Here he goes again. Again. Trump did it. He’s in it to win it [1]. Or rather ‘win’ [2] it. Again. In 2024. Surprise.
But while Trump’s announcement was barely a surprise, it’s worth keeping in mind that a second Trump presidency really would be full of surprises. This wouldn’t be a boring sequel. Trump would be WAY crazier this time around. He’s had practice. And so has the whole MAGA movement.
But there’s another reason we can fully expect a second Trump term to be absolutely bonkers beyond anything we saw in the first administrations: they’re telling us about their plans to be absolutely bonkers right out of the gate this time and spending tens of millions of dollars setting up a constellation of new right-wing entities to execute this bonkers plan. No fumbling around. They’re going to do a ‘clean sweep’ this time immediately. Cleansing the federal government of non-MAGA loyalists.
It’s not a secret plot to purge the federal government of its career staffers and replace them with partisan hacks. It was a secret when then-President Trump set the plot in motion 13 days before the 2020 election with an executive order. The “Schedule F” executive order plot — centered around a bureaucratic loophole discovered in January of 2019 by an obscure Trump administration official on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — opened the floodgates. And while the mass firings never actually took place in the final months of the Trump administration, those floodgates remain open along with the plot. That’s the explosive revelation from a pair of massive articles put out by Axios back in July: The Schedule F plot continues. The Trump administration isn’t wasting any time next time. A mass purge of the federal government will be one of the first moves of a second Trump administration. It’s not a secret this time. Quite the stop opposite. The plan has evolved. Schedule F is going to something Trump will be campaigning on during his presumed 2024 run. At least that’s what a number of figures involved with the ongoing plot openly talked about with Axios. Donald Trump is planning on making Schedule F a campaign theme. All part of his war on the Deep State. A war where those who have yet to pass a Trumpian loyalty test are deemed enemies of the Trumpian state.
Yes. there’s a loyalty test component to this plot. It was already implemented by the Trump administration but it sounds like the plan is for a much wider implementation. Basically, the more you indicate your dislike for the Deep State, the likelier you are to get the job. Professional qualifications are beside the point. After the planed mass firings across the federal government there’s going to be a lot of positions to fill an that point. And a lot of loyalty tests to administer. And it will all be portrayed as Trump simply keeping his campaign promises.
Or maybe not Trump’s campaign promises. The Schedule F plot may have started with the Trump administration but it’s not a Trump team project. At least not exclusively. This is a group effort. A ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ group effort. In other words, a Council for National Policy (CNP) effort. As we should expect by this point. And it’s not contingent on Donald Trump’s reelection. Schedule F is the plan for any future Republican administration.
There’s already an army right-wing lawyers working on it. Yes, this army of operatives has a distinctly Trumpian flair. They aren’t hiding that aspect of the Schedule F plot at this point. Trump is planning on campaigning on it after all. But it has a far more CNP-ish flair and that CNP flair means this plot is going to have a lot of momentum behind it whether Trump runs again or not. Schedule F is the right-wing mega-donor’s project too and they’re not going anywhere whether of not Trump loses the primary and/or goes to jail. That CNP hand in the Schedule F plot is what we’re going to be covering in this post.
Oh, and it turns out Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug — one of the central figures in the Dark Enlightenment — has been advocating a plot that starts with a candidate campaigning on their plans to implement the ‘Schedule F’ plot and then proceed with an aggressive purge of leftists and non-loyalists out of the government. He’s pretty confident this will all be quite popular as people are sick of politics and want someone who can get things done. And as we’re going to see, Yarvin’s ideas have been getting eerily ‘respectable’ in conservative circles in recent years. For example, during an interview on a conservative podcast last fall, JD Vance — who was is now a newly elected Senator for Ohio — advocated Trump implement Schedule F and just ignore the courts if they protest. Vance credited Yarvin with the idea. That’s what’s happening in high level conservative circles in the post-insurrection environment. They’re planning like a ‘Jan 6’ of mass federal firings right out of the gate next time. And the Dark Enlightenment’s muse is guiding this.
It’s a large cast of characters. But all working as part of a coordinated effort. And as should be entirely unsurprising by now, this effort is bristling with Council for National Policy (CNP) members and entities. Yep, the same network of theocratic powerbrokers who helped bring us the January 6 Capitol insurrection are working on bringing us the ‘Jan 6’ of mass ideological purges of the federal workforce [3]. But this ‘Jan 6’ will come right at the beginning of the next president’s terms instead of the very end. And pave the way for more insanity to come. And maybe outright fascism. Or a monarchy, if Yarvin gets his way [4]. However it plays out, it’s the death of what’s left of the US’s democratic institutions.
Figures involved in the Schedule F plot include:
* James Sherk: The aspiring ideologue on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council who spent more than a decade working on public policy at the Heritage Foundation, James Sherk was looking for a way to fire career officials he felt were blocking Trump’s agenda back in January of 2019 when he stumbled upon some historical fun facts about federal labor laws that became the kernel of the Schedule F plot. Sherk found his loophole in the Pendleton Act of 1883, a law ironically passed to break the system of political patronage that existed at the time. The act was a historic start to the vision of a professional class of federal bureaucrats who served regardless of administration and developed expertise in the ways of government. Sherk’s loophole was in Section 7511 of Title 5 of US Code, which exempts certain employees from the Pendleton Act’s firing protects. The exempt employees were those “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.” Sherk’s ‘aha’ moment was to realize that this language arguably exempted a large number of career federal employees. It was just a matter of declaring them to be working in a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” capacity and therefore exempt from firing privileges. Sherk shared his discovery with the White House Counsel’s Office. Within months the plan was one of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets.
* John McEntee: Trump’s bodyman before becoming the very MAGA head of Trump’s personnel office who ‘Red-pilled’ the office with fellow Trump loyalists, John McEntee was an obvious choice for a participant in a secret plot to carry out a purge of the federal work force. The Schedule F plot was supposed to be a plan McEntee implemented soon after Trump’s reelection. By late 2020, McEntee and Mark Meadows — reportedly working hand in glove — had org charts for the second term. Along with a ‘fire list’ that could use the claimed powers of the Schedule F plot to carry out. McEntee is reportedly continuing his oversight role on the ongoing plot through the newly formed Personnel Policy Organization (PPO).
* Andrew Kloster: A senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation, Andrew Kloster was recruited by McEntee to the office of personnel where he worked with McEntee’s deputy, James Bacon, to develop a questionnaire for federal employees. A questionnaire filled with the kind of questions that made clear that loyalty to Trump and the MAGA agenda is the primary qualification. Along with a sense that one had been personally wronged by “the system”. The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better.
* Kash Patel: As we’ve seen, Kash Patel was a central figure in the plots to keep Trump in office. A central figure who was being actively elevated inside the national security bureaucracy after Trump lost: First, Trump replaces Mark Esper with counterterrorism chief Chris Miller as Defense Secretary on November 9, 2020, days after the election [5]. But it was Trump’s decision to appoint partisan hack Kash Patel as Miller’s Chief of Staff that really raised eyebrows. Then, shortly after Trump’s pardoning of Michael Flynn on November 20, both Flynn and Sidney Powell contacted the then-deputy undersecretary of intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick — who had also just been appointed to that position by Trump days after the election — imploring Trump to take extreme measures involving the election. Flynn wanted him to issue orders to have the military seize ballots. But it’s the request made by Powell to Cohen-Watnick shortly after Flynn’s call that is so interesting here: Powell wanted Cohen-Watnick to order some sort of military special forces raid to capture Gina Haspel who had allegedly been injured during a secret mission in Germany to destroy the servers used to steal the election from Trump [6]. It was two week later that Trump literally ordered the replacement of Haspel’s deputy director with Patel, only to be dissuaded at the very last minute, after the order had already been given. And that move to make Patel the acting deputy director of the CIA appears to have been part of a move that could have seen Patel replace Haspel herself as the head of the CIA [7]. To top it all, Kash Patel’s text messages on his government phone during the post-election period around Jan 6 were among the texts messages that ended up lost during the botched phone archiving fiasco that ended up resulting in lost Secret Service texts too [8]. Kash Patel was a key figure in the Trump administration’s plot to steal the election. And as we’re going to see, Patel has been telling conservative audiences to expect a massive Schedule F purge when Trump retakes the White House in 2025. Trump will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI. According to Axios’s sources, if Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director. And if not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House. Patel is now reportedly working with the CRA on it’s ongoing Schedule F work.
* Mark Poaletta: A close family friend of Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Mark Poaletta has been joining Kash Patel in informing conservative audiences about the plans to implement Schedule F as soon as possible.
* Stephen Miller: Trump’s senior advisor, Miller’s AFLF — formed months after he left the Trump administration in 2021 — is reportedly generating lists of potential individuals filled with a “MAGA” fervor who can fill general counsel jobs across the government.
* Jeffrey Clark: Of all the figures involved with the January 6 Capitol insurrection plot, few were more eager than Jeffrey Clark, then a Trump appointee in the Department of Justice. Recall how Clark tried to get his boss fired at the DOJ so he could take their place and block the certification of the electoral vote [9]. He was ready and willing to do it, And is seen as a top contender for Attorney General should Trump win re-election. Clark proved his loyalty and a willingness to do whatever it takes. Clark is reportedly now working with the CRA on its ongoing Schedule F work.
Two other figures who were deeply involved in the plotting leading up to Jan 6 and then jumped over to the CPI were Cleta Mitchell and Mark Meadows. And while they don’t show up in the reporting as being directly involved with ongoing Schedule F plotting, their roles at the CPI suggest they will at least have some sort of behind the scenes role given the CPI’s focus on this project:
* Cleta Mitchell: A Republican lawyer who has long operated as one of the GOP’s long-standing go-to conservative for justifying the worst kind of gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics [10]. Recall how Mitchell was sitting in on the now notorious Jan 2, 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensburger demanding that they “find” the votes he needed to win the state, resulting in Mitchell’s law firm effectively kicking her out of the firm [11]. Mitchell’s involvement in overturning the 2020 election arguably goes back to August of 2019, when she co-chaired a high-level working group that ended up advocating for radical reading of the constitution that would enable state legislatures to override the popular vote [12]. After the election, Mitchell joined the Conservative Policy Institute (CPI) in March of 2021 to lead the organization’s ‘election integrity’ efforts [13]. And while Mitchell herself is reportedly going to be focused on the CPI’s ‘election integrity’ efforts (making false voter fraud claims), the CPI is playing a central role in the Schedule F efforts and it’s hard to imagine she’s not going to be involved that key CPI focus.
* Mark Meadows: As Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows was operating at the heart of the post-election efforts to overturn the 2020 election inside the Trump White House. Recall how Meadows was charged with contempt of congress back in December of 2021 over his refusal to answer congressional investigators’ questions, citing executive privilege [3]. And while the Department of Justice did ultimately decide to not prosecute Meadows on those contempt charges [14], that doesn’t mean Meadows isn’t an active figure of interest in the ongoing investigation. In fact, in mid-September, Meadows ended up handing over to the DOJ the same documents he previously gave to the congressional Jan 6 investigation as part of the DOJ’s own subpoena of Meadows [15]. Meadows joined the CPI on January 27, 2021 [16], one week after the dark end of the Trump administration. The CPI was the ‘first refuge of the scoundrel’ in this case.
The plot also involves a number of CNP organizations, some now familiar for their role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election:
* The Conservative Policy Institute (CPI): The Conservative Policy Institute hired CNP-member Cleta Mitchell in March of 2021, where she proceeded to help lead the creation of the next generation of the CNP’s ‘election integrity’ efforts centered around amplifying the now mainstream conservative claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud [3]. The CPI was keeping the Jan 6 torch alight. And as we’re going to see, the CPI is keeping the Schedule F torch alight too. It is deeply involved with Schedule F project. And much like how the CPI spawned Mitchell’s ‘Election Integrity Network’ to execute those ‘election integrity’ efforts, we find the CPI ultimately spawned in 2021 many of the other entities involved with Schedule F too. Specifically, the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), and American Moment. 2021 was also the year Trump himself blessed the CPI in a fundraising letter as “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” The CPI’s fundraising exploded to $20 million with large contributions from the conservative mega-donor networks.
* The Center for Renewing America (CRA): Founded by Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought — but really one of the CPI’s many spinoffs — the Center for Renewing America (CRA) appears to be dedicated to waging culture wars. But the CRA has another major project: Schedule F. It’s no surprise. As Trump’s final OMB director, Vought was the one agency head to put Schedule F into effect in the waning months of the Trump administration. The mass firings never materialized, but only because there wasn’t a second Trump administration. Vought proposed reassigning 88% of the agency workforce as Schedule F employees. Note that Russ Vought’s Wife, Mary Vought, shows up on the leaked CNP member list as an ‘assumed member’ [17]. So whether or not she’s actually a member, she apparently works so closely with the CNP that everyone just assumes she’s one. Other CRA senior fellows involved with the Schedule F efforts include Jeffrey Clark, Kash Patel, Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Paoletta. Jeffrey Clark landed a position at the CRA after leaving the Trump administration and is working on Schedule F efforts.
* The America First Policy Institute (AFPI): Another “America First” branded Trumpian entity, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is already involved with the GOP’s various ‘election integrity’ efforts. The AFPI, similarly, has its own Center for Election Integrity chaired by CNP member Kenneth Blackwell [18]. The AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins and is filled with former Trump staffers. Michael Rigas — who ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — was chosen to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Trump’s PAC gave the group $1 million in June 2021.
* The America First Legal Foundation (AFLF): Founded by senior advisor Trump Stephen Miller months after Trump left office (but actually another CPI spinoff), the role the AFLF appears to playing in the Schedule F effort is focused on identifying figures who can fill general counsel jobs across the government. Specifically, general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s agenda.
* American Moment: Another CPI spinoff, American Moment was founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas. And yes, Sharma is a reported member of the CNP [17]. American Moment is dedicated to the idea of ‘restaffing the government’. Ohio Senator-elect JD Vance serves on its board. Dozens of informal talent scouts teams have been sent out to college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.” — looking for potential candidates to fill those government slots after the Schedule F mass firings.
* The Personnel Policy Organization (PPO): A ‘nonprofit’ led by John McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway and staffed with other former members of Trump’s OPM under McEntee, the PPO started by John McEntee is reportedly playing a leading role in the vetting of lists of potential hires. It doesn’t sound like the PPO is going to be generating lists of potential hires on its own but instead will be playing a ‘quality control’ role in the vetting of lists generated by other groups working on the Schedule F effort. In other words, John McEntee is still leading the Schedule F efforts but it’s a more indirect leading role now.
* The Heritage Foundation: The long-standing icon of the Conservative ‘establishment’, the Heritage Foundation has moved in a decided ‘America First’ direction in recent years, even more so under the new leadership of CNP-member Kevin Roberts. Recall how Roberts is also a member of the “National Association of Scholars” (NAS) and the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) [19]. Also recall how the NAS and Roberts have been working on the “American Birthright” school curriculum project that is filled with CNP members [20]. Finally, recall how the TPPF was found to be running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election in coordination with the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection [21]. Plus, the Heritage Foundation was a “meeting sponsor” of CNP’s 2022 annual conference [22]. CNP-member Kevin Roberts appears to be committed to keeping the Heritage Foundation closely aligned with the Trump agenda. And that includes its ongoing efforts to help fill the staffing lists of whichever Republican administration is next occupying the White House. While the Heritage Foundation’s staffing project isn’t formally part of the ongoing Trump-aligned Schedule F planning efforts, it’s clearly coordinating with the overall effort. Because of course it is. The Heritage Foundation isn’t the type of entity that’s going to pass up the enormous opportunity to influence a mass purging of the federal workforce. As we’re going to see, Andrew Kloster, a senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation, was a key figure in the Trump White House’s Schedule F planning.
These are just some of the figures involved with a plot that was put into effect and poised to explode had Trump remained in office. He tried to stay in office. Boy did he try. And boy did he have help. Extensive Council for National Policy help. One CNP member after another [2]. The January 6 Capitol insurrection was as much a CNP operation as it was a Trump-world scheme. The Schedule F plot is no different. It’s one Trump world figure after another and one CNP figure after another helping to birth the plot and keep it alive and ready to put into action when the next Republican administration comes into office. It’s that story of an ongoing Trump-world/CNP plot that we’re going to cover in this post. A plot birthed in secret in that Trump administration, partially put into effect in Trump’s final months, and continuing to evolve today in preparation for a Schedule F mass firing blitzkrieg right out of the gates at the beginning of the next Republican administration.
Here’s a quick review of the articles we’re going to be reviewing in this post:
* July 22, 2022 [23]: A radical plan for Trump’s second term [24]
The first of Jonathan Swan’s pair of giant Axios exposés on the Schedule F plot, the piece lays out the origins of the plot and the key figures involved. And as makes clear, while the groups behind the Schedule F effort clearly have an “America First” MAGA orientation, this is far from a MAGA-exclusive movement with the CNP’s fingerprints all over it. And that broader conservative movement’s participation in the effort — ongoing participation — underscore how the Schedule F plot isn’t just the plan for the next Trump administration. It’s the plan for the next Republican president, whoever that ends up being. Three groups appear to be leading that ongoing effort: the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). Other groups involved include the Heritage Foundation and Stephen Miller’s AFLF, which will both be involved with the generation of candidate lists, and American Moment, which will be focusing on finding conservative job candidates on campuses across America. Expect the incoming army of loyalists to be a little wet behind the ears. And then there’s John McEntee’s PPO, which will be conducting quality control on those lists. It’s sprawling multi-institution effort but the PPO will ensure it’s not too sprawling.
* July 23, 2022 [25]: Trump’s revenge [26]
As Jonathan Swan’s giant follow up piece on the Schedule F plot makes clear, while the ongoing planning around Schedule F is being carried out in a manner that could be put into action for whichever Republican next finds their way into the White House, there’s going to be another dimension to Schedule F’s rollout should that next Republican be Donald Trump. A dimension of seething revenge against Trump’s list of enemies. Which is obviously a very long list. Much revenge is called for. So much revenge. Schedule F is going to need an army of loyal people ready to not just fill posts but also loyal people willing to fire all the current employees in the first place. It was in early 2020, shortly after his impeachment acquittal in the Senate, when Trump made the stunning decision to hire McEntee — his former bodyman who was fired in 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly — to lead the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. And serving up revenge against Trump’s institutional enemies, real and perceived, was exactly what Trump hired him to do. As the article also describes, the Schedule F plot was already almost a year old by that point. It was January of 2019 when James Sherk — a former Heritage Foundation ideologue working on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — found the legal loophole he and many others in the Trump had long been looking for: a bureaucratic loophole that would allow the administration to fire federal career employees. In particular those career employees who refuse to go along with the MAGA agenda, damn the law and regulations. Trump wanted to fill the federal bureaucracy with an army of loyal MAGA diehards and after Sherk provided him with the legal tools he needed to pull it off he picked a favorite bodyman to make it happen. Trump wanted a revenge purge after his impeachment trial and Schedule F was the weapon of choice. Which is exactly what McEntee did, hiring figures like Andrew Kloster who went on to develop a questionnaire to vet government employees for their ‘MAGA’ attitude. Schedule F became a top administration secret before Trump signed it into effect on Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election. It doesn’t sound like many agency heads took Trump’s Schedule F order seriously, with one noteable exception: Russ Vought, who was then the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director before moving on to found the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which is helping to carry on the Schedule F work into 2025. And that’s really the take-home message of this important piece: Schedule F may have started as a Trump revenge plot, but it’s going to be ready for any Republican administration, Trump or not.
* July 10, 2022 [27]: Conservative Partnership Institute: The Trump-aligned $19.7M Institution Creating “America First” Political Infrastructure [28]:
An important report by Documented.net covering two major new developments at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI): 1. An explosion of mega-donor donations to the CPI, including an highly unusual $1 million from Trump’s notoriously stingy Save America PAC. And 2. The large number of MAGA-oriented CPI spinoff groups that have already been created. Eight new groups launched in 2021, including a number of groups involved with the ongoing Schedule F plot. Groups like Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America (CRA), Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), and Saurabh Sharma’s American Moment. The CNP’s CPI was having a banner year, and much of that was in preparation for a big Schedule F surprise in 2025.
* June 24, 2022 [29]: How Mark Meadows’ nonprofit benefited from Trump’s ‘Big Ripoff’ [30]
This report piece by Facing South puts that $1 million donation to the CPI by Trump’s Save America PAC and the eight new spinoff CPI groups in an important context: The nearly $20 million the CPI brought in in 2021 was fueled by Trump’s personal endorsement [31] in a fundraising letter, in which he said CPI is “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” Trump is personally giving the CPI — a thoroughly CNP-dominated entity — the “American First” patina, and it resulted in a flood of mega-donor cash dedicated to building the infrastructure. Which will presumably be infrastructure dedicated to purging the government and stacking it with loyalists. But also infrastructure like the Election Integrity Institute, one of the CPI’s 2021 spinoffs founded by CNP member — and central Jan 6 figure — Cleta Mitchell. And with both Mitchell and Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — another central figure in the Jan 6 plot — both joining the CPI in early 2021 it’s looking like the CPI is positioned to be a kind of MAGA-mothership for Trump should he run in 2024. A CNP-dominated MAGA-mothership that’s been investing a lot of time and money into getting better at claiming election fraud. But the election fraud is just step 1. Step 2 is a mass purge of the federal bureaucracy that the Trump movement didn’t know how to do in 2017. But they know how they’ll do it now. The ability to foment election denialism is a major piece of the ‘America First infrastructure’ heading into 2025. But implementing that Schedule F federal blitzkrieg on non-loyalists in the federal workforce is the other big new piece of America First infrastructure.
