Imagine it’s Jan. 20, 2025. Inauguration Day. The president-elect raises his right hand and begins to recite the oath: I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear …
Trump wins again
What will happen to America if Trump wins again?
If Trump installed loyalists at the FBI and Justice Department — picture as the next attorney general Jeffrey Clark, the Justice official who tried to get the department to help overturn the 2020 election — then any lingering federal investigations of Trump could be dropped. An endless series of investigations of Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, Merrick Garland, Brad Raffensperger, Letitia James and other perceived enemies could begin. “This is a guy for whom political revenge is pretty front and center,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “He’s going to come in and use the state to go after his enemies. He has a long list of grievances against people. … He’s going to come in like an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”
Loyalists would lead other departments as well. While in office, Trump futilely tweeted at the Federal Reserve, seeking a monetary policy that would benefit him politically, and compared Chairman Jerome Powell to an “enemy” like China’s Xi Jinping. Powell’s term is up in 2026. If Trump could get a loyalist through the Senate, interest rates could be manipulated to juice the economy ahead of elections, says Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History and the Last Man” and, most recently, “Liberalism and Its Discontents.” Meanwhile, a politicized Bureau of Labor Statistics could lead to monthly jobs reports suddenly becoming suspect. Or how about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Says Fukuyama: “Do you want people who believe in hydroxychloroquine making these decisions?”
He governs without Senate advice and consent.
Democrats hope to retain control of the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. But even if they do, a Trump victory in 2024 presupposes that he will have strong coattails to sweep in down-ballot candidates — and a Trumpified Senate could reasonably be expected to approve his nominees for top jobs in his administration.
What if, however, a few Republicans balk at nominees who are just too beyond the pale? Or what if the Democrats hold a majority? Not a problem. By the end of his first term, Trump had mastered the art of governing without the advice and consent of the Senate. In part he was forced to do so by Democratic obstruction and by the terrible dysfunction of the appointments process — an already damaged corner of our democracy. But Trump, more than any other president in memory, relied on “acting” Cabinet secretaries and unconfirmed agency chiefs who wielded delegated authority. “I sort of like ‘acting,’ ” Trump told reporters in 2019. “It gives me more flexibility.”
It can also create chaos. In the last year of Trump’s term, the Government Accountability Office found that his acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the acting DHS deputy were serving unlawfully, calling into question the legitimacy of their policy decisions. But there’s little to stop a president willing to skirt the rules and run out the clock on his term. It would take both houses of Congress to stand up to him, perhaps wielding the power of the purse as a cudgel, says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on effective government and smooth presidential transitions. And what if a gridlocked Congress failed to check an out-of-control chief executive? Stier told me: “If the president
decides they’re going to install a secretary of defense that isn’t actually confirmed, and Congress isn’t going to try to respond with their powers and try to stop that, I think the reality is that there’s not much that you can do.”
He creates a MAGA civil service.
Installing loyalists at the top of government won’t be enough. As for populating the rank and file with those who echo the former president’s slogan of Make America Great Again, Trump tipped his hand near the end of his term, when he signed an executive order designed to strip as many as tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil service protections. The order created a new category of employees, dubbed Schedule F, targeting those whose jobs arguably include a degree of policymaking. Top officials would be able to fire them almost at will. President Biden rescinded the order shortly after he was inaugurated. If Trump were reelected, he’d reinstate the policy, Axios reported in July.
“They are using the language of good government to justify this, saying that this is the only way that you can discipline poorly performing workers,” Fukuyama says. “But obviously their real intention is to basically politicize the whole civil service. … Because Trump personalizes everything to such an extent, he’s going to be super looking out for revenge and therefore going after, for example, anybody that denied that he won the 2020 election. And this is going to go down to a really low, granular level of American government.”
The approach would restore a patronage system that hasn’t existed in the United States since reforms were enacted in the late 19th century, says Stier. “It is fundamentally this notion that the president should be able to decide, not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of political or personal interest, a larger segment of the workforce,” he says.
The country already has far more politically appointed civil servants — some 4,000 — than most, or all, liberal democracies, Stier explains. We need fewer consigned to that status, not more, he says. As an example of the potential impact, Stier notes that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget reportedly identified nearly 90 percent of its employees as fitting into the new category. The OMB is the nerve center of the government, making vital decisions on budgets and regulations for all the agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Internal Revenue Service to the Defense Department to the intelligence community. Political actors from OMB could reach into all the scattered engine rooms of democracy; other corners of the government could undergo similar transformations. (A Democratic bill to block initiatives like Schedule F is currently before the Senate. But even if it passes, it could always be repealed.)
Rollins, of the America First Policy Institute, rejects the charge that a measure such as Schedule F would harm government. “It’s not really about us-versus-them, or ‘they’re the bad guys in the federal government and we’re the good guys going to put in some draconian new measures that allow us to come in and clear everybody out,’ ” she says. “But what I do believe we have to put in place is a system where those who agree with the agenda of more freedom and less government have people working in those positions that also align and agree with that. It’s okay if you don’t, but maybe you should not necessarily be part of a policymaking process.”
Fukuyama maintains it would mark the death knell of expertise in the U.S. government. “It’s ridiculous when you can’t run a modern government without expertise,” he says, “and they want to try to undo that system because of these right-wing ideas about the ‘deep state’ and the need to root it out.”
