign and later worked as a top adviser in the White House, said that Trump's agenda was delayed by the challenges of quickly filling roughly 4,000 slots for presidential appointees at federal agencies and the steep learning curve for political officials who were new to Washington.
He is not alone in that view. His appearance at the Capitol Hill Club came at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which was formed to create a resource for future GOP officials tapped to fill federal jobs.
"There are so many statutes and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first come in," said Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Broadcasting Board of Governors official who is one of the organizers of the group. "This is an organization that has a very narrow, clear and much-needed purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not just for the Republican Party but for the country."
Trump often railed publicly about career civil servants and Obama administration political appointee holdovers whom he saw as obstacles to his agenda, referring to them collectively as the "deep state."
Bannon said he wants to see pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies when the next Republican president takes office. For the most part, that means the tiers of presidential appointees whose postings don't require Senate confirmation.
"We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies," he said, referring to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan and describing a 2024 electoral victory as a "second term."
Bannon's happy to tip his hand, because he knows he's going to win. He knows he's going to have his own Deep State ready to go in 2024, and that will be the end of democracy around here in your lifetime. He doesn't need Trump, he'll execute this plan with whoever gets he 2024 nod.
We got lucky once. We have to push these barbarians back again and again to survive.
However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse.
The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.
In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand.
Mr. Eastman’s unusual visit was reported at the time, but a new book by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides the details of his proposed six-point plan. It involved Mr. Pence rejecting dozens of already certified electoral votes representing tens of millions of legally cast ballots, thus allowing Congress to install Mr. Trump in a second term.
Mr. Pence ultimately refused to sign on, earning him the rage of Mr. Trump and chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by the rioters, who erected a makeshift gallows on the National Mall.
The fact that the scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed is cold comfort. Mr. Trump remains the most popular Republican in the country; barring a serious health issue, the odds are good that he will be the party’s nominee for president in 2024. He also remains as incapable of accepting defeat as he has ever been, which means the country faces a renewed risk of electoral subversion by Mr. Trump and his supporters — only next time they will have learned from their mistakes.
That leaves all Americans who care about preserving this Republic with a clear task: Reform the federal election law at the heart of Mr. Eastman’s twisted ploy, and make it as hard as possible for anyone to pull a stunt like that again.
Democrats have to reform the Electoral Count Act, among other voting rights reforms, or it's over. The GOP is openly telling us they will use the full power of the US government as a weapon against dissent. We have to make sure this happens or we're all going to burn.
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