* October 24, 2022 [32]: Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans [33]
The US political system was already looking like it was poised for an anti-democratic disaster just two weeks before the recent 2022 US midterms. And then Vox published an interview that makes clear how much more ominous the situation really is. Because as the interview of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug — the godfather of the Dark Enlightenment — reminds us, any plot to purge the federal government of non-MAGA loyalists is really just an opening plot. The revolution will only accelerate at that point. A revolution that Yarvin has spent A LOT of time thinking about. A talking about. And writing about. As we’ve seen, in addition to Yarvin’s role as a kind of ideological fellow traveler of Peter Thiel [34] and an influence on the Seasteading movement [35], Yarvin is also reportedly close to CNP-member Steve Bannon, creating a backchannel between Yarvin and the Trump White House [36]. Yarvin and Bannon even worked together to turn Brietbart into a mainstreaming vehicle for the ‘Alt Right’ [37]. As the piece describes, after the Claremont Institute started publishing Yarvin’s writings in 2019, all of that thinking and writing about how to end democracy started going mainstream. At least mainstream in the kind of elite conservative circles at places like the Claremont Institute where the future of the conservative movement is formulated. Yarvin has fans. Prominent fans including Senator-elect JD Vance [38], who was one of the two GOP Senate candidates heavily backed by ‘Alt Right’ sugar-daddy [34] — and a growing GOP sugar-daddy [39] — Peter Thiel. Recall how Vance serves on the board of American Moment, one of the CPI spinoff groups involved with the ongoing Schedule F efforts. It turns out Vance is VERY interested Schedule F. Curtis Yarvin-style Schedule F that effectively ends what’s left of the US’s democratic checks and balances. Yes, during a September 2021 appearance on a conservative podcast, Vance started talking about how, should Donald Trump win a second term, he should “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him. Vance then told the audience that he got these ideas from Yarvin. So Vance was basically calling for the full blown implementation of Schedule F, but with the added twist that the courts should just be ignored if they get in the way. Now, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, it’s not hard to imagine that Trump would find rather tepid resistance from the Supreme Court for much of this plot. But let’s not assuming that the people behind this scheme aren’t planning something so extreme that even a majority of the Supreme Court opposes it. There’s a plan for that scenario. Ignore the courts. That was one of the ideas Vance took from Curtis Yarvin’s plans for implementing a kind of super Schedule F that formally ends democracy altogether. Someone should just declare control over all US institutions, fire all non-loyalists, and just take over. State and local governments — where Democrats will often be in power — should just be dissolved. Just a formal end to democracy in the form of takeover blitzkrieg. Elite media and academic institutions could just be shut down. If the courts get in the way they will be demoted to an advisory status. And to circumvent Congress, Yarvin says the new Caesar can install their allies at the Federal Reserve and fund the government via the Fed. Yarvin is convinced this whole scenario be a popular move. People are just sick of democracy not working and they’re ready for something new. The new dictator could even direct street mobs of supports with things like phone apps. He even suggests someone should run for office on the platform, perhaps as early as 2024. And while Yarvin doesn’t actually refer to Schedule F in the Vox interview, it’s pretty clear that the scenarios he’s talking about would at least start with the aggressive implementation of a Schedule F mass purge across the federal government. The full blown ending of democracy and authoritarian takeover wouldn’t necessarily have to happen after you purge the government of all non-loyalists. But it will be a lot easier.
Those are the five article excerpts we’re going to be looking at in this post.
The Plan to Go ‘Jan 6’ on the Federal Labor Laws
Ok, Let’s start off with Jonathan Swan’s enormous first report detailing the array of institutions and figures who have at this point spent years working on this plan. It’s a remarkable report for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most surprising part is that so many of the figures involved with the ongoing Schedule F scheming are openly talking about their big plans to an Axios reporter at all. They’re so open about their plans that Swan had to break it down into two mammoth reports. This whole Axios series was like a Schedule F coming out party. Or, rather, the Coming Out party: Part One. It was a long party.
And while it’s at clear that the Schedule F plot started in the MAGA world and remains a MAGA project, it’s not just a MAGA effort. As we’re going to see, it’s one CNP figure after another after another, making Schedule F a vehicle for the ongoing fusion of Trumpism with the Republican party’s theocratic power base. When the purge comes it’s going to be a MAGA-CNP group effort [24]:
Axios
Inside Trump ’25A radical plan for Trump’s second term
Jonathan Swan
Jul 22, 2022 — Politics & PolicyFormer President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First [40]” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.
The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.
During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”
The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” [41] developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.
The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire.
*****
As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.
Trump remains distracted [42] by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025.
Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.
They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.
The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.
These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6–3 Supreme Court.
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The centerpiece
Trump signed an executive order [43], “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.
Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.
Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.
New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 [44] so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.
An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.
Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.
Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.
It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.
Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy.
Trump’s allies claim such pendulum swings will not happen because they will not have to fire anything close to 50,000 federal workers to achieve the result, as one source put it, of “behavior change.” Firing a smaller segment of “bad apples” among the career officials at each agency would have the desired chilling effect on others tempted to obstruct Trump’s orders.
They say Schedule F will finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.
Unions and Democrats would be expected to immediately fight a Schedule F order. But Trump’s advisers like their chances in a judicial system now dominated at its highest levels by conservatives.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the federal civil service, is among a small group of lawmakers who never stopped worrying about Schedule F, even after Biden rescinded the order. Connolly has been so alarmed that he attached an amendment [45] to this year’s defense bill to prevent a future president from resurrecting Schedule F. The House passed Connolly’s amendment but Republicans hope to block it in the Senate.
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Machine-in-waiting
No operation of this scale is possible without the machinery to implement it. To that end, Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The names are a mix of familiar and new. They include Jeffrey Clark, the controversial lawyer Trump had wanted to install as attorney general in the end days of his presidency. Clark, who advocated a plan to contest the 2020 election results, is now in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI. Clark is working at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the group founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
Former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government include names like Vought, Meadows, Stephen Miller, Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, Brooke Rollins, James Sherk, Andrew Kloster and Troup Hemenway.
Others, who remain close to Trump and would be in contention for the most senior roles in a second-term administration, include Dan Scavino, John McEntee, Richard Grenell, Kash Patel, Robert O’Brien, David Bernhardt, John Ratcliffe, Peter Navarro and Pam Bondi.
Following splits from some of his past swathe of loyal advisers, Trump has tightened his circle. The Florida-based strategist Susie Wiles is Trump’s top political adviser. She runs his personal office and his political action committee. When he contemplates endorsements, Trump has often attached weight to the views of his former White House political director Brian Jack, pollster Tony Fabrizio, and his son Donald Trump Jr. He often consults another GOP pollster, John McLaughlin. For communications and press inquiries Trump calls on Taylor Budowich and Liz Harrington. Jason Miller remains in the mix.
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The advocacy groups who have effectively become extensions of the Trump infrastructure include the CRA, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
Other groups — while not formally connected to Trump’s operation — have hired key lieutenants and are effectively serving his ends. The Heritage Foundation, the legacy conservative group, has moved closer to Trump under its new president, Kevin Roberts, and is building links to other parts of the “America First” movement.
Sources who spoke to Axios paint a vivid picture of how the backroom plans are taking shape, starting with a series of interactions in Florida earlier this year, on April 28.
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Trump’s new targets
On that warm spring night in April, an armada of black Escalades drove through the rain from a West Palm Beach hotel to Donald Trump’s Mediterranean-style private club.
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Inside, near the bar past the patio, a balding man with dramatically arched eyebrows was the center of attention at a cocktail table. He was discussing the top-level staffing of the Justice Department if Trump were to regain the presidency in 2025.
With a background as an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration, was unknown to the public until early 2021. By the end of the Trump administration, he was serving as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division — although other DOJ leaders paid him little attention. But Trump, desperate to overturn the election, welcomed Clark, the only senior official willing to apply the full weight of the Justice Department to contesting Joe Biden’s victory, into his inner circle.
In February of this year, Clark repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during a deposition with the Jan. 6 committee. And in the early hours of June 22, federal agents with an electronics-sniffing dog in tow arrived at Clark’s Virginia home to execute a search warrant and seize his devices.
But back in April, as Clark circulated at Mar-a-Lago wearing a loose-fitting black suit and blue shirt, any troubles related to the Jan. 6 investigation seemed a world away. Clark sounded optimistic. Half a dozen or so donors and Trump allies surrounded him at the high-top table.
One of the donors asked Clark what he thought would happen with the Justice Department if Trump won the 2024 election. Conveying the air of a deep confidant, Clark responded that he thought Trump had learned his lesson.
In a second term, Clark predicted, Trump would never appoint an attorney general who was not completely on board with his agenda.
There was a buzz around Clark. Given Trump wanted to make him attorney general in the final days of his first term, it is likely that Clark would be a serious contender for the top job in a second term.
By this stage in the evening, more than a hundred people were crammed onto the Mar-a-Lago patio. They were a mix of wealthy political donors and allies of the former president and they had come to see Trump himself bless Russ Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America.
Vought was a policy wonk who became one of Trump’s most trusted officials. Before joining the Trump administration in 2017 as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget — and ultimately going on to run the agency — Vought had a long career in conservative policy circles.
That included a stint as executive director and budget director of the Republican Study Committee — the largest bloc of House conservatives — and as the policy director for the House Republican Conference.
Trump was helping raise money for Vought’s CRA, which has been busily developing many of the policy and administrative plans that would likely form the foundation for a second-term Trump administration.
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In those closed-door sessions, Trump confidants, including former senior administration officials, discussed the mistakes they had made in the first term that would need to be corrected if they regained power.
They agreed it was not just the “deep state” career bureaucrats who needed to be replaced. Often, the former Trump officials said, their biggest problems were with the political people that Trump himself had regrettably appointed. Never again should Trump hire people like his former chief of staff John Kelly, his former defense secretaries, James Mattis and Mark Esper, his CIA director Gina Haspel, and virtually the entire leadership of every iteration of Trump’s Justice Department.
Shortly after noon, Kash Patel entered The Ben’s ballroom. Donors and Trump allies sat classroom-style at long rectangular tables in a room with beautiful views of the Atlantic Ocean.
The group was treated to a conversation between Patel and Mark Paoletta, a former senior Trump administration lawyer with a reputation for finding lateral ways [46] to accomplish Trump’s goals. The Patel-Paoletta panel discussion was titled, “Battling the Deep State.”
Paoletta was a close family friend and prominent public defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. Throughout the Trump administration, Ginni Thomas had taken a strong interest in administration personnel. She complained to White House officials, including Trump himself, that Trump’s people were obstructing “MAGA” officials from being appointed to key roles in the administration.
As Axios previously reported [47], Ginni Thomas had assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.
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Patel had enjoyed an extraordinary rise from obscurity to power during the Trump era. Over the course of only a few years, he went from being a little-known Capitol Hill staffer to one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. national security apparatus.
He found favor with Trump by working for Devin Nunes when he played a central role in the GOP’s scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Patel was the key author of a memo in which Nunes accused the Justice Department and the FBI of abusing surveillance laws as part of a politically motivated effort to take down Trump.
Some of Nunes’ and Patel’s criticisms of the DOJ’s actions were later validated by an inspector general, and Trump came to view Patel as one of his most loyal agents. He put him on his National Security Council and made him the Pentagon chief of staff.
In one astonishing but ill-fated plan [48], Trump had wanted to install Patel as either the deputy director of the CIA or the FBI late in his administration. He abandoned this only after vehement opposition and warnings from senior officials including Haspel and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his own memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel becoming deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”
Never again would Trump acquiesce to such warnings. Patel has only grown closer to the former president since he left office. Over the past year, Patel has displayed enough confidence to leverage his fame as a Trump insider — establishing an online store selling self-branded merchandise with “K$H” baseball caps and “Fight With Kash” zip-up fleeces.
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He also set up the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust to raise money to sue journalists. He recently authored an illustrated children’s book [49] about the Russia investigation in which “King Donald” is a character persecuted by “Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight.” Trump characteristically gave it his imprimatur, declaring [50] he wanted to “put this amazing book in every school in America.”
During that April 28 discussion at The Ben, Patel portrayed the national security establishment in Washington, D.C., as malevolently corrupt. He claimed the intelligence community had deliberately withheld important national security information from Trump.
According to two people in the room, Patel told the audience he had advised Trump to fire senior officials in the Justice Department and he lamented the appointments of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray. Paoletta also recounted to the audience instances in which Trump officials refused or slow-walked lawful directives because they disagreed with the former president’s policies.
Patel’s message to the audience was that things would be different next time. A source in the room said later the takeaway from the session was that if Trump took office in 2025, he would target agencies that conservatives have not traditionally viewed as adversarial.
Sources close to the former president said that he will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.
A spokesperson for Patel, Erica Knight, did not dispute details from this scene at The Ben in West Palm Beach when Axios reached out for comment.
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Trump saved his kindest words that night for two individuals: Mark Meadows and Russ Vought. He praised their organizations and the important work they were doing.
During the past year, Vought’s group has been developing plans that would benefit from Schedule F. And while the power rests largely on the fear factor to stifle civil service opposition to Trump, sources close to the former president said they still anticipate needing an alternate labor force of unprecedented scale — of perhaps as many as 10,000 vetted personnel — to give them the capacity to quickly replace “obstructionist” government officials with people committed to Trump and his “America First” agenda.
In other words, a new army of political partisans planted throughout the federal bureaucracy.
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The new inner circle
The most important lesson Trump took from his first term relates to who he hires and to whom he listens.
Trump has reduced his circle of advisers and expunged nearly every former aide who refused to embrace his view that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
He spends significant amounts of his time talking to luminaries of the “Stop the Steal” movement, including attorney Boris Epshteyn and the pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell, who has spent [51] at least $25 million of his own money sowing doubts about the 2020 election result.
Daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are no longer involved in Trump’s political operation. Trump still talks to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy but their relationship is not what it once was. The former president is no longer in close contact with a variety of former officials and GOP operatives who once had his ear. This group includes former senior adviser Hope Hicks, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former campaign manager Bill Stepien.
Though Stepien has limited personal contact with Trump these days, he is still a part of Trumpworld. He participates in a weekly call that involves close advisers to the former president including his son, Donald Trump Jr. And Stepien is running the campaigns of several Trump-endorsed candidates.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, however, is in a different category altogether: now labeled enemy.
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Trump has doubled down with a small group he views as loyal and courageous. The group includes his former senior White House officials, Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller and John McEntee. It also includes his fourth chief of staff, Mark Meadows, though their relationship was strained when Meadows recounted in his memoir private details of Trump’s hospitalization with COVID-19.
Trump trusts only a few of his former Cabinet secretaries and senior government officials, sources close to him said. He still talks casually to many others, and is seldom off his phone, but former aides who felt they could occasionally persuade Trump to change course say he is quick to shut down advice he does not want to hear.
He remains fixated on the “stolen” 2020 election. He cannot stop talking about it, no matter how many allies advise him it would serve his political interests to move on. Most have stopped trying.
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Seeking “courage”
In a second term, Trump would install a different cohort at the top than in 2017. He has said what he wants, above all, is people with “courage.”
Under the courage criteria, he has singled out Jeffrey Clark for particular praise. Trump has also praised Patel, who would likely be installed in a senior national security role in a second term, people close to the former president said. If Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director, these sources said. If not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House.
People close to the former president said Richard Grenell has better odds than most of being nominated as Trump’s secretary of state. Grenell was one of Trump’s favorite officials at the tail end of his first term. As Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, he declassified copious materials related to the Trump-Russia investigation.
Grenell currently works as an executive and on-air analyst for the pro-Trump television network Newsmax. Grenell told Newsmax earlier this year [52]: “I’m not going to stop until we prosecute [Trump’s former FBI director] Jim Comey.”
Speculation about the futures of these high-profile MAGA personalities obscures the detailed footwork going on in preparation for 2025.
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Crowdsourcing power
One important hub of 2025 preparations is the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), an organization whose nonprofit status under the tax code allows it to conceal its donors’ identities. CPI is a who’s‑who of Trump’s former administration and the “America First” movement.
Founded by former firebrand GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — the bane of Mitch McConnell’s existence when he served in Congress — CPI has become the hub of the hard right in Washington.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI last year. The group’s senior staff includes Edward Corrigan, who worked on the Trump transition team’s personnel operation; Wesley Denton, who served in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget; Rachel Bovard, one of the conservative movement’s sharpest parliamentary tacticians; and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group runs its operations out of a brownstone a short walk from the Capitol building and the Supreme Court. They recruit, train and promote ideologically vetted staff for GOP offices on Capitol Hill and the next Republican administration. The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus meets at CPI headquarters.
CPI has become a fundraising powerhouse over the past few years, raising $19.7 million last year [53]. The group has been buying up D.C. real estate. It leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups it is helping to incubate and has even bought a farm and homestead in eastern Maryland that it uses for training retreats and policy fellowships.
In March, the Federal Election Commission released data showing Trump’s political action committee, “Save America,” had more cash on hand [54] than the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined. This is partly because of the strength of Trump’s online fundraising machine. It is also partly because Trump does not like to share his PAC’s money.
It was, therefore, a meaningful act when Trump authorized a $1 million donation to the CPI. This was by far the Trump committee’s largest donation to political allies in the second half of 2021 [55].
CPI will wield substantial influence on the makeup of a potential second-term Trump administration. It has a team working on a database of vetted staff that could be fed immediately to the next GOP presidential nominee’s transition team.
CPI is not, however, spending much time thinking about Cabinet-level appointments. CPI staff know Trump well enough to understand nobody will have much influence over his splashy Cabinet picks. Their focus is on the crucial mass of jobs below.
CPI’s immediate priority is preparing to put its vetted people in new GOP congressional offices at the start of 2023. Over the past five years since CPI’s founding, the group has been adding personnel to a database that now contains thousands of names.
The CPI team is reckoning on Republicans likely winning back the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterms. That would deliver a tremendous staffing opportunity. These anticipated victories could open hundreds of new staff jobs on Capitol Hill next year — from congressional offices to key committees.
CPI’s goal is to have at least 300 fully vetted “America First” staffers to supply GOP congressional offices after the midterms. These new staffers would theoretically gain valuable experience to use on Capitol Hill but also incubate for a Trump administration in 2025.
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Another influential group is Vought’s Center for Renewing America — designed to keep alive and build upon Trump’s “America First” agenda during his exile.
Vought kept a relatively low media profile through much of the Trump administration but by the end Trump trusted him as somebody who would rebuff career officials and find edge-of-the-envelope methods to achieve Trump’s ends.
When Congress blocked Trump from getting the funds he needed to build the southern border wall, Vought and his team at the Office of Management and Budget came up with the idea of redirecting money from the Pentagon budget to build the wall.
In the final week of the Trump administration, Vought met with the former president in the Oval Office and shared with him his plans to start CRA. Trump gave Vought his blessing. CRA’s team now includes Jeffrey Clark and Kash Patel as well as other Trump allies including Mark Paoletta and Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.
Vought plans to release a series of policy papers, beginning this year, detailing various aspects of their plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”
Vought has other far-reaching intentions. He has told associates it was too onerous in the past for Trump officials to receive security clearances, so he plans to recommend reforms to the security clearance system. He also wants to change the system that determines how government documents become classified.
“We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,” Vought told Axios.
America First Legal was launched by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.
But Miller has also been doing another job in preparation for 2025 that has not previously been reported. He has been identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.
Trump’s close allies are intently focused on the recruitment of lawyers. Trump frequently complained that he did not have the “right” lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office.
He grumbled that they were “weak” — that they always and reflexively told him his demands were illegal and could not be implemented. Trump would occasionally compare his White House lawyers unfavorably to his late New York attorney — the notorious mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Yet he deferred removing them.
Other senior officials, including Miller, believed the federal agencies were clotted with cowardly general counsels too worried about their Washington reputations to risk throwing their support behind Trump’s policies. Instead, the Trump team suspected, these general counsels allowed the career attorneys to steamroll them.
Miller has his eye out for general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.
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One model of such a lawyer is Chad Mizelle, who served as the acting general counsel at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Miller formed a close working partnership with Mizelle and spoke glowingly of him to colleagues. Together they helped execute the most hardline immigration and border security policies in recent history.
In his new role, Miller has been working with Republican state attorneys general and closely watching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff. The lawyers in Paxton’s office are a useful proxy for the type of attorneys Trump would likely recruit to fill a second-term administration.
Paxton has over the past few years filed some of the right’s most aggressive and controversial lawsuits, including a federal suit to overturn elections in battleground states Trump lost. His effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled Texas had no standing to sue. On May 25, the Texas State Bar filed a professional misconduct lawsuit [56] against Paxton related to his efforts to help Trump subvert the 2020 election.
Paxton’s office has been using the legal equivalent of a blitzkrieg in the Biden era — suing fast and often to obstruct Biden’s agenda at multiple points — most frequently immigration, the environment, and COVID-19 measures.
As of July 17, Texas had filed 33 lawsuits against the Biden administration, by far the most lawsuits of all the Republican attorneys general during the Biden administration, according to Paul Nolette, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University who tracks state attorneys general.
A senior member of Paxton’s team, Aaron Reitz, outlined their mentality and strategy on the conservative “Moment of Truth” podcast [57] in November. It is a blueprint for the mindset that would likely pervade a second Trump term.
“Just blitzing in every front where you can,” Reitz said, describing the Texas attorney general’s approach. While he said they do not want to file bad lawsuits against Biden, “the sort of hyper-caution that I think too often Republicans demonstrate, not just in the legal space but political and elsewhere, the time for that is over. We need to understand what time it is and … fight our war accordingly.”
Reitz said what animates himself and Paxton is “an abiding belief that we, as a movement, are at war with the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch.”
At the Texas attorney general’s office, “our soldiers are lawyers and our weapons are lawsuits and our tactic is lawfare,” Reitz added.
A large portion of the broader conservative movement infrastructure has also shifted to benefit Trump’s 2025 administration-in-waiting.
Most conservative groups take pains to claim they are neutral between prospective GOP presidential candidates. But these same groups are increasingly hiring people for key roles who are loyal to the former president or who support his “America First” views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.
Subtle shifts inside the vaunted Heritage Foundation provide an instructive example. For decades, Heritage was the conservative movement’s intellectual North Star, playing a significant role in shaping the personnel and policies of GOP presidents dating back to the Reagan administration.
When Trump emerged in 2016 with his “America First” ideology, he tore up the GOP’s playbook, especially on foreign policy and trade. Some inside Heritage at the time recoiled at these apostasies.
During the Trump administration, many conservatives perceived the group as sliding into irrelevance as they were detached from Trump and his movement. Recently though, some former Heritage allies watched in horror when the group broke with GOP hawks and opposed Congress’ $40 billion aid package to Ukraine for its fight against Russia.
Jessica Anderson, head of Heritage’s lobbying operation, released a statement explaining the controversial decision. Its title: “Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last.”
Heritage is not institutionally tied to Trump. But under its new president, Kevin Roberts, the organization appears to be moving closer than any previous iteration of Heritage in allying itself with the Trumpian “America First” wing of the Republican Party.
Roberts has developed a closer personal relationship with Trump than his predecessor did. Trump even visited Amelia Island in Florida to speak to Heritage’s annual leadership conference in April. In addition to courting Trump, Roberts has also opened his door to the “New Right” — individuals and organizations whose views differ dramatically from many of the Bush era conservative policies Heritage has traditionally supported.
Roberts said in an interview to Axios he plans to spend at least $10 million collaborating with at least 15 conservative groups to build a database of personnel for the next Republican administration. He was careful to say the list is intended to support whoever is the GOP nominee, but he has appointed a former top Trump personnel official, Paul Dans, to run the operation, and a glance down the list of allied organizations shows it is heavy on stalwart Trump allies.
Roberts said these allied groups will be able to edit the personnel document with their own notes — a Wikipedia-like process. Tellingly, the Conservative Partnership Institute has signed onto the Heritage effort.
The Trump-blessed think tank America First Policy Institute did not sign onto the Heritage initiative, preferring instead to promote its standalone personnel project. This, too, will have a strong Trumpian flavor.
AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. More than half a dozen Trump Cabinet officials are affiliated with AFPI and Trump loyalists fill the group from top to bottom.
Rollins brought in Michael Rigas to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Rigas ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s HR department. AFPI’s official position is that the group is developing their personnel database for whichever Republican wins the nomination. Such is Trump’s appreciation for AFPI that his PAC wired [58] $1 million to the group in June 2021.
Even the billionaire-funded Koch network is playing a friendly behind-the-scenes role. While the Koch network overall has often been at odds with Trump, the network’s anti-interventionist foreign policy aligns neatly with Trump’s “America First” ideology.
In this narrow field of alignment, connections have been forged between Trumpworld and Kochworld, especially via the head of Koch’s foreign policy program, Dan Caldwell.
During the last year of the Trump administration, the Koch network built close ties with Trump’s personnel office. Trump’s final nominee for the ambassador to Afghanistan, Will Ruger, was a Koch candidate. The Koch talent pipeline — on foreign policy if nothing else — would likely get a serious hearing in a second-term Trump administration.
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Startups including American Moment have sprung up to develop lists of thousands of younger “America First” personnel for the next GOP administration. Founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas, American Moment is dedicated to the idea of restaffing the government. Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance serves on its board.
Sharma said in an interview that he and his team have dozens of informal talent scouts on college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.”
They have plugged into the younger staff populating hard-right offices on Capitol Hill and seek to attract a steady flow of young ideologues through events and a podcast.
American Moment says it has, so far, around 700 “fully vetted” personnel to potentially serve in the next administration. Sharma’s goal is to have 2,000 to 3,000 “America First” would-be government staffers in his database by the summer of 2024.
By then, the next Republican presidential nominee will be standing up their transition team and looking for staff to occupy not just senior jobs but the junior and mid-level positions American Moment wants to specialize in filling.
Sharma is prescriptive about what gets a person on his list. He wants applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legal immigration into the United States. He favors people who are protectionist on trade and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. They must be eager to fight the “culture war.” Credentials are almost irrelevant.
“Reagan hired young, he hired ideological, and he hired underqualified,” Sharma said. “That gave him an enormous amount of soft power in the conservative movement for 40 years since, and many of those people are still in charge today.”
In the background, the former staff members of Trump’s final personnel director John McEntee have stayed in touch and are working loosely together across a number of groups in preparation for 2025.
One of these new organizations, “Personnel Policy Organization [59]” or “PPO” — an homage to McEntee’s PPO — is a nonprofit led by McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway. PPO says its mission is to “educate and defend conservative, America First civil servants and their advisors.”
A person familiar with the group’s work told Axios the group is helping to do “quality control” on other groups’ personnel lists and is “developing plans to provide a suite of policies and services to conservative officials and outside advisors to ensure that they are able to stand firm against attacks by the media or left-wing governmental actors, and offensive steps to take against left-wing officials.”
All of this amounts to a giant crowdsourcing effort for 2025.
CPI’s Edward Corrigan worked at Heritage during the 2016 presidential election cycle. After Trump’s surprise victory, he moved into an office at Trump Tower to join the transition team frantically sourcing and vetting personnel.
Heritage had assembled personnel lists starting in 2015, as it does for every election cycle, but Corrigan said the challenge for Heritage back then was that no one knew which candidate they were recruiting for.
“Back then most people assumed it was going to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, but it ends up being Trump,” Corrigan told Axios in an interview. “And so that creates a challenge because you don’t actually know” what is needed for the person to fit in.
“And so in 2024 if Trump is the nominee,” Corrigan added, “it gives you a huge advantage in that you know the kind of people that Trump’s going to want to pick.”
One uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology.
Now, they are functioning as a series of task forces for a possible Trump administration. They are rookeries for former Trump staff. They are breeding grounds for a new wave of right-wing personnel to run the U.S. government.
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“A radical plan for Trump’s second term” by Jonathan Swan; Axios; 07/22/2022 [24]
“One uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology.”
Yes, one uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology. But as we’ve repeatedly seen, that’s not the only recurring theme here. Scratch the surface, and we find the Council for National Policy. In this case, it’s the CNP-affiliated Conservative Partnership Institute that appears to be playing a central role in the scheme. A scheme devised around the “Schedule F”. A scheme the Trump administration was already secretly working on and put into action 13 days before the 2020 election. We don’t need to ask if a Republican administration would be willing to implement a plan this radical. They already did. They just didn’t have enough time to finish:
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The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” [41] developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election....
As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.
Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.
They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.
The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.
These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6–3 Supreme Court.
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And Trump isn’t going to wait until the end of his next term again to implement it. The plan is for an immediate purge of the federal workforce shortly after Trump takes office. Trump or any other Republican administration in 2025 presumably. And a plan to create the kind of precedent that could lead to a mass purging of the federal workforce every time there’s a party switch in the White House:
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Trump signed an executive order [43], “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.
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Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.
It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.
Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy.
Trump’s allies claim such pendulum swings will not happen because they will not have to fire anything close to 50,000 federal workers to achieve the result, as one source put it, of “behavior change.” Firing a smaller segment of “bad apples” among the career officials at each agency would have the desired chilling effect on others tempted to obstruct Trump’s orders.
They say Schedule F will finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.
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But while the Schedule F plan was largely a product of the Trump administration at first, it sounds like three conservative groups are now working on that effort: the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). As we’ve seen, the CPI is one of the central players in the GOP’s ‘Election Integrity’ efforts, with members like CNP member Cleta Mitchell. The AFPI, similarly, has its own Center for Election Integrity chaired by CNP member Kenneth Blackwell [18]. Then there’s the CRA, founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. And who do we find newly employed at the CRA? None other than Jeffrey Clark, the DOJ official who literally tried to get his boss fired at the DOJ so he could take their place and block the certification of the electoral vote [9]. So the conservative groups working on continuing the “Schedule F” plans aren’t just deeply intertwined with the CNP. They’re also closely aligned with the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Efforts that have now morphed into a plot to overturn the 2024 election results:
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No operation of this scale is possible without the machinery to implement it. To that end, Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.The names are a mix of familiar and new. They include Jeffrey Clark, the controversial lawyer Trump had wanted to install as attorney general in the end days of his presidency. Clark, who advocated a plan to contest the 2020 election results, is now in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI. Clark is working at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the group founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
Former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government include names like Vought, Meadows, Stephen Miller, Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, Brooke Rollins, James Sherk, Andrew Kloster and Troup Hemenway.
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The advocacy groups who have effectively become extensions of the Trump infrastructure include the CRA, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
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There’s another important detail to keep in mind when we learn that Jeffrey Clark is a part of this project: as the DOJ official who was willing to go the furthest to keep Trump in office, Clark is now viewed as leading candidate to be Attorney General in any future Trump administration. In other words, should “Schedule F” get put into action in 2025 following a GOP victory, expect the new attorney general to be fully on board with the scheme:
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Sources who spoke to Axios paint a vivid picture of how the backroom plans are taking shape, starting with a series of interactions in Florida earlier this year, on April 28....
Inside, near the bar past the patio, a balding man with dramatically arched eyebrows was the center of attention at a cocktail table. He was discussing the top-level staffing of the Justice Department if Trump were to regain the presidency in 2025.
With a background as an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration, was unknown to the public until early 2021. By the end of the Trump administration, he was serving as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division — although other DOJ leaders paid him little attention. But Trump, desperate to overturn the election, welcomed Clark, the only senior official willing to apply the full weight of the Justice Department to contesting Joe Biden’s victory, into his inner circle.
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One of the donors asked Clark what he thought would happen with the Justice Department if Trump won the 2024 election. Conveying the air of a deep confidant, Clark responded that he thought Trump had learned his lesson.
In a second term, Clark predicted, Trump would never appoint an attorney general who was not completely on board with his agenda.
There was a buzz around Clark. Given Trump wanted to make him attorney general in the final days of his first term, it is likely that Clark would be a serious contender for the top job in a second term.
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But CRA’s highly troubling recent hires aren’t limited to Clark. Kash Patel — the partisan hack Trump installed as acting Chief of Staff for then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller after Trump lost the election [60] — is also working at the CRA along with figures like Ken Cuccinelli, who was the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security during Jan 6. Recall how both Patel and Cuccinnelli were two of the senior Pentagon officials whose texts in the period around Jan 6 have mysteriously gone missing [8]. So the CRA appears to have an abundance of figures who weren’t just Trump administration alums, but were part of the Trump administration during that crucial Jan 6 period. There’s quite of bit of experience on these kinds of election-overturning efforts between the whole group. Interestingly, the CRA also appears to have ambitions on making it easier for government employees to clear security clearances. You have to wonder how much of that is in anticipation of these figures who were directly involved in Jan 6 being blocked from future appointments due to security clearance concerns related to Jan 6:
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In the final week of the Trump administration, Vought met with the former president in the Oval Office and shared with him his plans to start CRA. Trump gave Vought his blessing. CRA’s team now includes Jeffrey Clark and Kash Patel as well as other Trump allies including Mark Paoletta and Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.Vought plans to release a series of policy papers, beginning this year, detailing various aspects of their plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”
Vought has other far-reaching intentions. He has told associates it was too onerous in the past for Trump officials to receive security clearances, so he plans to recommend reforms to the security clearance system. He also wants to change the system that determines how government documents become classified.
“We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,” Vought told Axios.
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In one astonishing but ill-fated plan [48], Trump had wanted to install Patel as either the deputy director of the CIA or the FBI late in his administration. He abandoned this only after vehement opposition and warnings from senior officials including Haspel and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his own memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel becoming deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”
Never again would Trump acquiesce to such warnings. Patel has only grown closer to the former president since he left office. Over the past year, Patel has displayed enough confidence to leverage his fame as a Trump insider — establishing an online store selling self-branded merchandise with “K$H” baseball caps and “Fight With Kash” zip-up fleeces.
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And note the affiliations of Mark Paoletta, one of the speakers at that CRA closed-door sessions: he’s a close family friend of Clarence and Ginni Thomas. As we’ve seen, it’s hard to find a figure who was working more feverishly on convincing state legislator to overturn the election results than [61] key CNP operative Ginni Thomas [62]. Paoletta went on to act as the spokesperson for Thomas, asserting to reporters that she played no organizational role at all in that state-level lobbying campaign and that her group’s Dec 8, 2020 invitation to John Eastman to discuss that exact strategy was not an endorsement of the strategy [63]. In other words, Paoletta is so close to the Thomases that he’s acting as their public representative.
Also recall how Ginni Thomas co-founded the Groundswell Group meetings with fellow CNP member Steve Bannon back in 2013 as a competitor to Grover Norquist’s influential ‘Wednesday Morning Meetings’. Groundswell went on to play a major role in making staffing decisions for the Trump White House [64]. So when we read about Paoletta’s involvement in the Schedule F plot, keep in mind his ties to Ginni Thomas and the central role her Groundswell network already played in making staffing decisions for the Trump administration:
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The group was treated to a conversation between Patel and Mark Paoletta, a former senior Trump administration lawyer with a reputation for finding lateral ways [46] to accomplish Trump’s goals. The Patel-Paoletta panel discussion was titled, “Battling the Deep State.”Paoletta was a close family friend and prominent public defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. Throughout the Trump administration, Ginni Thomas had taken a strong interest in administration personnel. She complained to White House officials, including Trump himself, that Trump’s people were obstructing “MAGA” officials from being appointed to key roles in the administration.
As Axios previously reported [47], Ginni Thomas had assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.
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The CPI appears to be carrying out a general organizational role like it does on so many other CNP efforts. And that includes hiring key Trump White House figures like Mark Meadows. And in addition to CNP member Cleta Mitchell, we also find CNP members Ed Corrigan as President of the CPI and Rachel A. Bovard as CPI Senior Director of Policy [17]. The CPI is a CNP extension, and its immediate goals include preparing staff lists for the GOP to use in 2023. It’s a reminder that this vast staffing operation isn’t going to have to wait until 2024 to really get up and running:
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One important hub of 2025 preparations is the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), an organization whose nonprofit status under the tax code allows it to conceal its donors’ identities. CPI is a who’s‑who of Trump’s former administration and the “America First” movement.Founded by former firebrand GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — the bane of Mitch McConnell’s existence when he served in Congress — CPI has become the hub of the hard right in Washington.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI last year. The group’s senior staff includes Edward Corrigan, who worked on the Trump transition team’s personnel operation; Wesley Denton, who served in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget; Rachel Bovard, one of the conservative movement’s sharpest parliamentary tacticians; and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group runs its operations out of a brownstone a short walk from the Capitol building and the Supreme Court. They recruit, train and promote ideologically vetted staff for GOP offices on Capitol Hill and the next Republican administration. The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus meets at CPI headquarters.
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CPI’s immediate priority is preparing to put its vetted people in new GOP congressional offices at the start of 2023. Over the past five years since CPI’s founding, the group has been adding personnel to a database that now contains thousands of names.
The CPI team is reckoning on Republicans likely winning back the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterms. That would deliver a tremendous staffing opportunity. These anticipated victories could open hundreds of new staff jobs on Capitol Hill next year — from congressional offices to key committees.
CPI’s goal is to have at least 300 fully vetted “America First” staffers to supply GOP congressional offices after the midterms. These new staffers would theoretically gain valuable experience to use on Capitol Hill but also incubate for a Trump administration in 2025.
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Also note how the CPI is a dark money powerhouse that leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups. It’s the CNP’s incubator organization that exists to create spinoffs right-wing organizations:
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CPI has become a fundraising powerhouse over the past few years, raising $19.7 million last year [53]. The group has been buying up D.C. real estate. It leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups it is helping to incubate and has even bought a farm and homestead in eastern Maryland that it uses for training retreats and policy fellowships.In March, the Federal Election Commission released data showing Trump’s political action committee, “Save America,” had more cash on hand [54] than the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined. This is partly because of the strength of Trump’s online fundraising machine. It is also partly because Trump does not like to share his PAC’s money.
It was, therefore, a meaningful act when Trump authorized a $1 million donation to the CPI. This was by far the Trump committee’s largest donation to political allies in the second half of 2021 [55].
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Stephen Miller’s role in this effort appears to be coming up with lists of figures who can fill general counsel jobs across the government. Specifically, general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s agenda. That and waging nuisance lawsuits against the Biden administration through his America First Legal group.
And note that the lawyer cited as an example of the kind of person Miller is looking for, Chad Mizelle, was appointed acting general counsel of DHS in February of 2020 [65] and stayed in the job throughout the rest of Trump’s term, including the period leading up to Jan 6 [66]. So as the investigation into missing texts and possible plots swirling inside the Pentagon and DHS during that post-election period when figures like Patel and Cuccinelli were ominously appointed to leading positions inside the Pentagon and DHS [8], keep in mind that Mizelle had been appointed acting general counsel of DHS nine months earlier.
And when we see that Miller is working closely with Ken Paxton in this recruitment efforts, recall how we’ve already seen Paxton playing a supportive role in the legal by key conservative lawyer Jonathan Mitchell to overturn all court-won rights of the 20th and 21st centuries. An effort that was clearly part of a much broader CNP-backed radical legal agenda [67]. Seeing Paxton show up in relation to Miller’s efforts is exactly what we should expect at this point:
America First Legal was launched by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.
But Miller has also been doing another job in preparation for 2025 that has not previously been reported. He has been identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.
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One model of such a lawyer is Chad Mizelle, who served as the acting general counsel at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Miller formed a close working partnership with Mizelle and spoke glowingly of him to colleagues. Together they helped execute the most hardline immigration and border security policies in recent history.
In his new role, Miller has been working with Republican state attorneys general and closely watching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff. The lawyers in Paxton’s office are a useful proxy for the type of attorneys Trump would likely recruit to fill a second-term administration.
Paxton has over the past few years filed some of the right’s most aggressive and controversial lawsuits, including a federal suit to overturn elections in battleground states Trump lost. His effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled Texas had no standing to sue. On May 25, the Texas State Bar filed a professional misconduct lawsuit [56] against Paxton related to his efforts to help Trump subvert the 2020 election.
Paxton’s office has been using the legal equivalent of a blitzkrieg in the Biden era — suing fast and often to obstruct Biden’s agenda at multiple points — most frequently immigration, the environment, and COVID-19 measures.
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Another completely expected addition to this network is the Heritage Foundation. Because of course the Heritage Foundation would be involved with something like this. The Heritage Foundation and CNP are almost like the public/private faces of the same broader There probably isn’t an organization that has more overlap with the CNP than the Heritage Foundation, including its founder Ed Feulner [17]. Also recall how CNP member and CPI chairman Jim DeMint [17] was the President of Heritage from 2013–2016 [68]. Also note that the President of the CPI, Ed Corrigan, is also a CNP member [17] in addition to being a former VP for Policy Promotion at the Heritage Foundation. Even Heritage’s new president, Kevin Roberts is a CNP member. Recall how Roberts is also a member of the “National Association of Scholars” (NAS) and the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) [19]. Also recall how the NAS and Roberts have been working on the “American Birthright” school curriculum project that is filled with CNP members [20]. Finally, recall how the TPPF was found to be running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election in coordination with the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection [21]. Kevin Roberts has been busy:
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A large portion of the broader conservative movement infrastructure has also shifted to benefit Trump’s 2025 administration-in-waiting....
Heritage is not institutionally tied to Trump. But under its new president, Kevin Roberts, the organization appears to be moving closer than any previous iteration of Heritage in allying itself with the Trumpian “America First” wing of the Republican Party.
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Roberts said in an interview to Axios he plans to spend at least $10 million collaborating with at least 15 conservative groups to build a database of personnel for the next Republican administration. He was careful to say the list is intended to support whoever is the GOP nominee, but he has appointed a former top Trump personnel official, Paul Dans, to run the operation, and a glance down the list of allied organizations shows it is heavy on stalwart Trump allies.
Roberts said these allied groups will be able to edit the personnel document with their own notes — a Wikipedia-like process. Tellingly, the Conservative Partnership Institute has signed onto the Heritage effort.
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CPI’s Edward Corrigan worked at Heritage during the 2016 presidential election cycle. After Trump’s surprise victory, he moved into an office at Trump Tower to join the transition team frantically sourcing and vetting personnel.
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And when we read that Roberts has opened his door to the “New Right”, don’t forget that the “New Right” is just the new term for “Alt Right”, which was a new term for Nazi [69]. “New Right” is just what you call Nazis in polite company. At least polite reactionary company:
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Roberts has developed a closer personal relationship with Trump than his predecessor did. Trump even visited Amelia Island in Florida to speak to Heritage’s annual leadership conference in April. In addition to courting Trump, Roberts has also opened his door to the “New Right” — individuals and organizations whose views differ dramatically from many of the Bush era conservative policies Heritage has traditionally supported.
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Then we get to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) initiative, which is described as separate from the Heritage Institute’s staffing initiative. And yet, when we look at the people involved with the AFPI we see how small a world this is: Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director, is leading the AFPI. It turns out Roberts succeeded Rollins as the head of the TPPF after Rollins left to join the Trump administration in 2018. Rollins returned to the TPPF in 2021 as a Senior Advisor and member of the Board of Directors [70]. So the heads of the Heritage and the TPPF appear to have a very close ongoing working relationship. Keep that in mind when we’re told that the AFPI and Heritage initiatives are somehow separate:
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The Trump-blessed think tank America First Policy Institute did not sign onto the Heritage initiative, preferring instead to promote its standalone personnel project. This, too, will have a strong Trumpian flavor.AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. More than half a dozen Trump Cabinet officials are affiliated with AFPI and Trump loyalists fill the group from top to bottom.
Rollins brought in Michael Rigas to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Rigas ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s HR department. AFPI’s official position is that the group is developing their personnel database for whichever Republican wins the nomination. Such is Trump’s appreciation for AFPI that his PAC wired [58] $1 million to the group in June 2021.
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Similarly, when we read that the Koch network is planning on using its connections to this Schedule F initiative to help fill these staff roles, of course the Koch network is going to be filling these positions. These networks are all heavily overlapping. Increasingly so as the MAGA-ification of the GOP continues. It’s one big fascist family:
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Even the billionaire-funded Koch network is playing a friendly behind-the-scenes role. While the Koch network overall has often been at odds with Trump, the network’s anti-interventionist foreign policy aligns neatly with Trump’s “America First” ideology.In this narrow field of alignment, connections have been forged between Trumpworld and Kochworld, especially via the head of Koch’s foreign policy program, Dan Caldwell.
During the last year of the Trump administration, the Koch network built close ties with Trump’s personnel office. Trump’s final nominee for the ambassador to Afghanistan, Will Ruger, was a Koch candidate. The Koch talent pipeline — on foreign policy if nothing else — would likely get a serious hearing in a second-term Trump administration.
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One big fascist network with the CNP acting as a kind of connective tissue. For example, the founder of American Moment, Saurabh Sharma, is also a CNP member [17]. So when we see Sharma’s American Moment described as just some group that popped up keep in mind that CNP connective tissue:
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Startups including American Moment have sprung up to develop lists of thousands of younger “America First” personnel for the next GOP administration. Founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas, American Moment is dedicated to the idea of restaffing the government. Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance serves on its board.Sharma said in an interview that he and his team have dozens of informal talent scouts on college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.”
They have plugged into the younger staff populating hard-right offices on Capitol Hill and seek to attract a steady flow of young ideologues through events and a podcast.
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But while the CNP may be playing a key organizing role in the background of this effort, it’s John McEntee — Trump’s former bodyman-turned-director of the Presidential Personelle Office (PPO) — who appears to be tasked with overseeing the whole operation. An organization named after the PPO was started by McEntee’s former PPO staff to carry out quality control on the lists generated by the various groups involved with the effort:
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In the background, the former staff members of Trump’s final personnel director John McEntee have stayed in touch and are working loosely together across a number of groups in preparation for 2025.One of these new organizations, “Personnel Policy Organization [59]” or “PPO” — an homage to McEntee’s PPO — is a nonprofit led by McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway. PPO says its mission is to “educate and defend conservative, America First civil servants and their advisors.”
A person familiar with the group’s work told Axios the group is helping to do “quality control” on other groups’ personnel lists and is “developing plans to provide a suite of policies and services to conservative officials and outside advisors to ensure that they are able to stand firm against attacks by the media or left-wing governmental actors, and offensive steps to take against left-wing officials.”
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John McEntee may have left the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, but he hasn’t abandoned the mission of purging the federal government of non-loyalists.
Schedule F’s Origins: A Longstanding Conservative Desire to Purge the Federal Bureaucracy Meets Trump’s Post-Impeachment Plans for Revenge. Ongoing Plans for Revenge
It’s a mission to purge the federal government of non-loyalists. The next Trump administration is going to be Trumpian through and through. At least after the planned purge. But as we see in Jonathan Swan’s second giant Schedule F Axios piece, the desire to stuff the government full of MAGA loyalists and sycophants is only part of the motive here. At when it comes to Trump’s desire. Revenge is the other big animating force here. When Trump tapped his former bodyman, John McEntee, to become the new head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel in January of 2020, it was right after Trump’s impeachment acquittal in the Senate. Trump was in the mood for revenge and McEntee was the man he chose to make that revenge happen. And Trump already had a revenge plan in mind to make it happen thanks to the work of James Sherk — an ideologue working on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — a year earlier and his work researching the federal labor laws looking for a loophole. The kind of loophole that would become the focus of Trump’s revenge plot: all non-loyalists are going to have to go. Schedule F became a top administration secret before Trump signed it into effect on Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election. It doesn’t sound like many agency heads took Trump’s Schedule F order seriously, with one noteable exception: Russ Vought, who was then the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director before moving on to found the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which is helping to carry on the Schedule F work into 2025. Because while Schedule F may have started as a Trump revenge plot, it’s going to be ready for any Republican administration, Trump or not [26]:
Axios
Inside Trump ’25Trump’s revenge
Jonathan Swan
Jul 23, 2022President Donald Trump was attending the National Prayer Breakfast, but showing no sign of grace. Lips pursed, face alternating between anger and frustration, he lashed out at enemies who had brought him to the doors of impeachment. He brandished [71] the day’s newspapers, waving them above his head. The first headline: “ACQUITTED.” The next: “Trump Acquitted.” It was Feb. 6, 2020.
Close aides believed Trump had crossed a psychological line during his Senate trial. He now wanted to get even; he wanted to fire every single last “snake” inside his government. To activate the plan for revenge, Trump turned to a young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah: his former aide John McEntee [72].
By the end of that year, Trump also had a second tool in his armory, a secret weapon with the innocuous title, “Schedule F [41].” The intention of this obscure legal instrument was to empower the president to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants across the federal government.
The mission for McEntee and the power of Schedule F dovetailed in the lead-up to the 2020 election as Trump planned (but lost) a second term and fumed over perceived foes.
If former President Trump runs again in 2024 and wins back the White House, people close to him say, he would turn to both levers again. It is Schedule F, combined with the willpower of top lieutenants like McEntee, that could bring Trump closer to his dream of gutting the federal bureaucracy and installing thousands devoted to him or his “America First [73]” platform.
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Trump’s move in early 2020 to bring back McEntee, the then 29-year-old former presidential body man abruptly fired in 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly, would become one of his more consequential decisions. McEntee had been one of his favorite aides and Trump had long regretted allowing Kelly, whom he had grown to despise, to have his way.
After Trump’s Senate acquittal, he gave McEntee an astonishing promotion to run the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. McEntee had no experience running any kind of personnel operation, much less such a significant post in the U.S. government. But Trump did not care.
He gave McEntee his blessing to start ridding the federal government of his enemies and replacing them with Trump people. McEntee was to ignore the “RINOs [74]” who would try to dissuade him. He was to press ahead with urgency and ruthlessness.
At the president’s direction, McEntee weeded out administration officials deemed to be disloyal or obstructionist. With Trump’s unequivocal backing, he became more powerful than any personnel director in recent history. Trump had decided to ignore his more traditional advisers and to take an aggressive stance against anyone in his way — an approach he would surely replicate in any second term.
McEntee had the authority to overrule Trump’s own Cabinet secretaries. He was able to hire and fire in many cases without their sign-off — and in at least one instance [75], without even the Cabinet secretary’s prior knowledge.
In their place, McEntee and his colleagues in the personnel office recruited die-hard Trump supporters from outside Washington to serve in important government positions. Some had barely graduated from college and had few, if any, of the credentials usually expected for such positions.
They tested job seekers’ commitment to Trump in informal conversations and they formalized this emphasis in a “research questionnaire” for government officials. One question on the form asked: “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” Answers to such questions were prioritized over professional qualifications and experience.
*****
“Red pills” and “blue pills”
McEntee brought a different mentality to the personnel office. He brought in “America First” conservatives who thought of themselves as having been “red-pilled” about the evils of the Left.
This was a reference to the 1999 dystopian sci-fi film “The Matrix,” where the main character was offered a choice between two colored pills — a red one to learn the dangerous truth of the world or a blue one to remain in ignorance.
McEntee’s new recruits to the personnel office were ardently loyal to Trump and committed to his nationalist ideology — with especially hardline views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.
They believed, by and large, that the American republic needed saving from a range of domestic enemies and an embedded “deep state” sabotaging Trump from within.
A key recruit to McEntee’s office was Andrew Kloster, a senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation. Kloster helped McEntee’s deputy, James Bacon, develop his questionnaire to vet government employees and overhaul the government’s hiring process.
Kloster described their approach in an interview last November on the “Moment of Truth” podcast — a podcast run by American Moment, a group developing an “America First” personnel pipeline for the next GOP administration.
“I think the first thing you need to hire for is loyalty,” Kloster said on the podcast. “The funny thing is, you can learn policy. You can’t learn loyalty.”
Loyalty — to Trump and the “America First” ideology — was only part of the formula McEntee and his team wanted. They deliberately sought recruits not chasing a long-term career in Washington. They screened out anyone who seemed merely interested in maintaining a good reputation with the business community, K Street, or GOP leaders on Capitol Hill.
Kloster spent hours, sometimes over multiple days, conducting interviews and designing methodology to identify “someone who’s not on the team.”
A revealing question was to ask prospects where they ideally wanted to be promoted to in the government. If a job candidate wanted to work in “international finance” it set off alarm bells. “You hear about what jobs come with perks; and traveling a lot and networking with the ‘Davos set’ is not something someone genuinely civic-minded would angle for,” Kloster told Axios.
A red flag went up if a prospective employee answered “deregulation and judges” when asked to name their favorite Trump policies. Kloster described this as “a shell of an answer.” It was a sure sign the applicant could be a weak-kneed member of the establishment.
“This kind of answer isn’t always a dealbreaker, but you want someone to take a risk and be honest with you about what problems they see as facing America,” Kloster said. “A lowest-common denominator answer is the sign of an operator, a careerist.”
Kloster wanted people harboring angst — who felt they had been personally wronged by “the system.” The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better. And if someone felt mugged, that was even better, as it would help drive their desire to break up the system.
“It’s not just that being ‘canceled’ motivates a person; it’s also that being canceled indicates a person knows the kind of heat that is brought to bear by the media, by institutions, and the public, and is probably better able to fight when the time comes,” Kloster told Axios.
By late 2020, McEntee and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — working hand in glove — had org charts to plan a second term. They had a chart for each federal agency and they had them printed on large boards for review. One set of boards was in McEntee’s office and another in Meadows’ office.
They looked at positions further down in the bureaucracy in a second term — not just secretaries, but undersecretaries and assistant secretaries. They were thinking about people willing to break a little china.
One source on the edge of this work at the time said the plan was to bring tenacity and resolve to the first 45 days of a second term, by contrast to the missed opportunities of Trump’s first term. They had four years of experience to know what the pitfalls were.
McEntee also had explicit lists of top officials to fire and hire in a Trump second term. This was his road map for the future.
According to a source with direct knowledge of the lists, prominent names on McEntee’s second-term “fire” list included the White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.
But the “fire” list was just the start. To respond to Trump’s demand to clean out the “deep state,” McEntee would need far-reaching powers and a legal rationale to supply them.
He heard about something that might help him in the summer of 2020. There were low whispers in corridors by then that options were being developed to change the status quo in the civil service.
*****
Origins of Schedule F
What was being quietly worked on — by a more technocratic group of Trump officials — was a novel legal theory. It would give the president the authority to terminate and replace an estimated 50,000 career civil servants across the federal government.
Its genesis was back in early 2017. Senior Trump officials had talked about the need to expand the hiring category typically reserved for political appointees so that they could fire — and replace — a much larger number of career government officials. But their early discussions were bogged down by bureaucratic and legal delays for two years.
The idea for Schedule F was hatched in January 2019 by a little-known official working inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, an extravagant building in the Second Empire style across the street from the White House.
James Sherk, an enterprising conservative ideologue on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, had been fuming for months about career officials across various agencies whom he believed were deliberately sabotaging Trump’s agenda. He had heard stories from his colleagues and encountered elements of the resistance firsthand. The pushback included an uprising within the State Department against Trump’s hardline refugee policies.
The revolt was so intense that only 11 days after Trump took office, The Washington Post published a story [76] that detailed “a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers” who were charged with implementing Trump’s agenda.
From his standing desk inside the EEOB, Sherk began reading through federal statutes on Cornell Law School’s website. He undertook a close reading of Title 5, the section of the U.S. Code that governed federal employees and agency procedures. He was searching for any openings in the law that might allow a president to fire career government officials who had protections that made it difficult and time-consuming to get rid of them.
Sherk researched the history of federal employment protections. Congress had passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to reform the government. The goal of this law was to replace the patronage system with a nonpartisan civil service that would work across administrations, no matter which political party controlled the White House. The objective was to create a professional civil service. The idea was that over long careers, these government officials would accumulate invaluable institutional knowledge and experience that would benefit Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
What Sherk discovered, however, was that the Pendleton Act did not introduce the extensive removal protections that have made it so onerous for modern presidents to fire civil servants. Sherk learned through his research that those appeals rights were introduced much later, in a series of laws and executive orders passed between the 1940s and the 1970s.
Sherk shared the view of many conservatives that the “nonpartisan” system was a farce that helped Democratic presidents and stymied Republicans.
He could point to campaign donations — skewing Democratic [77] among federal government workers — to argue that the federal bureaucracy, far from being nonpartisan, had too many embedded Democrats working to thwart Republican administrations.
*****
A weapon to aim
Trump wanted a weapon to aim at these civil servants — to threaten them with their jobs if they stepped out of line. He wanted to be able to fire and replace them if they were disloyal or obstructed his agenda. Sherk was searching for the legal instrument to support Trump’s aim.
In January 2019, Sherk found Trump his weapon, in Section 7511 [78] of Title 5 of the U.S. Code. This section exempts from firing protections employees “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.”
It struck Sherk. The language in the Code was not limited to political appointees. The wording was “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating.”
Nothing, Sherk thought, stops us from putting career employees into this bucket.
Conservatives had long dreamed of applying these criteria to career staff as well as political appointees. Sherk’s relatively untrained eyes saw a fresh path in the statute.
He was not a lawyer, but he had spent more than a decade working on public policy at the Heritage Foundation. He had also worked on more than a dozen executive orders for Trump, including a controversial decree [79] that classical architecture be the default for federal buildings in Washington, D.C.
Sherk sent his idea to a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office. Over the next few months, Sherk worked in secrecy with a small group of Trump political appointees and government lawyers to prepare what became the “Schedule F” order.
The final order would command agency leaders to compile lists of their staff who served in roles that influenced policy. These employees would then be reassigned to a new employment category, Schedule F, which would promptly eliminate most of their employment protections. The head of the federal government’s HR division — the Office of Personnel Management — would have to sign off on the lists. And then these career civil servants could easily be fired and replaced.
Career officials across the government had no idea about the development of this extraordinary proposal to threaten their job security. Members of Congress tasked with overseeing the civil service were also in the dark. So were the federal workers’ unions. Schedule F became one of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets.
Sherk and a small group of Trump political appointees worked quickly. They completed a draft of the order by late spring of 2019. They sent paper copies to senior political appointees at a few agencies to get their feedback. They gave these officials firm instructions not to share any details of the order with the career staff at their agencies.
Trump’s top officials who were read into the planning were struck by the vast implications of Schedule F. But during the closely held policy process, several expressed concerns about the timing of the order. Trump’s agencies had a huge workload coming up. Some officials thought it would be a bad idea to unveil the order and foment staff unrest.
The team decided to wait until 2020 to implement Schedule F. Then came COVID-19, which overtook the Trump administration and further delayed the order.
It took until Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election, for Trump to finally sign the Schedule F order. The announcement was immediately drowned out by the noise of the final stretch of campaigning.
Few people had the bandwidth to pay attention to a new order with an anodyne title during the most chaotic election in recent history. Most Americans have never heard of Schedule F, let alone absorbed its vast implications.
The Washington Post published a detailed insider account [80] of the evolution of Schedule F and the risks to the civil service within two days of the executive order.
But leaders in Washington were only barely awake to what Trump had done. Some of Trump’s own agency leaders made no serious attempt to follow the Schedule F order. Trump had lost the election; his senior officials predicted incoming President Biden would immediately rescind the order. Some felt there was no point ruffling feathers on behalf of a doomed order.
However, one of Trump’s hard-edged and most ideological agency heads — Russ Vought [81], who ran the Office of Management and Budget — wanted to lay down a marker. Regardless of the election result, Vought wanted to show what Schedule F could accomplish inside his own agency. Vought proposed reassigning 88% of OMB’s workforce as Schedule F employees, with just two months left of Trump’s presidency.
*****
Sounding the alarm
Some on the left did immediately grasp the significance of what Trump was doing and tried to sound the alarm.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑Va.) chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing government operations, was one of them. He and other Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote a letter to Michael Rigas, head of Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, describing what they viewed as the “grave” implications of the Schedule F order.
“The executive order is a harmful attack on the integrity of our government because it will permit the replacement of non-partisan civil servants with partisan Trump loyalists,” the lawmakers wrote [82].
...
Trump was delighted. He sent Sherk a signed copy of the 2020 Washington Post front-page story, headlined “Assault on feds years in making.” Sherk was also given the Sharpie that Trump used on Air Force One to sign the order. The newspaper, the executive order and the presidential Sharpie are now hanging framed on the walls of Sherk’s office at the Trump-allied think tank, the America First Policy Institute. AFPI is one of the key groups — detailed in part one of this series — developing plans and personnel lists for a Trump second term.
President Biden struck back, rescinding [83] the Schedule F executive order on his third day in office.
But if Trump returns to office in 2025, his plans to upend the civil service could realize the worst fears of the relatively few Democrats who grasp Schedule F’s significance.
*****
The fine print
Even if Schedule F is not reimposed — or if it comes back but is then limited by Congress or the courts — experts say there are already so many existing exemptions across the federal bureaucracy that a future president determined to pursue mass firings would have plenty to work with. Someone with Trump’s willpower will find a new methodology if Schedule F falls.
The system has become Balkanized over a matter of decades, with a hand from Democrats as well as Republicans, to the point where experts say there are effectively dozens of civil services — not one — all covered by separate authorities with different rules and protections.
Broadly speaking, the U.S. Intelligence Community is not covered by the so-called competitive service jobs appointed under Title 5. Thus, Schedule F wouldn’t have the same impact because intelligence employees are already exempt from most protections.
Intelligence Community posts do have some due process rights — but those are typically developed within individual agencies, and they do not get to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. So presidents already have wide latitude to purge intelligence positions, so long as the agency head goes along and voters or Congress do not punish them.
Schedule F does not affect a category called the Senior Executive Service, which includes some of the most senior career government officials.
But agency heads could target those protected SES officials in other ways, sources close to Trump said. They could reassign them to backwater jobs or install political appointees and sympathetic career officials on pperformance review boards [84] who could deliver adverse reviews that could lead to termination.
Some in conservative legal circles say that the major civil service laws dating to the 1800s are all arguably unconstitutional and that it should be up to a president who stays and goes on their watch. Testing the limits of that theory would put the question before the courts.
Trump’s closest confidant in Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan [85] (R‑Ohio), is excited about the prospects of mass firings in the second term of a Trump administration. He said in an interview with Axios that he had talked about it with another person close to Trump and that “the line that we talked about was, ‘Fire everyone you’re allowed to fire. And [then] fire a few people you’re not supposed to, so that they have to sue you and you send the message.’ That’s the way to do it.”
...
McEntee now lives in California and is working on building a dating app [86] for conservatives — funded by billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel. But he maintains strong ties to key people working in an array of outside groups on 2025 personnel projects, some of whom had worked for him in the Trump administration.
*****
Signs and signals
Trump is alert to any signs of squishiness, especially on his signature issue: contesting the outcome of the 2020 election. He will likely bar hiring anyone who believes Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States. And he may declare ahead of time whom he will, and will not, pick.
Earlier this year, Patel joined Charlie Kirk’s podcast [87] to discuss what they both saw as the biggest failure of Trump’s first term. Kirk is a Trump ally with substantial influence. He runs the college campus activist network “Turning Point USA,” which regularly convenes thousands of “America First” students to watch speeches from Trump, his son Don Jr., and top GOP elected officials.
It is part of the wingspan of Trump’s most active loyalists to conduct communications and signaling through podcasts with like-minded conservative media or former staffers from the Trump administration.
“So you think, the second term, one of the things has to be kind of a promise that Trump is going to make different personnel choices,” Kirk said to Patel.
“Yeah,” Patel replied. “And you know how you solve that? You build the book now. And I believe that that’s in process and that’s going.”
“Not only do you build the book now of who you’re going to put in the Cabinet and deputies and undersecretaries, but then you make announcements on the campaign trail: ‘If I win, this person is going to be head of FBI, this person is going to take CIA, this person is going to DOD,’ ” Patel added. “Show the voters that that is the individual you have identified to lead your Cabinet.”
“I think that’s terrific,” Kirk said. “The same way he did the Supreme Court picks.”
...
————
“Close aides believed Trump had crossed a psychological line during his Senate trial. He now wanted to get even; he wanted to fire every single last “snake” inside his government. To activate the plan for revenge, Trump turned to a young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah: his former aide John McEntee [72].”
This isn’t just a fascist ideological purge. It’s revenge. Trump’s revenge. A revenge plot that Trump already put into motion in early 2020 with the appointment of John McEntee, his former bodyman who was fired by then-chief of staff John Kelly in 2018. Kelly was already out of the White House and on the disloyal list by the time McEntee was invited back into the administration. McEntee was quite the symbolic choice for the role. A role that gave McEntee the power to overrule Cabinet secretaries:
...
Trump’s move in early 2020 to bring back McEntee, the then 29-year-old former presidential body man abruptly fired in 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly, would become one of his more consequential decisions. McEntee had been one of his favorite aides and Trump had long regretted allowing Kelly, whom he had grown to despise, to have his way.After Trump’s Senate acquittal, he gave McEntee an astonishing promotion to run the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. McEntee had no experience running any kind of personnel operation, much less such a significant post in the U.S. government. But Trump did not care.
He gave McEntee his blessing to start ridding the federal government of his enemies and replacing them with Trump people. McEntee was to ignore the “RINOs [74]” who would try to dissuade him. He was to press ahead with urgency and ruthlessness.
...
McEntee had the authority to overrule Trump’s own Cabinet secretaries. He was able to hire and fire in many cases without their sign-off — and in at least one instance [75], without even the Cabinet secretary’s prior knowledge.
...
There was really just one qualification for applicants: loyalty to Trump. Overt loyalty to Trump and the MAGA agenda. An agenda that, at that point in Trump’s presidency, was focused on Trump’s declared battle with the ‘deep state’:
...
In their place, McEntee and his colleagues in the personnel office recruited die-hard Trump supporters from outside Washington to serve in important government positions. Some had barely graduated from college and had few, if any, of the credentials usually expected for such positions.They tested job seekers’ commitment to Trump in informal conversations and they formalized this emphasis in a “research questionnaire” for government officials. One question on the form asked: “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” Answers to such questions were prioritized over professional qualifications and experience.
...
McEntee’s new recruits to the personnel office were ardently loyal to Trump and committed to his nationalist ideology — with especially hardline views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.
They believed, by and large, that the American republic needed saving from a range of domestic enemies and an embedded “deep state” sabotaging Trump from within.
...
And recall how the Heritage Foundation, under its new president (and CNP member) Kevin Roberts, was described as making its own separate contribution to the Schedule F project. Similarly, we learned about the efforts by a new group, American Moment, founded by CNP member [17] Saurabh Sharma. Here we see one of the key recruits for John McEntee’s operation, Andrew Kloster, was recruited from Heritage and Kloster was talking about their overall strategy on a podcast for American Moment last November. This network hasn’t stopped working since its start in early 2020 when Trump brought McEntee back into the White House. They’ve even been podcasting about it:
...
A key recruit to McEntee’s office was Andrew Kloster, a senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation. Kloster helped McEntee’s deputy, James Bacon, develop his questionnaire to vet government employees and overhaul the government’s hiring process.Kloster described their approach in an interview last November on the “Moment of Truth” podcast — a podcast run by American Moment, a group developing an “America First” personnel pipeline for the next GOP administration.
“I think the first thing you need to hire for is loyalty,” Kloster said on the podcast. “The funny thing is, you can learn policy. You can’t learn loyalty.”
...
Kloster wanted people harboring angst — who felt they had been personally wronged by “the system.” The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better. And if someone felt mugged, that was even better, as it would help drive their desire to break up the system.
“It’s not just that being ‘canceled’ motivates a person; it’s also that being canceled indicates a person knows the kind of heat that is brought to bear by the media, by institutions, and the public, and is probably better able to fight when the time comes,” Kloster told Axios.
...
Note that when we see that Mark Meadows was working with McEntee in the fall of 2020 on the loyalty purge, don’t forget that Meadows joined the CPI after leaving the Trump administration. And as we’re going to see, the CPI is playing a major role in the Schedule F loyalty purge. In other words, Mark Meadows never stopped working on Schedule F either:
...
By late 2020, McEntee and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — working hand in glove — had org charts to plan a second term. They had a chart for each federal agency and they had them printed on large boards for review. One set of boards was in McEntee’s office and another in Meadows’ office.
...
Also note how the individual who actually came up with the bureaucratic ‘aha’ — the idea that the rules about the firing of political appointees — was someone who previously spent over a decade working at the Heritage Foundation was working at the Trump White House’s Domestic Policy Council at the time. Recall how the AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. It’s the same larger network:
...
What was being quietly worked on — by a more technocratic group of Trump officials — was a novel legal theory. It would give the president the authority to terminate and replace an estimated 50,000 career civil servants across the federal government....
James Sherk, an enterprising conservative ideologue on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, had been fuming for months about career officials across various agencies whom he believed were deliberately sabotaging Trump’s agenda. He had heard stories from his colleagues and encountered elements of the resistance firsthand. The pushback included an uprising within the State Department against Trump’s hardline refugee policies.
...
In January 2019, Sherk found Trump his weapon, in Section 7511 [78] of Title 5 of the U.S. Code. This section exempts from firing protections employees “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.”
It struck Sherk. The language in the Code was not limited to political appointees. The wording was “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating.”
Nothing, Sherk thought, stops us from putting career employees into this bucket.
Conservatives had long dreamed of applying these criteria to career staff as well as political appointees. Sherk’s relatively untrained eyes saw a fresh path in the statute.
He was not a lawyer, but he had spent more than a decade working on public policy at the Heritage Foundation. He had also worked on more than a dozen executive orders for Trump, including a controversial decree [79] that classical architecture be the default for federal buildings in Washington, D.C.
...
Another noteworthy detail in the plot involves the fact that the head of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had to sign off on it. So it’s noteworthy that Trump tried to replace the then-acting head of the OPM, Michael Rigas, with John Gibbs, then the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in July of 2020 [88] three months before Schedule F was order into effect just two weeks before the election, although that nomination was never confirmed. So Rigas was still the head of the OPM when Trump issued the October 2020 Schedule F order:
...
Sherk sent his idea to a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office. Over the next few months, Sherk worked in secrecy with a small group of Trump political appointees and government lawyers to prepare what became the “Schedule F” order.The final order would command agency leaders to compile lists of their staff who served in roles that influenced policy. These employees would then be reassigned to a new employment category, Schedule F, which would promptly eliminate most of their employment protections. The head of the federal government’s HR division — the Office of Personnel Management — would have to sign off on the lists. And then these career civil servants could easily be fired and replaced.
Career officials across the government had no idea about the development of this extraordinary proposal to threaten their job security. Members of Congress tasked with overseeing the civil service were also in the dark. So were the federal workers’ unions. Schedule F became one of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets.
...
It took until Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election, for Trump to finally sign the Schedule F order. The announcement was immediately drowned out by the noise of the final stretch of campaigning.
...
Now, when it came to actually implementing Schedule F, it doesn’t appear that many agency heads took the order seriously. But there was one very notable exception: Russ Vought, then the head of the Office of Management and Budget, proposed reassigning 88% of the agency workforce as Schedule F employees. Note that Russ Vought’s Wife, Mary Vought, shows up on the leaked CNP member list as an ‘assumed member’ [17]. So whether or not she’s actually a member, she apparently works so closely with the CNP that everyone just assumes she’s one. Once again, the CNP network is just beneath the surface:
...
But leaders in Washington were only barely awake to what Trump had done. Some of Trump’s own agency leaders made no serious attempt to follow the Schedule F order. Trump had lost the election; his senior officials predicted incoming President Biden would immediately rescind the order. Some felt there was no point ruffling feathers on behalf of a doomed order.However, one of Trump’s hard-edged and most ideological agency heads — Russ Vought [81], who ran the Office of Management and Budget — wanted to lay down a marker. Regardless of the election result, Vought wanted to show what Schedule F could accomplish inside his own agency. Vought proposed reassigning 88% of OMB’s workforce as Schedule F employees, with just two months left of Trump’s presidency.
...
President Biden struck back, rescinding [83] the Schedule F executive order on his third day in office.
But if Trump returns to office in 2025, his plans to upend the civil service could realize the worst fears of the relatively few Democrats who grasp Schedule F’s significance.
...
Also note how many parallels there are between the legal theory that presidents should have complete control over the executive branch’s workforce regardless of laws or court rulings and the ‘independent-state-legislature’ theory that was at the core of the legal strategy behind the plot to overturn the election [89]. It’s all of a piece:
...
Some in conservative legal circles say that the major civil service laws dating to the 1800s are all arguably unconstitutional and that it should be up to a president who stays and goes on their watch. Testing the limits of that theory would put the question before the courts.
...
Also note the ties between McEntee and Peter Thiel. Recall the important role Thiel played in Trump transition through his close working relationship with transition team member Charles Johnson [90]. So when we hear that McEntee still maintains strong ties to the people working on this Schedule F project in anticipation of 2025, keep in mind those ties To Thiel and Thiel’s longstanding interest in White House staffing decisions:
...
McEntee now lives in California and is working on building a dating app [86] for conservatives — funded by billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel. But he maintains strong ties to key people working in an array of outside groups on 2025 personnel projects, some of whom had worked for him in the Trump administration.
...
And then we get to a particularly disturbing part of this whole story: The plan isn’t simply to implement Schedule F immediately upon the next Republican administration. They are also talking about putting together lists of names of the people who will be filling the roles and campaigning on it. So is this why the whole plan got leaked to Axios? It’s hard to keep this a secret if Trump plans on campaign on his planned government purge. Also note that Charlie Kirk’s podcast was an appropriate venue for Kash Patel to discussed this idea. Charlie Kirk is a member of the CNP [17], after all. Everywhere we look with this Schedule F plot we find members of the CNP:
...
Earlier this year, Patel joined Charlie Kirk’s podcast [87] to discuss what they both saw as the biggest failure of Trump’s first term. Kirk is a Trump ally with substantial influence. He runs the college campus activist network “Turning Point USA,” which regularly convenes thousands of “America First” students to watch speeches from Trump, his son Don Jr., and top GOP elected officials.It is part of the wingspan of Trump’s most active loyalists to conduct communications and signaling through podcasts with like-minded conservative media or former staffers from the Trump administration.
“So you think, the second term, one of the things has to be kind of a promise that Trump is going to make different personnel choices,” Kirk said to Patel.
“Yeah,” Patel replied. “And you know how you solve that? You build the book now. And I believe that that’s in process and that’s going.”
“Not only do you build the book now of who you’re going to put in the Cabinet and deputies and undersecretaries, but then you make announcements on the campaign trail: ‘If I win, this person is going to be head of FBI, this person is going to take CIA, this person is going to DOD,’ ” Patel added. “Show the voters that that is the individual you have identified to lead your Cabinet.”
“I think that’s terrific,” Kirk said. “The same way he did the Supreme Court picks.”
...
And that concludes our look at Jonathan Swan’s Schedule F reports that sort of blew the whole story open. Sure, there were reports about Schedule F before this. But nothing that made clear just how far-reaching the efforts were in developing a plot or that the plot is still fully ongoing and bigger than ever. Don’t forget, all those CPI spin-offs didn’t exist in 2019 and 2020 when the plot was still getting hatched in the Trump White House. There’s a lot more man power behind it now. And they aren’t hiding it anymore. We won’t be able to say they didn’t warn us.
The CPI’s Brood of MAGA Spinoffs Working to Get Schedule F Ready for 2024
As those twin Axios pieces describe, the Schedule F plot is clearly a MAGA-world enterprise. But also clearly a CNP-backed initiative. And as the following Documented.net piece lays out, it’s the CNP-dominated CPI where these two worlds converge. It’s a convergence that is reflected by the record nearly $20 million raised by the CPI in 2021 for Republican mega-donors, including a $1 million donation for Trump’s own Save America PAC. And the CPI hasn’t been just sitting on all that cash. Eight new CPI spinoffs were created in 2021. One of those spinoffs, Cleta Mitchell’s ‘Election Integrity Network’, is focused on continuing the now-standard claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud that were at the core of the justifications for the January 6 Capitol insurrection [91]. But then there’s the spinoffs we’ve already seen as part of the Schedule F plot: the Center for Renewing America (CRA), America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), and American Moment. Yes, while it’s not always clear in the coverage of these groups that they’re actually CPI spinoffs, that’s what they are. Which is reminder that, while it might seem like there’s large number of different groups working of this project, they all operating from the same playbook because they’re all ultimately part of the same network. A network now financed by large numbers of GOP mega-donors who on board with the agenda [28]:
Documented
Conservative Partnership Institute: The Trump-aligned $19.7M Institution Creating “America First” Political Infrastructure
Trump: “CPI is helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.”
Published On JUL 10, 2022The Conservative Partnership Institute (“CPI”) is a $19.7 million “America First” institution boosted with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. Led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, CPI is creating the MAGA-oriented political infrastructure that the Trump administration lacked.
CPI is recruiting America First staffers and providing in-depth training for Hill offices, as well as creating legal institutions, opposition research firms, think tanks, and other groups helmed by former Trump officials and allies, including Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, and Cleta Mitchell.
The group’s ambitions are sprawling, from amplifying conspiracies around stolen elections and “critical race theory,” to tanking Democratic nominees and filing lawsuits against the Biden administration. CPI’s president, Ed Corrigan, helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team [92], and the group is positioned to staff and support the next MAGA administration.
CPI is located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and serves as a hub for the America First movement. The House Freedom Caucus holds weekly meetings at CPI, and texts obtained by the January 6 committee show lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene [93] and Sen. Mike Lee [94] referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period following the 2020 election. Nearly two dozen individuals tied to the January 6 attempted coup are connected to CPI, according to Grid’s analysis [95].
Nerve Center for the MAGA Movement
CPI’s Washington D.C. headquarters serve as a hub for the far-right conservative movement. According to CPI, [96] in 2021 the “House Freedom Caucus, the Senate Steering Committee, Congressional Chiefs of Staff, Congressional Communicators, Congressional Legislative Directors, and numerous conservative organizations and activists coalesced regularly at [CPI’s headquarters] to plan their methods and means of attack against the Left to save this country.”
CPI boasted [97] of holding 600 meetings or events in 2021, served as a “strategy center” to oppose President Biden’s vaccine requirements, and hosted multiple “war rooms” [98] during Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination. CPI is also expanding, and says that it is “in the process of acquiring multiple properties adjacent to our D.C. headquarters in order to create a culture of collaboration and victory for the movement.”
According to CPI, members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Andy Biggs, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Byron Donalds have made the CPI headquarters “their home away from home.” A dozen members of Congress have disclosed [99] paying membership dues to CPI/CPC using campaign or leadership PAC funds.
Ties to Trump’s 2020 Coup Attempt
CPI and its affiliate groups “employ or assist at least 20 key operatives reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election,” according to Grid [95], including Cleta Mitchell., the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the infamous call [100] when the president urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes; Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff who was in communication [101] with alleged Jan. 6 plotters and at least tolerated Trump’s attempted coup; and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s [102] desire for DOJ to declare the result fraudulent, and whose home was raided by the FBI [103] in June of 2022.
Texts obtained by the January 6 committee also show Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene [104] and Sen. Mike Lee [94] referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period after the 2020 election.
Mike Lee to Mark Meadows [94], Nov. 9 2020:
We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.
Marjorie Taylor Greene to Mark Meadows [104], Dec. 31, 2020:
Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state. I’ll be over at CPI this afternoon.
...
“America First” Staffing
CPI boasts of recruiting, recommending, and training Congressional staffers who are committed to advancing an America First agenda. In 2021, CPI claims to have trained [97] 49 members of Congress and 246 Congressional staffers, and to have made [97] 200 Congressional staffing recommendations.
“We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report [96]. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5‑week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “they armed conservative staffers with every tactic the House and Senate rules gave them: how to force amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”
“You may have seen that conservatives defeated Biden’s gun-grabbing pick to lead the ATF and stopped a communist- sympathizing economist from becoming comptroller of the currency. That didn’t happen by accident.”
According to CPI, [96] “our trainings have become so respected that conservative congressional offices and grassroots advocacy organizations now come to us when they have job openings to fill. They know that we maintain a database of current and prospective congressional staffers who have been through our trainings and are up to the task of putting America first.”
CPI-Launched Projects, Many Led by former Trump Officials
In 2021, CPI launched eight new projects, as well as entities to provide legal compliance and administrative support for those groups:
* Election Integrity Network: Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, joined CPI and launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) in early 2021, after resigning as a partner with the international law firm Foley and Lardner. As described in reports by the New York Times and ABC News, CPI’s EIN is working with groups like Tea Party Patriots to create “permanent election integrity coalitions in eight target states.”
* Center for Renewing America: Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought leads the culture war-oriented Center for Renewing America (CRA). “CRA’s strategy is to initiate planned confrontations on major national cultural issues, win those confrontations, and let the resulting political momentum fuel legislative activity at the federal, state, and local levels.” CRA has created anti-CRT model legislation, opposed making women eligible for the draft, and opposed Afghan refugee migration. Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as Attorney General after the 2020 election and who supported Trump’s desire for the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, joined CRA as Senior Fellow in June 2022. Other senior fellows include Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Paoletta.
* America First Legal Foundation: Trump’s hardline immigration advisor Stephen Miller co-created the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) with Mark Meadows, which claims to give “the 234 new federal judges appointed by Donald Trump the chance to finally hold Washington accountable to the rule of law.” AFLF has supported lawsuits challenging Biden administration policies around immigration, equity, and vaccines, and has urged the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action.
* American Accountability Foundation: Tom Jones, Ted Cruz’s 2016 oppo research director, leads the group described as the “Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees” by the New Yorker. AAF has taken credit for knocking out President Biden’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms nominee David Chipman, comptroller nominee Saule Omarova, and Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin.
* American Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carson hosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke “Little Patriots” platform “to teach children about our founding principles.”
* American Moment: “American Moment’s mission is to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” according to CPI’s annual report. In 2021, American Moment claims to have placed ten fellows at aligned organizations and congressional offices and, according to CPI, paid them “a living wage of $3,000 a month.” CPI plans to quadruple the program to 40 fellows in 2022.
...
CPI’s Fundraising
Since forming in 2017, CPI’s fundraising has increased dramatically—most recently, jumping from $7.3 million in 2020 to $19.7 million in 2021.
CPI held a fundraiser [105] at Mar al Lago in April 2021, with former President Trump as the keynote speaker, shortly after Trump’s Save America PAC disclosed giving $1 million to the group.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI does not publicly disclose its donors.
However, an analysis by Grid [95] identified more than 40 foundations, charities and other organizations that have funded CPI, including $1.25 million from GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein’s foundation in 2020, $500,000 from the late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation, and $200,000 from the Chicago Community Trust.
CPI has also identified some financial supporters in its 2021 annual report.
David and Brenda Frecka: CPI thanked the pair for their financial support in its 2021 annual report, and named a “David and Brenda Frecka Boardroom” at CPC. In 2021 [106], David Frecka gave $1M to Jim Jordan’s House Freedom Action, and Brenda Frecka gave $1.15M to Debbi Meadows’s Right on Women PAC
Mike Rydin: According to CPI’s annual report, Ryden “made a generous gift” so that CPI could purchase a townhouse next door to its headquarters “for additional meeting and event space as well as space to host out-of-town guests.” The property sold for $1.5M [107] in 2020.
Dr. William Amos Jr.: The son of the AFLAC founder “has generously supported the Conservative Partnership Institute. For his incredible contributions to CPI’s growth and mission, in 2021, CPI honored Dr. Amos with CPI’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Foster Friess “supported many groups in the movement, including CPI. Foster will always be an important part of the CPI story. With love and purpose, Lynn carries on her late husband’s legacy of helping those in need.”
Doug and Charlotte Waikart “made the ultimate commitment to sending American values into the future by supporting CPI in their estate plans.”
———–
“The Conservative Partnership Institute (“CPI”) is a $19.7 million “America First” institution boosted with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. Led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, CPI is creating the MAGA-oriented political infrastructure that the Trump administration lacked.”
If the CNP is like the parent network for this movement, the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is the organizational manifestation of that role. It exists to spawn new entities, including many of the organizations directly involved with the Schedule F plot. And employing many of the people involved with the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Nearly two dozen such people, including key figures like Cleta Mitchell and Mark Meadows:
...
CPI is located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and serves as a hub for the America First movement. The House Freedom Caucus holds weekly meetings at CPI, and texts obtained by the January 6 committee show lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene [93] and Sen. Mike Lee [94] referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period following the 2020 election. Nearly two dozen individuals tied to the January 6 attempted coup are connected to CPI, according to Grid’s analysis [95]....
CPI and its affiliate groups “employ or assist at least 20 key operatives reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election,” according to Grid [95], including Cleta Mitchell., the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the infamous call [100] when the president urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes; Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff who was in communication [101] with alleged Jan. 6 plotters and at least tolerated Trump’s attempted coup; and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s [102] desire for DOJ to declare the result fraudulent, and whose home was raided by the FBI [103] in June of 2022.
Texts obtained by the January 6 committee also show Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene [104] and Sen. Mike Lee [94] referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period after the 2020 election.
Mike Lee to Mark Meadows [94], Nov. 9 2020:
We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.
Marjorie Taylor Greene to Mark Meadows [104], Dec. 31, 2020:
Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state. I’ll be over at CPI this afternoon.
...
And when we see “5‑week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, try not to be surprised to learn that CPI President Ed Corrigan — the Former V.P. for Policy Promotion at the Heritage Foundation — is a CNP member along with Bovard [17]. The CPI really is a CNP operation:
...
CPI boasts of recruiting, recommending, and training Congressional staffers who are committed to advancing an America First agenda. In 2021, CPI claims to have trained [97] 49 members of Congress and 246 Congressional staffers, and to have made [97] 200 Congressional staffing recommendations.“We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report [96]. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5‑week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “they armed conservative staffers with every tactic the House and Senate rules gave them: how to force amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”
...
Then we get to the string of organizations set up in 2021 alone: Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, and two of the groups we’ve seen in the Schedule F efforts: Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America and American Moment founded by founded by CNP member Saurabh Sharma [17]. The CPI is ramping up the parrallel efforts to steal the next election and then immediately fire as many federal workers as possible. Also recall how the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) was set to run sleazy smear operations [108]. So the AAF will presumably be deeply involved in the public relations operations for any future insurrections or mass loyalty purges:
...
In 2021, CPI launched eight new projects, as well as entities to provide legal compliance and administrative support for those groups:* Election Integrity Network: Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, joined CPI and launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) in early 2021, after resigning as a partner with the international law firm Foley and Lardner. As described in reports by the New York Times and ABC News, CPI’s EIN is working with groups like Tea Party Patriots to create “permanent election integrity coalitions in eight target states.”
* Center for Renewing America: Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought leads the culture war-oriented Center for Renewing America (CRA). “CRA’s strategy is to initiate planned confrontations on major national cultural issues, win those confrontations, and let the resulting political momentum fuel legislative activity at the federal, state, and local levels.” CRA has created anti-CRT model legislation, opposed making women eligible for the draft, and opposed Afghan refugee migration. Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as Attorney General after the 2020 election and who supported Trump’s desire for the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, joined CRA as Senior Fellow in June 2022. Other senior fellows include Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Paoletta.
* America First Legal Foundation: Trump’s hardline immigration advisor Stephen Miller co-created the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) with Mark Meadows, which claims to give “the 234 new federal judges appointed by Donald Trump the chance to finally hold Washington accountable to the rule of law.” AFLF has supported lawsuits challenging Biden administration policies around immigration, equity, and vaccines, and has urged the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action.
* American Accountability Foundation: Tom Jones, Ted Cruz’s 2016 oppo research director, leads the group described as the “Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees” by the New Yorker. AAF has taken credit for knocking out President Biden’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms nominee David Chipman, comptroller nominee Saule Omarova, and Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin.
* American Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carson hosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke “Little Patriots” platform “to teach children about our founding principles.”
* American Moment: “American Moment’s mission is to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” according to CPI’s annual report. In 2021, American Moment claims to have placed ten fellows at aligned organizations and congressional offices and, according to CPI, paid them “a living wage of $3,000 a month.” CPI plans to quadruple the program to 40 fellows in 2022.
...
Finally, note how the CPI’s funding exploded in 2021, in concert with all these new ‘election integrity’ and ‘Schedule F’ efforts. And it exploded thanks to the generous donations from GOP mega-donors like Richard Uihlein [109]. Over 40 organizations by one count. The CPI is becoming like the election dirty-tricks vehicle of choice for the GOP mega-donor mainstream:
...
Since forming in 2017, CPI’s fundraising has increased dramatically—most recently, jumping from $7.3 million in 2020 to $19.7 million in 2021.CPI held a fundraiser [105] at Mar al Lago in April 2021, with former President Trump as the keynote speaker, shortly after Trump’s Save America PAC disclosed giving $1 million to the group.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI does not publicly disclose its donors.
However, an analysis by Grid [95] identified more than 40 foundations, charities and other organizations that have funded CPI, including $1.25 million from GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein’s foundation in 2020, $500,000 from the late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation, and $200,000 from the Chicago Community Trust.
...
The future may be looking rather dim for American democracy these days, but the future is bright for the CPI. How many tens of millions of dollars in mega-donor donations did the group receive in 2022 from this same mega-donor network? We’ll see.
The CPI: “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” So Said Trump in His Plea to the GOP’s Mega-Donors
But as the following piece by Facing South points out, the explosive growth in fundraising for the CPI last year wasn’t simply due to the spontaneous generosity of the GOP mega-donor class. Donald Trump declared exhorted donors to give to the CPI went declared in a June 2021 fundraising letter that the CPI was “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” This was months after both Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell — two of the central figures in the post-2020 election scheming that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection — joined the group. Again, don’t forget that Cleta Mitchell’s ‘Election Integrity Network’ was also formed by the CPI in 2021 [91]. 2021 was the year the CPI become part of the MAGA movement, whether that future is lead by Trump or not, as reflected by that massive haul of mega-donor cash.
But as the article also notes, the CPI wasn’t the only entity involved with the ongoing Schedule F plot to receive some generous donations last year from Trump’s Save America PAC. The American First Policy Institute (AFPI) also received $1 million from Trump’s PAC in June 2021. And while that money undoubtedly went towards the Schedule F plot, don’t forget that AFPI’s launched its own Center for Election Integrity chaired by CNP member Kenneth Blackwell [18]. Like the CPI, AFPI is working on a variety of ‘MAGA infrastructure’ too.
And as the large Republican establishment cash flows into these groups makes clear, the CPI and AFPI aren’t just building the infrastructure that will propell the ‘MAGA’ movement ti ‘new heights’. This is the about building the infrastructure for the future of the Republican Party. Again, whether that future is led by Trump or not. Overturning elections and stuffing the federal government with loyalists is part of the GOP’s current Trumpian agenda. Also the GOP’s future post-Trumpian agenda. It’s the future [30]:
Facing South
How Mark Meadows’ nonprofit benefited from Trump’s ‘Big Ripoff’
By Sue Sturgis
June 24, 2022(Update: On June 28, four days after this story was published, the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed that Mark Meadows himself, along with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, also requested pardons after the attack.)
Among the matters discussed at the ongoing congressional hearings into Donald Trump’s supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol and the presidential election certification process on Jan. 6. 2021, is how the former president’s campaign used what it knew to be false claims of fraud to raise money — lots of money.
As Amanda Wick, a senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee, testified in a video [110], after election night Trump began to “barrage” small-dollar donors with emails containing disinformation, “sometimes as many as 25 a day,” and continued to do so until 30 minutes before the Capitol breach. The emails asked for contributions to something called an Official Election Defense Fund, but the committee revealed that such a fund did not exist. Instead, most of the $250 million Trump raised from his false claims went to an entity he created in November 2020 called the “Save America PAC,” which in turn paid millions of dollars to Trump-connected organizations.
“Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the Big Ripoff,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and member of the bipartisan select committee investigating the Capitol attack, during the second hearing held on June 13.
The Jan. 6 committee showed that the Save America PAC sent $5 million to Event Strategies, the company that organized the rally preceding the Capitol riot. It paid $204,857 to Trump’s hotel business. And it donated $1 million each to the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank led in part by former Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow and former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon, and the Washington, D.C.-based Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
CPI is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit founded in 2017 and chaired by Jim DeMint, who represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005 and the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. A leading figure in the far-right tea party movement that opposed President Obama, DeMint went on to serve as president of the Heritage Foundation but resigned from the conservative think tank in 2017 at the unanimous request of the board, which cited [111] “significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation.” Mickey Edwards, one of Heritage’s founding trustees and a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told Politico [68] at the time that DeMint changed Heritage “from a highly respected think tank to just a partisan tool and more ideological — more of a tea party organization than a think tank.”
At CPI, DeMint is free to embrace his fringe leanings. The stated mission [112] of the group, which has a staff [113] of 20, is “to serve and support the conservative movement on Capitol Hill.” According to its 2021 annual report [114], CPI trained 49 members of Congress last year as well as 246 staff members from 132 congressional offices. It offers broadcast studios and spaces for meetings and events, convenes coalitions of conservative organizations, and vets, trains, and places congressional staff. Among the members of Congress it cites as using its services are far-right Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, outspoken election deniers who were among the 147 House Republicans [115] who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race after the Capitol attack. Greene is also among the six Republican House members [116] that the Jan. 6 committee has identified as having sought pardons from President Trump in the riot’s aftermath.
Many of CPI’s key players came from the Trump administration. For example, its president and CEO is Ed Corrigan, who led the Trump transition team’s personnel selection process for domestic policy departments. In January 2021, CPI hired Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who played a central role in Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential race and who — after coming under fire for her role in baselessly challenging the results in Georgia — quit her job at the prestigious Foley & Lardner firm, where she had represented the National Rifle Association, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. She now leads CPI’s “Election Integrity Network,” [117] which aims to train conservative poll watchers as part of a broader effort to create enough disputes to justify intervention in the election [118] by Republican-controlled state legislatures. CPI’s Election Integrity Network also fought federal legislation to expand voting rights, including the For the People Act [119], the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act [120], and the Freedom to Vote Act [121]. Last November, Mitchell was appointed to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s board of advisors [122], which has no rule making authority but offers recommendations; she was nominated by the commission’s Republican-appointed members and approved by a majority vote.
Two months after hiring Mitchell, CPI brought on as senior partner Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth and final White House chief of staff. The former real estate developer and North Carolina congressman was a founding member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and played an important role [123] in the 2013 federal government shutdown that tried but ultimately failed to kill funding for the Affordable Care Act. The Jan. 6 committee has put Meadows at the center of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, thanks in part to the 9,000 pages [124] of documents he turned over to the committee’s investigators. For example, Meadows and Mitchell were both part of Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find 11,780 votes” — the minimum needed to overcome Biden’s edge in the state. Meadows also discussed sending Georgia election investigators what an aide called [125] “a shitload of POTUS stuff,” including coins and autographed MAGA hats. A Georgia grand jury is now looking into potential charges [126] related to Trump’s rebuffed request.
Though the House recommended Meadows be held in contempt for refusing to comply with a committee’s subpoena, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on June 3 that it would not prosecute him [127]. CPI, for its part, has dismissed the Jan. 6 committee as “desperate primetime theater.” [128] Indeed, among those CPI named in its latest report as its “Heroes of 2021” was none other than Meadows, who’s currently under investigation [129] for registering to vote simultaneously in three states [130] — Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, where the owner of a mobile home in rural Macon County whose address appeared on his registration form told the New Yorker [131] that Meadows “never spent a night.”
But none of that matters to CPI, which takes an “own the libs” approach to its work. “As President Trump’s most loyal and effective chief of staff, Meadows steered Trump’s White House through some of its toughest fights against the Left,” it says in the annual report. “When Mark left government service in January 2021, he wanted to keep up the fight. That made CPI his obvious landing spot.”
Building a poll watcher cavalry
Trump’s major investment in CPI and Meadows’ arrival there in 2021 coincided with a financial boom for the nonprofit. Between its founding in 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue increased steadily from $1.8 million to $7.3 million, according to its latest annual report. But in 2021, CPI’s revenue soared almost 170% to $19.7 million — helped in no small part by Trump’s personal endorsement [31] in a fundraising letter, in which he said CPI is “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” The nonprofit is currently working to buy more buildings surrounding its headquarters, the Conservative Partnership Center, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI is not allowed to get directly involved in elections, nor is it legally required to disclose its donors. But the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) Sourcewatch.org website has compiled some funding data [132] for the organization by scouring foundation reports. One of CPI’s biggest donors, giving $2.25 million from 2018 to 2020, is the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation controlled by right-wing mega-donor Richard Uihlein, founder of the Wisconsin-based shipping and business supply company Uline. In addition, CPI has received significant funding — at least $732,500 — from DonorsTrust [133], a nonprofit fund that exists to protect the identity of individual conservative donors.
Also among CPI’s major donors, giving it at least $300,000, according to Sourcewatch.org, is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the largest conservative foundations in the United States. CPI’s Cleta Mitchell currently sits on Bradley’s board. In 2017, CMD published a series of stories [134] on the Milwaukee-based foundation that exposed a highly political agenda, including efforts to dismantle and defund unions [135] in order to impact state elections. Bradley’s current president is Art Pope of North Carolina, the millionaire owner of the Variety Wholesalers discount retail chain; a former state legislator, state budget director, and current member of UNC’s Board of Governors; and a leading conservative donor in his own right through his family’s John William Pope Foundation.
Among CPI’s Election Integrity Network’s top spending priorities this year is a series of election summits it held in seven key swing states, three of them in the South: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to the summit websites, the other groups sponsoring the events included Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Heritage Action for America; Tea Party Patriots Action, part of a network of related groups that took part in the rally [136] before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack; and FreedomWorks, a leading tea party organization now aligned with Trump. Another sponsor was the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which promotes voter roll purges [137]; its board is chaired by Mitchell and includes attorney John Eastman, who has emerged as another key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by promoting the baseless theory that the vice president has the authority to block certification of an election.
...
Another speaker at CPI’s elections summits was Lynn Taylor, president and co-founder of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that belongs to the conservative State Policy Network. CPI says Taylor worked closely with Mitchell to build a grassroots team of poll watchers and election workers heading into Virginia’s elections last fall. The group says it saw Virginia, where off-year elections decided party control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, as a “test case for the election integrity movement.” In August 2021, CPI brought nearly 300 conservative activists together in Richmond to learn about voter rolls, voter registration, and how to set up local and state task forces to monitor elections. And perhaps not coincidentally, local elections officials in Virginia reported [138] seeing more poll watchers than in previous years, with Republicans far outnumbering Democrats. Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe by a 51–49 margin, seized on the disinformation-driven concerns about fraud by inviting Virginia voters to join his “election integrity task force” and to get involved in poll watching.
The Election Integrity Network is an in-house project for CPI, but the group also launches spinoff organizations that provide jobs for Trump loyalists. They include the American Accountability Foundation led by Tom Jones, a former opposition research director for Trump ally U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, which targets President Biden’s judicial nominees; America First Legal, a right-wing counterpart to the ACLU led by former Trump advisor and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller; the Center for Renewing America, which creates model legislation to ban the teaching of critical race theory and is led by former Trump Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, with former Trump Homeland Security official and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli serving as a senior fellow along with Jeffrey Clark [139], the former DOJ lawyer who Trump sought to install as attorney general [140] in the days before the Capitol riot; the American Cornerstone Institute, a think tank led by former Trump Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson that launched a learning platform and app called the Little Patriots Program to provide children with an alternative to what it calls “woke” history; American Moment, which identifies and educates young people to get involved in conservative politics; Compass Legal Services and Compass Professional Services, which provide basic support to both new and established conservative groups; and the State Freedom Caucus Network, which supports conservative state elected officials and connects them with the U.S. House Freedom Caucus. CPI reports [114] that it plans to launch a separate political action committee, State Freedom Caucus Action, to defend legislators facing tough reelections. And even with the Jan. 6 committee closing in on one of its principals, the group sounds optimistic about the possibilities.
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“The Jan. 6 committee showed that the Save America PAC sent $5 million to Event Strategies, the company that organized the rally preceding the Capitol riot. It paid $204,857 to Trump’s hotel business. And it donated $1 million each to the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank led in part by former Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow and former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon, and the Washington, D.C.-based Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).”
$1 million dollars to the Conservative Policy Institute and another million to the AFPI, both from the Save America PAC, Donald Trump’s super PAC. The same super PAC that was scamming small donors right up to the last moment before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, Recall how the AFPI is described as playing a key role in the Schedule F effort. Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director, is leading the AFPI. It was like a $1 million donation to keep Schedule F going.
And then there’s the $1 million to the CPI. It was clearly an investment. Trump doesn’t give away that kind of money as a gift. And as we’re going to see, there’s plenty of ways the CPI yields returns on that investment. From hiring key figures involved in the plot to steal the 2020 election like Mark Meadows the Cleta Mitchell, both hired shortly after the Trump administration’s ignominious end. And both participants in the now notorious phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find 11,780 votes”. The CPI was both the last first of the scoundrels behind the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the home base for plotting the overturning of the next election:
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Many of CPI’s key players came from the Trump administration. For example, its president and CEO is Ed Corrigan, who led the Trump transition team’s personnel selection process for domestic policy departments. In January 2021, CPI hired Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who played a central role in Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential race and who — after coming under fire for her role in baselessly challenging the results in Georgia — quit her job at the prestigious Foley & Lardner firm where she had represented the National Rifle Association, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. She now leads CPI’s “Election Integrity Network,” [117] which aims to train conservative poll watchers as part of a broader effort to create enough disputes to justify intervention in the election [118] by Republican-controlled state legislatures. CPI’s Election Integrity Network also fought federal legislation to expand voting rights, including the For the People Act [119], the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act [120], and the Freedom to Vote Act [121]. Last November, Mitchell was appointed to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s board of advisors [122], which has no rule making authority but offers recommendations; she was nominated by the commission’s Republican-appointed members and approved by a majority vote.Two months after hiring Mitchell, CPI brought on as senior partner Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth and final White House chief of staff. The former real estate developer and North Carolina congressman was a founding member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and played an important role [123] in the 2013 federal government shutdown that tried but ultimately failed to kill funding for the Affordable Care Act. The Jan. 6 committee has put Meadows at the center of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, thanks in part to the 9,000 pages [124] of documents he turned over to the committee’s investigators. For example, Meadows and Mitchell were both part of Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find 11,780 votes” — the minimum needed to overcome Biden’s edge in the state. Meadows also discussed sending Georgia election investigators what an aide called [125] “a shitload of POTUS stuff,” including coins and autographed MAGA hats. A Georgia grand jury is now looking into potential charges [126] related to Trump’s rebuffed request.
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The fact that the CPI is chaired by Jim DeMint is consistent with the CPI’s radical overall agenda. He was hired to chair the CPI following his stint as the guy who turned the Heritage Foundation into a hack Tea Party organization that dropped any pretense of respectability. So of course the CPI has become the stomping ground for figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Figures who played their own role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Recall the early reports of “reconnaissance tours” of insurrectionists in the halls of the Capitol by Republican members of Congress days before Jan 6 [141]. Boebert is a named suspect in those tours. [142] Also recall the networking around planning the ‘wild’ Jan 6 rally that Ali Alexander was doing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, and Louie Gohmert and the allegations the members of congress were peddling blanket pardon offers on behalf of the White House. [143] These are the CPI’s fellow travelers:
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CPI is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit founded in 2017 and chaired by Jim DeMint, who represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005 and the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. A leading figure in the far-right tea party movement that opposed President Obama, DeMint went on to serve as president of the Heritage Foundation but resigned from the conservative think tank in 2017 at the unanimous request of the board, which cited [111] “significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation.” Mickey Edwards, one of Heritage’s founding trustees and a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told Politico [68] at the time that DeMint changed Heritage “from a highly respected think tank to just a partisan tool and more ideological — more of a tea party organization than a think tank.”At CPI, DeMint is free to embrace his fringe leanings. The stated mission [112] of the group, which has a staff [113] of 20, is “to serve and support the conservative movement on Capitol Hill.” According to its 2021 annual report [114], CPI trained 49 members of Congress last year as well as 246 staff members from 132 congressional offices. It offers broadcast studios and spaces for meetings and events, convenes coalitions of conservative organizations, and vets, trains, and places congressional staff. Among the members of Congress it cites as using its services are far-right Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, outspoken election deniers who were among the 147 House Republicans [115] who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race after the Capitol attack. Greene is also among the six Republican House members [116] that the Jan. 6 committee has identified as having sought pardons from President Trump in the riot’s aftermath.
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Trump’s $1 million donation though his super PAC was just part of the support gives to the CPI, Trump personally endorsed the group in a 2021 fundraising letter, a year when the group’s fundraising exploded. The CNP’s CPI is completely dedicated to Trump’s agenda. Because of course it is. Trump’s agenda is the CNP’s agenda:
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Trump’s major investment in CPI and Meadows’ arrival there in 2021 coincided with a financial boom for the nonprofit. Between its founding in 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue increased steadily from $1.8 million to $7.3 million, according to its latest annual report. But in 2021, CPI’s revenue soared almost 170% to $19.7 million — helped in no small part by Trump’s personal endorsement [31] in a fundraising letter, in which he said CPI is “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” The nonprofit is currently working to buy more buildings surrounding its headquarters, the Conservative Partnership Center, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
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But, of course, Trump’s agenda is the agenda of this broader mega-donor network. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised to see significant contributions to the CPI from anonymous mega-donors using the Koch network’s DonorsTrust ‘nonprofit’ to make those anonymous contributions. The $300,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation — which has Cleta Mitchell sitting on its board — is another example of the mainstream nature of the CPI’s funding. At least the mainstream for right-wing mega-donors:
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As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI is not allowed to get directly involved in elections, nor is it legally required to disclose its donors. But the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) Sourcewatch.org website has compiled some funding data [132] for the organization by scouring foundation reports. One of CPI’s biggest donors, giving $2.25 million from 2018 to 2020, is the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation controlled by right-wing mega-donor Richard Uihlein, founder of the Wisconsin-based shipping and business supply company Uline. In addition, CPI has received significant funding — at least $732,500 — from DonorsTrust [133], a nonprofit fund that exists to protect the identity of individual conservative donors.Also among CPI’s major donors, giving it at least $300,000, according to Sourcewatch.org, is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the largest conservative foundations in the United States. CPI’s Cleta Mitchell currently sits on Bradley’s board. In 2017, CMD published a series of stories [134] on the Milwaukee-based foundation that exposed a highly political agenda, including efforts to dismantle and defund unions [135] in order to impact state elections. Bradley’s current president is Art Pope of North Carolina, the millionaire owner of the Variety Wholesalers discount retail chain; a former state legislator, state budget director, and current member of UNC’s Board of Governors; and a leading conservative donor in his own right through his family’s John William Pope Foundation.
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Also note the relationship between Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman — one of the central players in orchestrating the efforts to steal the election [144] — via the CPI’s “Election Integrity Network”: The series of ‘election integrity summits’ held by the group were sponsored by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Both Mitchell and Eastman sit on the Public Interest Legal Foundation board. Recall the other figures deeply involved with the CNP’s ‘election integrity’ efforts who are members of this organization. As we saw, both CNP-member J Christian Adams and Heritage Foundation member Hans von Spakovsky — two of the GOP’s leading ‘election integrity’ ‘experts’ — have been trotted out in front of Congress to make unsubstantiated wild claims about mass voter fraud [10]. In addition to sitting on the Public Interest Legal Foundation board, Spakovksy continues to head the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Both the Public Interest Legal Foundation and the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative are funded by the Bradley Foundation [12]. Again, the CPI’s ‘MAGA’ agenda is the agenda of this broader right-wing mega-donor network. We know this because they’re paying for it:
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Among CPI’s Election Integrity Network’s top spending priorities this year is a series of election summits it held in seven key swing states, three of them in the South: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to the summit websites, the other groups sponsoring the events included Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Heritage Action for America; Tea Party Patriots Action, part of a network of related groups that took part in the rally [136] before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack; and FreedomWorks, a leading tea party organization now aligned with Trump. Another sponsor was the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which promotes voter roll purges [137]; its board is chaired by Mitchell and includes attorney John Eastman, who has emerged as another key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by promoting the baseless theory that the vice president has the authority to block certification of an election.
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Finally, it’s worth noting the extensive CNP connections to the State Policy Network, another right-wing ‘think tank’ that’s involved with these ‘election integrity’ efforts. The President of the State Policy Network is CNP member Tracy Sharp [17]. Lynn Taylor — the president and co-founder of the State Policy Network’s offshoot, the Virginia Institute for Public Policy — is the widow of former State Policy Network CEO John Taylor [145], who also shows up on the CNP membership list [17]. And as we’ve seen, the State Policy Network has received significant funding from the Koch network of mega-donors [146]. As we’ve also seen, one of the State Policy Network’s offshoots, Federalism in Action, was involved with promoting the Bundy clan’s attempts to takeover federal lands [147]. Extremism is mainstream in the realm of dark money. Because this is all one big extremist network:
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Another speaker at CPI’s elections summits was Lynn Taylor, president and co-founder of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that belongs to the conservative State Policy Network. CPI says Taylor worked closely with Mitchell to build a grassroots team of poll watchers and election workers heading into Virginia’s elections last fall. The group says it saw Virginia, where off-year elections decided party control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, as a “test case for the election integrity movement.” In August 2021, CPI brought nearly 300 conservative activists together in Richmond to learn about voter rolls, voter registration, and how to set up local and state task forces to monitor elections. And perhaps not coincidentally, local elections officials in Virginia reported [138] seeing more poll watchers than in previous years, with Republicans far outnumbering Democrats. Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe by a 51–49 margin, seized on the disinformation-driven concerns about fraud by inviting Virginia voters to join his “election integrity task force” and to get involved in poll watching.
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Big extreme plans are in the works. Schedule F is just the big extreme starting plan to get the fascist ball rolling.
The Dark Enlightenment’s Schedule F Purge Plans: Curtis Yarvin, J.D. Vance, and the Plans to Purge Every Institution in the US
So what can we expect after the big Schedule F blitzkrieg at the beginning of the next Republican administration? That presumably depends on how of a ‘Caesar’ mood the new Republican president is feeling. But it won’t just be up that president. The broader right-wing mega-donor powerbroker establishment will presumably want to have its say. And that brings us to the following profoundly disturbing interview published in Vox just two weeks before the 2022 midterms. An interview of a figure whose ideas were long described as ‘outside the mainstream’. But not so outside the mainstream anymore: Curtis Yarbin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug.
As we’ve seen, in addition to Yarvin’s role as a kind of ideological fellow traveler of Peter Thiel [34] and an influence on Seasteading movement [35], Yarvin is also reportedly close to CNP-member Steve Bannon, creating a backchannel between Yarvin and the Trump White House [36]. Yarvin and Bannon even worked together to turn Brietbart into a mainstreaming vehicle for the ‘Alt Right’ [37]. And as we’re going to see in the following Vox piece, Yarvin’s influence with conservative circles has only blossomed in recent years following the Claremont Institute’s publication of his writings. He’s apparently mainstream enough that Senator-elect JD Vance felt comfortable crediting Yarvin with an idea Vance had about what Trump should do should he win a second term. And idea that could be described as ‘Schedule F+’: Vance wanted to see a full aggressive implementation of Schedule F across government. As he put it, Trump should “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, and “replace them with our people.” In other words, Schedule F. But Vance had an addition proposal for Trump: ignore the courts if they get in the way, including the Supreme Court. Just ignore them. That was the idea Vance credited to Yarvin a year before getting elected to the Senate to represent Ohio in a campaign initially bankrolled by Peter Thiel.
Yarvin got an opportunity to share those views that Vance was all excited about with the world in the following Vox interview published two weeks before the elections. And while Yarvin doesn’t explicitly talk about “Schedule F”, it’s clear that’s what he was talking about just as it was clear that’s what Vance was proposing. And as Yarvin makes clear, any plot to purge the federal government of non-MAGA loyalists is really just an opening plot. The revolution will only accelerate at that point. A revolution that Yarvin has spent A LOT of time thinking about. A talking about. And writing about. And Yarvin has fans. Mainstream conservative establishment fans thanks, in part, to the Claremont Institute’s to publish Yarvin’s writings in 2019 as a topic of discussion. Fans like JD Vance, who has apparently heard Yarvin advocating for the aggressive use of something sounding a lot like Schedule F. Recall how Vance serves on the board of American Moment, one of the CPI spinoff groups involved with recruiting young college conservatives to fill government roles as part of the Schedule F planning. Vance isn’t just talking about putting Schedule F into effect. He’s actively preparing.
And Yarvin’s idea’s go way beyond ignoring the courts in the following interview. Yarvin advocated that Someone should just declare control over all US institutions, fire all non-loyalists, and just take over. State and local governments — where Democrats will often be in power — should just be dissolved. Just a formal end to democracy in the form of takeover blitzkrieg. Elite media and academic institutions could just be shut down. If the courts get in the way they will be demoted to an advisory status. Yarvin is convinced this will be a popular move. People are just sick of democracy not working and they’re ready for something new. He even suggests someone should run for office on the platform, perhaps as early as 2024. And while Yarvin doesn’t actually refer to Schedule F in the Vox interview, it’s pretty clear that the scenarios he’s talking about would at least start with the aggressive implementation of a Schedule F mass purge across the federal government. The full blown ending of democracy and authoritarian takeover wouldn’t necessarily have to happen after you purge the government of all non-loyalists. But it will be a lot easier [33]:
Vox
Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans.
The New Right blogger has been cited by Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. What exactly is he advocating?
By Andrew Prokop
Oct 24, 2022, 5:00am EDTIn September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared [148] on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things...”
Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student named Blake Masters, asked by a friend for reading recommendations for a book club, emailed [149] a link to a set of blog posts. These posts made an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, asserting that the democratically elected US government should be abolished and replaced with a monarchy. Its author, then writing pseudonymously, was Yarvin.
Masters is now the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona. At a campaign event last year, according to Vanity Fair’s James Pogue [150], he was asked how he’d actually drain the swamp in Washington. “One of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE — Retire All Government Employees,” Masters answered. You’ve probably guessed who the friend is.
In many thousand words’ worth of blog posts over the past 15 years, computer programmer and tech startup founder Curtis Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy [151]: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and captured.
But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power [152],” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist [153]” — a term he disputes [154], arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy [155]” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures.
Besides Vance and Masters (whose campaigns declined to comment for this story), Yarvin has had a decade-long association with [156] billionaire Peter Thiel, who is similarly disillusioned with democracy and American government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year, he declared [157] that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.” Fox host Tucker Carlson is another fan, interviewing Yarvin with some fascination [158] for his streaming program last year. He’s even influenced online discourse — Yarvin was the first [159] to popularize the analogy from The Matrix of being “redpilled” or “-pilled,” suddenly losing your illusions and seeing the supposed reality of the world more clearly, as applied to politics.
Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right [160] — a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite — ideas for the second term [24], such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot [161] this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has written a playbook [162] for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
So these ideas are no longer entirely just abstract musings — it’s unclear how many powerful people may take Yarvin entirely literally, but many do take him seriously. And after the 2020 election crisis, the fall of American democracy seems rather more plausible than it used to. To better understand the ideas influencing a growing number of conservative elites now, and the battles that may lie ahead, then, I reviewed much of Yarvin’s sizable body of work, and I interviewed him.
During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see why further movement down that road would be.
From obscure “anti-democracy” blogger to New Right influencer
In Yarvin’s telling [163], his political awakening occurred during the 2004 election. A computer programmer living in Silicon Valley, he was then an avid reader of political blogs, following the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth [164]” scandal about whether Democratic nominee John Kerry had lied about aspects of his military service. Yarvin thought it was clear Kerry had lied, and felt the media went to stunning lengths to protect him and smear his accusers. But he also became disillusioned with the conservative response, which he thought amounted to ineffectively complaining about “media bias” and continuing with politics as usual. The problem, he felt, was far deeper.
An intense period of reading old books on political theory and history to contemplate how systems work followed. Eventually, he (as he later put it) “stopped believing in democracy [151],” comparing this realization to how formerly religious people feel when they stop believing in God. Soon, he began posting blog comments [165], and then writing a self-described “anti-democracy blog [151]” beginning in 2007, under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” In these writings — discursive, filled with historical references, wry, and often gleefully offensive [166] — he laid out a sort of grand theory of why America is broken, and how it can be fixed:
* The US government is a sclerotic, decaying institution that can no longer achieve great or even competent things and, as he now puts it [167], “just sucks.” Constrained by the separation of powers and Congress, the president has “negligible power [168]” to achieve his agenda [165] in contrast to the “deep state” bureaucracy [159] and the nonprofits that are permanent fixtures of Washington’s governing class.
* True power in the US is held by “the Cathedral [169]” — elite academic and media institutions that, in Yarvin’s telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames. This does not unfold as a centralized conspiracy, but rather through a shared worldview and culture, and it’s his explanation for why society keeps moving to the left through the decades.
* It’s not just the current government that sucks — democracy sucks, too. Sometimes he denounces democracy entirely, calling it a “dangerous, malignant form of government [170].” Sometimes he says democracy doesn’t even practically exist in the US, because voters don’t have true power [171] over the government as compared to those other interests, which function as an oligarchy. Sometimes he argues [172] that organizations in which leadership is shared or divided simply aren’t effective.
* Far preferable, in his view, would be a government run like most corporations — with one leader holding absolute power over those below, though perhaps accountable to a “board of directors” of sorts (he admits that [172] “an unaccountable autocracy is a real problem”). This monarch/CEO would have the ability to actually run things, unbothered by pesky civil servants, judges, voters, the public, or the separation of powers. “How do we achieve effective management? We know one simple way: find the right person, and put him or her in charge,” he writes [173].For years, Yarvin was something of an odd internet curiosity, with his ideas far from most political conservatives’ radar. He gained one prominent reader — Thiel, who had written about his own disillusionment with democracy [174], became a Yarvin friend, and funded his startup [175]. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin later wrote of Thiel in an email [176], “just plays it very carefully.” (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.) Beyond that, ideas bloggers like Robin Hanson [177] and Scott Alexander [178] argued with him, and he gradually got more attention for being a leading figure in the “neoreactionary” movement [179].
Though his blog was pseudonymous, he had not made a particularly extensive effort to keep his identity secret, appearing in person as Moldbug to give a talk [180] at a conference in 2012. In the following years, journalists began [181] to write about him by name [182], and though he soon put his blog on hiatus [183] to focus on his startup, outrage over some of his writings continued to follow him. Yarvin was disinvited [184] from one tech conference in 2015 after protests, and his appearance at another [185] in 2016 led several sponsors and speakers to withdraw.
The sticking points commonly cited by his critics included one Moldbug post on historical thought about slavery [186], which was seized on as proof that he was “pro-slavery [185]” and racist. In a response [187], he said he believes in the biological roots of intelligence and does not believe that all populations (or racial groups) are equally intelligent, on average. But he insisted racism was “despicable” and said he did not believe Europeans have any inherent or “moral superiority” over other races. Another post that spurred outrage discussed far-right Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik — Yarvin argued [188] that the political organizations of left heroes like Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela [189] also murdered civilians, and they should face condemnation, too.
Yarvin was out of the blogging game for the early Trump years (though he did attend [190] Thiel’s watch party for the 2016 election). But in his time away, his influence grew. To some on the right, Yarvin’s longtime obsessions seemed both prescient and clarifying. The “Cathedral” anticipated the “Great Awokening [191]” and the social justice wars, as Jacob Siegel has written [192]. Presidential powerlessness before the “deep state” predicted Trump’s struggles in getting his agenda done.
Additionally, Trump himself proved a filter of sorts to the conservative intellectual class. As the president disdained the norms of classically liberal democracy, conservatives who were attached to those norms either self-selected out of the party or got purged. The pro-Trump intellectual space was taken by the New Right [160], thinkers arguing the left’s control of culture, society, and government have gotten so bad that extreme measures were necessary to reverse it — and that previous GOP leaders were too hesitant [193] to fully recognize they’re in a war and need to fight back.
Take, for instance, Vance. In explaining to podcast host Jack Murphy [194] why he became a Trump supporter after initially disdaining him [195], Vance said, “I saw and realized something about the American elite, and about my role in the American elite, that took me just a while to figure out. I was redpilled” — using the reference Yarvin helped popularize. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance told Murphy. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
After Yarvin stepped away from [196] his startup (the company behind the open source software project Urbit [175]) in 2019, The American Mind [197], the online publication of the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, began publishing his essays [198], effectively welcoming him into the now-mainstream discourse on the right. He became a frequent guest on New Right podcasts, and in 2020 he started a Substack [199], at first using it to post excerpts [199] from an in-progress book but eventually returning to his blogging roots. Then, when Trump tried and failed to overturn that year’s election result, Yarvin’s longtime interest in “regime change” suddenly became far more relevant.
How to win absolute power in Washington
Talk of an American coup may sound bizarre, but coups are not that weird. They happen in other countries, and in Yarvin’s telling, they’ve even happened in the US, sort of. He argues that Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt each so sweepingly expanded presidential power, centralizing authority and establishing new departments, that they can be said to have founded new regimes.
But Yarvin wants to see something even more dramatic. In posts such as “Reflections on the late election [200]” and “The butterfly revolution [162],” and podcast appearances such as those with former Trump official Michael Anton [201] and writer Brian Chau [202], Yarvin has laid out many specific ideas about how the system could really be fully toppled and replaced with something like a centralized monarchy. Sometimes he frames this as what Trump should have done in 2020, what he should (but won’t) do in 2024, or what some other candidate should do in the future, if they want to seize power. “Trump will never do anything like this,” Yarvin wrote [162]. “But I won’t disguise my belief that someone should. Someone worthy of the task, of course.”
It is basically a set of thought experiments about how to dismantle US democracy and its current system of government. Writer John Ganz, reviewing some of Yarvin’s proposals, concluded [153], “If that’s not the product of a fascist imagination, I don’t know what possibly could be.” Many of these are similar to events preceding the fall of democracies elsewhere in the world. Again, Yarvin’s prominent fans like Vance and Masters wouldn’t fully endorse this program — Masters told NBC [155] that he would have “a different prescription” of what to do than Yarvin, and that he believes in the Constitution — but some aspects of it have caught their interest.
Campaign on it, and win: First off, the would-be dictator should seek a mandate from the people, by running for president and openly campaigning on the platform of, as he put it to Chau [203], “If I’m elected, I’m gonna assume absolute power in Washington and rebuild the government.”
The idea here would be not to frame this as destroying the American system, but rather as improving a broken system that so many are frustrated with [204]. Congress is unpopular [205], the courts are unpopular, the federal government is unpopular [206]. Why not just promise to govern as president as you see fit, without their interference? And see if people like that idea?
“You’re not that far from a world in which you can have a candidate in 2024, even, maybe,” making that pledge, Yarvin continued. “I think you could get away with it. That’s sort of what people already thought was happening with Trump,” he said. “To do it for real does not make them much more hysterical, and” — he laughed — “it’s actually much more effective!”
It no longer seems clear that voters would reject such a pitch. Trump’s ascendancy already proves [207] that many American voters are no longer so enamored of niceties about the rule of law and civics class pieties about the greatness of the American separated powers system. Political messaging about “threats to democracy” has polled poorly this year [208], with voters not particularly engaged by it.
Another piece of advice Yarvin has in this vein is that the would-be dictator should try to prevent blue America from feeling so terrified about the new regime that they take to the streets and make it all fall apart. Instead, ideally, liberals and leftists should feel so disillusioned with the status quo that they’re ready for something new. (He thought things were on a promising trajectory on this front during the early Biden administration, but has griped that the Dobbs decision [209] may have scuttled this by firing up blue America.)
Purge the federal bureaucracy and create a new one: Once the new president/would-be monarch is elected, Yarvin thinks time is of the essence [167]. “The speed that this happens with has to take everyone’s breath away,” he told Chau. “It should just execute at a rate that totally baffles its enemies.”
Yarvin says the transition period before inauguration should be used to intensively study what’s essential for the federal government to do, determine a structure for the new government, and hire many of its future employees. Then, once in power, it’s time to “Retire All Government Employees” of the old regime, sending them off with nice pensions so they won’t make too much of a fuss. To circumvent Congress, the president should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve, and direct the Fed on how to fund the new regime.
Talk of firing vast swaths of federal workers is now common on the right. In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order called “Schedule F” that would reclassify as many as 50,000 civil servants in middle management as political appointees who could be fired and replaced by the new president. Nothing came of it, and Biden quickly revoked it, but Trump’s regime-in-exile is brainstorming what could be done with it in a second term, as Axios’s Jonathan Swan has reported [24].
To Yarvin, even that is a doomed half-measure. “You should be executing executive power from day one in a totally emergency fashion,” he told Anton. “You don’t want to take control of these agencies through appointments, you want to defund them. You want them to totally cease to exist.” This would of course involve some amount of chaos, but Yarvin hopes that will be brief, and the actually essential work of government would quickly be taken over by newly created bodies that could be under the autocrat’s control.
Ignore the courts: The rule of law in America is based on shared beliefs and behaviors among many actors throughout the system, but it has no magical power. The courts have no mechanism to actually force a president to abide by their wishes should he defy their rulings. Yet, with certain notable exceptions [210], they have had an extraordinary track record at getting presidents to stay in line. Defying the Supreme Court means ending the rule of law in the US as it has long been understood.
Yarvin has suggested just that [200] — that a new president should simply say he has concluded Marbury v. Madison — the early ruling in which the Supreme Court greatly expanded its own powers — was wrongly decided. He’s also said the new president should declare a state of emergency and say he would view Supreme Court rulings as merely advisory.
Would politicians back this? J.D. Vance, in the podcast mentioned above [148], said part of his advice for Trump in his second term would involve firing vast swaths of federal employees, “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Co-opt Congress: One reason past presidents may have been reluctant to defy the Supreme Court is that there is one body that can keep them in check — Congress, which can impeach and actually remove a president from office, and ban him from running again.
Now, congressional majorities have been gradually getting more deferential to their party’s presidents. Yet the threat of impeachment and removal hung over much of Trump’s decision-making and likely prevented him from going further in several key moments. For instance, he didn’t fire special counsel Robert Mueller, and he backed down and left office after January 6 (while Mitch McConnell’s allies were leaking [211] that the GOP Senate leader might support impeachment, in an apparent threat to Trump). Congress also frequently cut Trump [212] out of policymaking, ignoring his veto threats.
Yarvin’s idea here is that Trump (or insert future would-be autocrat here) should create an app — “the Trump app [162]” — and get his supporters to sign up for it. Trump should then handpick candidates for every congressional and Senate seat whose sole purpose would be to fully support him and his agenda, and use the app to get his voters to vote for them in primaries. Trump has been picking primary favorites and had some success in open seat contests, but this would be a far more large-scale, strategic, and systematic effort.
The goal would be to create a personalistic majority that nullifies the impeachment and removal threat, and that gives the president the numbers to pass whatever legislation he wants. If you can win majorities in this way, then “congratulations, you’ve turned the US into a parliamentary dictatorship,” Yarvin told Chau. Effectively, the US’s Madisonian separation of powers will have been made moot.
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Centralize police and government powers: Moving forward in the state of emergency, Yarvin told Anton the new government should then take “direct control over all law enforcement authorities,” federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies. This amounts to establishing a centralized police state to back the power grab — as autocrats typically do.
Whether this is at all plausible in the US anytime soon — well, you’ll have to ask the National Guard and police officers. “You have to be willing to say, okay, when we have this regime change, we have a period of temporary uncertainty which has to be resolved in an extremely peaceful way,” he says.
Yarvin also wants his new monarch’s absolute power to be truly absolute, which can’t really happen so long as there are so many independently elected government power centers in (especially blue) states and cities. So they’ll have to be abolished in “almost [167]” all cases. This would surely be a towering logistical challenge and create a great deal of resistance, to put it mildly.
Shut down elite media and academic institutions: Now, recall that, according to Yarvin’s theories, true power is held by “the Cathedral,” so they have to go, too. The new monarch/dictator should order them dissolved. “You can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April,” he told Anton. After that, he says, people should be allowed to form [213] new associations and institutions if they want, but the existing Cathedral power bases must be torn down.
Turn out your people: Finally, throughout this process, Yarvin wants to be able to get the new ruler’s supporters to take to the streets. “You don’t really need an armed force, you need the maximum capacity to summon democratic power that you can find,” he told Anton. He pointed to the “Trump app” idea again, which he said could collect 80 million cell numbers and notify people to tell them where to go and protest (“peacefully”) — for instance, they could go to an agency that’s defying the new leader’s instructions, to tell them, “support the lawful orders of this new lawful authority.”
He points to the post-Soviet revolutions in Eastern Europe as a model, saying the enormous mass of people “shouldn’t be menacing in this January 6 sense, it should have this joyous sense that you’re actually winning and winning forever and the world is being completely remade.” And he says that though many police officers follow orders during their day jobs, many of them also support Trump — so perhaps they could signal that by putting on “a special armband.”
“If the institutions deny the President the Constitutional position he has legally won in the election, the voters will have to act directly,” Yarvin wrote [162]. “Trump will call his people into the streets—not at the end of his term, when he is most powerless; at the start, when he is most powerful. No one wants to see this nuclear option happen. Preparing for it and demonstrating the capacity to execute it will prevent it from having to happen.”
Sowing seeds of doubt in democracy
Yarvin and I spoke for nearly two and a half hours recently. He peppered his comments with hundreds of historical references, and, as he often does with left interlocutors, he focused on areas where he appeared to believe he could find common ground. He was at pains to reassure me that he didn’t believe the US regime was going to fall anytime soon, saying this was a “generational, not immediate” process.
“Part of my project now is to say let’s make this a little less of an abstraction, let’s imagine what it might look like in a way that it doesn’t scare anyone,” he said. “It is dangerous! Any kind of serious political change is dangerous. And where we are is also dangerous,” he said. He named specifically the possibility of nuclear war [214] in Ukraine, which does seem quite dangerous, though it cannot be laid solely at the feet of democracy. And while saying he was not exactly a fan of FDR, he sang the praises of New Deal Washington as a time when the US government could actually achieve impressive things, bemoaning that it no longer can.
All this is more politic than Mencius Moldbug’s old approach of throwing rhetorical bombs at the left, and he’s given an explanation of this shift. On his Substack, he has used [209] a Lord of the Rings metaphor in which red-staters are “hobbits,” battling the elite blue-stater “elves,” but with “dark elf” allies — elite blue-staters like him. “The first job of the dark elves is to seduce the high elves — to sow acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds,” he wrote. Then perhaps they’ll change sides, or at least their “conviction and energy” may flag. “Today’s global elites are invulnerable to any external coercive power and can coerce any internal coercive power,” he continued. “Like the USSR, they can only overthrow themselves.”
That is: He wants to convince elite liberals and leftists to lose faith in the system, believing that when enough of them no longer want to defend it, it will be easier to topple. In his thinking, that’s the prerequisite for regime change. “??When you see cultural elites developing a sense of possibility in a broader sense which is outside the sort of matrix of conventional belief, then you’re like, okay, something interesting is starting to happen,” he told me.
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But of course Yarvin’s villains (the media, academia, the “deep state”) are different from the villains in the progressive story (moneyed interests, bigotry or systemic bias, religious extremists, ignorant red-staters). And what he’d want his monarch to do with all that power is different, too: He’s written about his idea to deter crime [215] by putting an ankle monitor on anyone who’s not rich or employed, and to create “relocation centers [215]” for “decivilized subpopulations.”
So if you’re trying to increase left-right agreement that the current system is fatally flawed, I asked him, is it really possible to please both sides about what the new system will offer? Might you be trying to sell the left a bill of goods, claiming this future monarchy will be better, when it will actually be far worse for them?
“Neither side should be sold a bill of goods,” he answered. “This is not a homogeneous country; it’s never been. There’s a lot of people in this country who have to share the same land. That’s a solvable problem.” He referenced the long-running conflict between plebeians and patricians in the Roman Republic, which he said was made irrelevant by Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus’s centralization of power. “Imagine in America if this red state/blue state, race war, class war, all this shit, it’s just gone,” he said.
The picture was so rosy that the music of John Lennon began playing in my head. It is certainly possible to imagine a much more effective government under one-man rule than the one we have now. Perhaps if we picked out the perfect brilliant, ingenious, compassionate king (with a wise board of directors he’d respect rather than supplant), it all would work out well. It could also, of course, work out very poorly.
Even if the darkest scenarios don’t come about, sclerosis and decay are hardly problems unique to democratic systems — they’ve affected autocracies throughout history, up to today [216]. It is difficult to ensure the leader’s incentives are focused on good governance rather than on entrenching himself in power. The corporate model, which Yarvin praises, also often leads to dysfunctional bureaucracy, not to mention that governing a country might simply be a different sort of problem than running a company.
But in a practical sense, Yarvin’s long-term ambitions for the new regime matter less than his ideas about how the old one could fall. Yarvin’s popularity among rising Republicans and New Right intellectuals reveals this cohort is more and more willing to entertain ideas that are out of the mainstream. Some ambitious figure, or even Trump himself, could well try to follow his playbook in a future crisis.
If they do, despite Yarvin’s urging that the revolution should be “absolutely bloodless [217],” there’s no telling how messy things could get. All the declarations that America is currently falling apart could look quaint by comparison to what comes, if the rule of law is shredded and the current order is toppled. “If you yank out a tooth, you cannot automatically expect a new and better tooth to grow back,” the economist Tyler Cowen recently wrote [160], in a critique of the New Right. The best-laid plans of revolutionaries very often go awry.
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“But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.”
A lot has changed for Curtis Yarvin over the years. He isn’t just focused on promoting the Dark Enlightenment philosophy. He has a more actionable goal: gaming out the collapse of the US democracy. And as should be clear by now, he’s no longer some obscure blogger ranting into the wilderness. His ideas for how to carry out a government coup are basically mainstream ideas within the contemporary Trumpified conservative movement. He’s even has his writings published by the Claremont Institute starting in 2019. Again, recall how the Claremont Institute was running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election that ironically envisioned all sorts of scenarios involving leftist mobs occupying capitols. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection [21]. Also recall how John Eastman is working for the CRA, which has Schedule F as one of its main focuses. You can’t really make sense of the insurrectionary fervor of the GOP without accounting for the growing influence and mainstreaming of Yarvin’s ideas. When John Eastman was making up BS legal excuses for Trump to oppose the election results that even ne knew were BS, he was channeling Yarvin. Just Do It. That’s Yarvin’s slogan. Just go ahead and grab the power and declare your instituational enemies invalid.
And while Yarvin may not be using the phrase ‘Schedule F’ when he issues these calls for a mass purge of institutions across the US, it’s pretty obvious that he’s very much talking about Schedule F. He’s just doing it using the hyperbolic revolutionary language of the ‘Alt-Right’ aka the ‘New Right’ where they just come out and admit their plans to end democracy. And despite that open talk of ending democracy and purging institutions across the US of any and all ‘leftists’, Yarvin’s essays started getting openly promoted by the Claremont Institute back in 2019, “effectively welcoming him into the now-mainstream discourse on the right.” That’s part of the disturbing context of Yarvin willingness to talk so openly about what sounds like Schedule F on steroids. He’s not fighting for acceptance. This is post-Jan 6. Curtis Yarvin is leading followers with an interview like that:
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To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power [152],” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist [153]” — a term he disputes [154], arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy [155]” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures....
Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right [160] — a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite — ideas for the second term [24], such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot [161] this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has written a playbook [162] for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
So these ideas are no longer entirely just abstract musings — it’s unclear how many powerful people may take Yarvin entirely literally, but many do take him seriously. And after the 2020 election crisis, the fall of American democracy seems rather more plausible than it used to. To better understand the ideas influencing a growing number of conservative elites now, and the battles that may lie ahead, then, I reviewed much of Yarvin’s sizable body of work, and I interviewed him.
During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see why further movement down that road would be.
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Yarvin was out of the blogging game for the early Trump years (though he did attend [190] Thiel’s watch party for the 2016 election). But in his time away, his influence grew. To some on the right, Yarvin’s longtime obsessions seemed both prescient and clarifying. The “Cathedral” anticipated the “Great Awokening [191]” and the social justice wars, as Jacob Siegel has written [192]. Presidential powerlessness before the “deep state” predicted Trump’s struggles in getting his agenda done.
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After Yarvin stepped away from [196] his startup (the company behind the open source software project Urbit [175]) in 2019, The American Mind [197], the online publication of the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, began publishing his essays [198], effectively welcoming him into the now-mainstream discourse on the right. He became a frequent guest on New Right podcasts, and in 2020 he started a Substack [199], at first using it to post excerpts [199] from an in-progress book but eventually returning to his blogging roots. Then, when Trump tried and failed to overturn that year’s election result, Yarvin’s longtime interest in “regime change” suddenly became far more relevant.
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And as Yarvin has observed, his ideas for overthrowing democracy are already so mainstream within the conservative movement that he now advocates that someone run for the presidency on a platform of ending democracy and seizing power. It would be a popular platform, as Yarvin sees it. He could even imagine a candidate running on that platform in 2024. It’s also worth noting the keen interest of figures like Peter Thiel, Steven Bannon, and Robert Mercer in the growing field of psychedelic medicine and the evidence showing that psychedelics can help people resist authoritarian worldviews [218]. It should be pretty clear by now that a population gripped by authoritarian mindsets is absolutely central to the futures envisioned by these fascist networks:
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Talk of an American coup may sound bizarre, but coups are not that weird. They happen in other countries, and in Yarvin’s telling, they’ve even happened in the US, sort of. He argues that Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt each so sweepingly expanded presidential power, centralizing authority and establishing new departments, that they can be said to have founded new regimes.But Yarvin wants to see something even more dramatic. In posts such as “Reflections on the late election [200]” and “The butterfly revolution [162],” and podcast appearances such as those with former Trump official Michael Anton [201] and writer Brian Chau [202], Yarvin has laid out many specific ideas about how the system could really be fully toppled and replaced with something like a centralized monarchy. Sometimes he frames this as what Trump should have done in 2020, what he should (but won’t) do in 2024, or what some other candidate should do in the future, if they want to seize power. “Trump will never do anything like this,” Yarvin wrote [162]. “But I won’t disguise my belief that someone should. Someone worthy of the task, of course.”
It is basically a set of thought experiments about how to dismantle US democracy and its current system of government. Writer John Ganz, reviewing some of Yarvin’s proposals, concluded [153], “If that’s not the product of a fascist imagination, I don’t know what possibly could be.” Many of these are similar to events preceding the fall of democracies elsewhere in the world. Again, Yarvin’s prominent fans like Vance and Masters wouldn’t fully endorse this program — Masters told NBC [155] that he would have “a different prescription” of what to do than Yarvin, and that he believes in the Constitution — but some aspects of it have caught their interest.
Campaign on it, and win: First off, the would-be dictator should seek a mandate from the people, by running for president and openly campaigning on the platform of, as he put it to Chau [203], “If I’m elected, I’m gonna assume absolute power in Washington and rebuild the government.”
The idea here would be not to frame this as destroying the American system, but rather as improving a broken system that so many are frustrated with [204]. Congress is unpopular [205], the courts are unpopular, the federal government is unpopular [206]. Why not just promise to govern as president as you see fit, without their interference? And see if people like that idea?
“You’re not that far from a world in which you can have a candidate in 2024, even, maybe,” making that pledge, Yarvin continued. “I think you could get away with it. That’s sort of what people already thought was happening with Trump,” he said. “To do it for real does not make them much more hysterical, and” — he laughed — “it’s actually much more effective!”
It no longer seems clear that voters would reject such a pitch. Trump’s ascendancy already proves [207] that many American voters are no longer so enamored of niceties about the rule of law and civics class pieties about the greatness of the American separated powers system. Political messaging about “threats to democracy” has polled poorly this year [208], with voters not particularly engaged by it.
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And then we get to the Schedule F part of Yarvin’s 2024 Fascist Dream campaign scenario: after running and winning on a platform of consolidating power as a new Caesar, Yarvin recommends a bureaucratic blitzkrieg. Mass firings of federal workers under the ‘Schedule F’ plot would happen immediately, with new entities and agencies replacing them. It’s a recipe for a mass privatization of the government. And to pay for it all, the new Caesar should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve:
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Purge the federal bureaucracy and create a new one: Once the new president/would-be monarch is elected, Yarvin thinks time is of the essence [167]. “The speed that this happens with has to take everyone’s breath away,” he told Chau. “It should just execute at a rate that totally baffles its enemies.”Yarvin says the transition period before inauguration should be used to intensively study what’s essential for the federal government to do, determine a structure for the new government, and hire many of its future employees. Then, once in power, it’s time to “Retire All Government Employees” of the old regime, sending them off with nice pensions so they won’t make too much of a fuss. To circumvent Congress, the president should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve, and direct the Fed on how to fund the new regime.
Talk of firing vast swaths of federal workers is now common on the right. In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order called “Schedule F” that would reclassify as many as 50,000 civil servants in middle management as political appointees who could be fired and replaced by the new president. Nothing came of it, and Biden quickly revoked it, but Trump’s regime-in-exile is brainstorming what could be done with it in a second term, as Axios’s Jonathan Swan has reported [24].
To Yarvin, even that is a doomed half-measure. “You should be executing executive power from day one in a totally emergency fashion,” he told Anton. “You don’t want to take control of these agencies through appointments, you want to defund them. You want them to totally cease to exist.” This would of course involve some amount of chaos, but Yarvin hopes that will be brief, and the actually essential work of government would quickly be taken over by newly created bodies that could be under the autocrat’s control.
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The courts would then be demoted to an “advisory” branch of government and ignored. How believable is such a scenario? And, don’t forget that Thiel-backed Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance — who won his race [38] — actually advocated that exact approach for a Trump second term. Just demote and ignore the courts. That’s apparently a mainstream conservative idea now:
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Ignore the courts: The rule of law in America is based on shared beliefs and behaviors among many actors throughout the system, but it has no magical power. The courts have no mechanism to actually force a president to abide by their wishes should he defy their rulings. Yet, with certain notable exceptions [210], they have had an extraordinary track record at getting presidents to stay in line. Defying the Supreme Court means ending the rule of law in the US as it has long been understood.Yarvin has suggested just that [200] — that a new president should simply say he has concluded Marbury v. Madison — the early ruling in which the Supreme Court greatly expanded its own powers — was wrongly decided. He’s also said the new president should declare a state of emergency and say he would view Supreme Court rulings as merely advisory.
Would politicians back this? J.D. Vance, in the podcast mentioned above [148], said part of his advice for Trump in his second term would involve firing vast swaths of federal employees, “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
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Then we get to the plan to get around the threat of an impeachment: stacking the GOP with authoritarian loyalists who will back the new Caesar in everything he does. That’s already the status quo, as Jan 6 and the resulting enduring support for Donald Trump amply demonstrates. So we can check off that part of the power-grab ‘to-do’ list:
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Co-opt Congress: One reason past presidents may have been reluctant to defy the Supreme Court is that there is one body that can keep them in check — Congress, which can impeach and actually remove a president from office, and ban him from running again....
Yarvin’s idea here is that Trump (or insert future would-be autocrat here) should create an app — “the Trump app [162]” — and get his supporters to sign up for it. Trump should then handpick candidates for every congressional and Senate seat whose sole purpose would be to fully support him and his agenda, and use the app to get his voters to vote for them in primaries. Trump has been picking primary favorites and had some success in open seat contests, but this would be a far more large-scale, strategic, and systematic effort.
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What about state and local governments, which will frequently be under Democratic control? Oh, they’ll have to be dissolved, along with all major universities. Poof. Gone. This will presumably all fall under the plan of creating a sense of ‘shock and awe’ in the opening rounds of this coup plot:
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Centralize police and government powers: Moving forward in the state of emergency, Yarvin told Anton the new government should then take “direct control over all law enforcement authorities,” federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies. This amounts to establishing a centralized police state to back the power grab — as autocrats typically do.Whether this is at all plausible in the US anytime soon — well, you’ll have to ask the National Guard and police officers. “You have to be willing to say, okay, when we have this regime change, we have a period of temporary uncertainty which has to be resolved in an extremely peaceful way,” he says.
Yarvin also wants his new monarch’s absolute power to be truly absolute, which can’t really happen so long as there are so many independently elected government power centers in (especially blue) states and cities. So they’ll have to be abolished in “almost [167]” all cases. This would surely be a towering logistical challenge and create a great deal of resistance, to put it mildly.
Shut down elite media and academic institutions: Now, recall that, according to Yarvin’s theories, true power is held by “the Cathedral,” so they have to go, too. The new monarch/dictator should order them dissolved. “You can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April,” he told Anton. After that, he says, people should be allowed to form [213] new associations and institutions if they want, but the existing Cathedral power bases must be torn down.
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So what should this aspiring Caesar do in the face of the inevitable popular resistance to this plot? Organize vigilante mobs in support for the new regime. Something like a “Trump App” that allows the president to issue orders to his supporters is potentially all that would be required. The mob would take care of the rest:
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Turn out your people: Finally, throughout this process, Yarvin wants to be able to get the new ruler’s supporters to take to the streets. “You don’t really need an armed force, you need the maximum capacity to summon democratic power that you can find,” he told Anton. He pointed to the “Trump app” idea again, which he said could collect 80 million cell numbers and notify people to tell them where to go and protest (“peacefully”) — for instance, they could go to an agency that’s defying the new leader’s instructions, to tell them, “support the lawful orders of this new lawful authority.”...
“If the institutions deny the President the Constitutional position he has legally won in the election, the voters will have to act directly,” Yarvin wrote [162]. “Trump will call his people into the streets—not at the end of his term, when he is most powerless; at the start, when he is most powerful. No one wants to see this nuclear option happen. Preparing for it and demonstrating the capacity to execute it will prevent it from having to happen.”
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It’s worth noting that Trump’s “Truth Social” app just got added to the Google app store back in October [219]. Will Truth Social be the app-of-choice for organizing Trumpian street mobs to ‘keep the peace’ after the bureaucratic blitzkrieg gets underway in early 2025? That remains to [220] be seen [220]. But at this point it’s pretty obvious that the right-wing social media ecosystem is only going to grow heading into 2024. It’s also worth noting that none other than John McEntee has reportedly gotten into the app-making business with Peter Thiel, to make a conservative dating app [221]. These are the kinds of details that could because salient when the Schedule F blitzkrieg is actually put into action. A lot of people are going to have to be recruited into the government all of a sudden. Or recruited into the vigilante street mobs if it comes to that.
Will it come to that? Roving mobs of supporters getting directed around the streets by a president-turned-dictator’s social media apps? Let’s hope not, but there’s no denying that such thoughts are in the air. From Curtis Yarvin’s lips to JD Vance’s ears. And Vance obviously isn’t the only high-level Republican who has been drinking Yarvin’s Kool-Aid. The Republican Party is in a decidedly revolutionary mood and in no mood to run into the same bureaucratic obstacle Trump faced during his first term. But with the prospects of a Trump-rerun now on the table following Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement, it isn’t just revolution in the air. Revenge is on the agenda. The kind of revenge that will make all of Trump’s enemies rue the day they ever thought about crossing him. That cauldron of rage of grievance is poised to become the animating force in US politics. The erratic chaos of Trump’s first term replaced with a more refined and vengeful chaos of a second term. A revenge term. And a term defined by all the planned chaos. It’s easy to forget when reading all of these conservative sources describing their plans for reordering the nature of the federal workforce just how wildly chaotic that whole process would actually be if implemented. You can’t actually mix-and-max expertise and skill sets the way these Schedule F plotters are planning and expecting things to run smoothly. But smooth running isn’t what they are planning on. Revolutionary chaos is the plan. Controlled chaos, but chaos. A bureaucratic blitzkrieg so sweeping and all encompassing that the public can barely wrap its head around what’s going on. Domestic shock and awe. Exciting and enthralling shock and awe, at least for much of the public if Curtis Yarvin’s predictions on the popularity of plots is at all accurate.
That’s the plan, Trump or not. It’s not a secret. It was a secret. One of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets in 2020, as we saw. But not anymore. Those twin giant Axios articles were the Schedule F coming out party. This is the plan for 2024 and the GOP is openly owning it. Will Schedule F manage to actually make it into the party’s 2024 platform? Who knows. That’s assuming there’s even a platform at all [222]. But as we’ve seen in this post, the conservative establishment is thoroughly committed to this project, whether or not the GOP officially declares a mass purge of the federal bureaucracy in the party platform. And whether that 2024 nominee is Trump or not. This isn’t just Trump’s revenge anymore. The mega-donors want this too. The Empire is planning on Striking Back. You don’t find this many CNP members working on something without full buy-in from the GOP establishment. Just as you wouldn’t have found one CNP-member after another working on overturning the 2020 election results [2] if that strategy didn’t have the thorough backing of the CNP network and mega-donor class. Schedule F is the plan for the next Republican adminstration. And tens of millions more dollars are going to be spent getting that massive plan ready to spring into action when the opportunity strikes. The only real question at this point is when they’ll get a chance to implement. Along with the general question of just how much more popular will Curtis Yarvin’s worldview get between now and then. Is Yarvin correct that an army of average Americans are ready and willing to toss away democracy for the excitement of a Caesar? Trump or not, we are on track to getting an answer that question. Again [223].