On Cowards & Creeping Coups: The GOP Plot to Purge Federal Workers & Impose Trumpism
The GOP's plan to purge the federal bureaucracy is one leg in an ongoing coup to neuter democratic government and impose a strongman-led autocracy.
Senator Josh Hawley epitomizes the dollar store fascist. On the morning of January 6, 2021, he’s all kruppstahl-faced and blackshirt fist-waving from behind the safety of police lines at the U.S. Capitol, riling up the mob about to storm the building. By afternoon, he’s scampering for his life out a back door. All posture, no guts. When the House January 6 Committee showed the contrasting imagery at its July 21 hearing, the entire chamber broke out in laughter. Such is the lot of the spineless hypocrite.
Hawley, son of a banker and a graduate of Harvard and Yale, purports to fight against the “elites” on behalf of the common citizen. His Texas colleague, Ted Cruz, is cut from the same faux khaki. Running for the Senate in 2016, Princeton-Harvard Cruz argued that policies made in Washington “benefit the rich and the powerful at the expense of the working men and women.” (BTW, Cruz has a net worth of $4 million.) Recall his saggy self, suitcase in tow, catching a flight to Cancún as winter storms left 30 dead and millions without power and clean water in his state? He stands with Hawley as a hypocritical laughingstock of comedy fest proportions.
Here’s the thing about demagogues and would-be fuehrers: life tends not to be good to them. Mussolini, fleeing in disguise, was caught by partisans, shot to death and hung by his heels at a gas station. With the Red Army closing in, a cowering Hitler put a bullet in his head. Muammar Gaddafi was pulled out of hiding in a drainage pipe, tormented and died of knife wounds to his anus. Saddam Hussein was pulled out of a “spider hole,” filthy and bedraggled, and later summarily hanged. Nicolae Ceausescu’s 24-year dictatorship came to an end before a firing squad after a 60-minute show trial. And things tend not to go well for their underlings and enablers either as attested by the Nuremberg Trials.
So, why do they do it?
A keen observer of human frailties, Mark Twain, nails it: “No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.”
But idiots can be dangerous. Donald Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham has said, should Trump return to the presidency, “He will be about revenge. He will probably have some pretty draconian policies that go on.”
One of them is “Schedule F,” an executive order he issued just before the November 2020 election, the import of which was drowned out by the January 6 Beer Belly Putsch rioting and its aftermath.
The order’s purpose was to remove career federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” jobs from the permanent career ranks, placing them into a new category in which they would be stripped of all civil service protections, marking them as easy targets for being summarily fired and replaced with political hacks.
“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump said of the plan. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”
In one of his first acts as president, Joe Biden rescinded the order. But this has not deterred Republicans. Like a QAnon fever swamp zombie, Schedule F is returning from the undead. In a wide-ranging investigation, Axios reports on a sprawling and coordinated plan by far-right groups to identify, groom and deploy tens of thousands of MAGA shock troops to quickly take over the levers of federal power once a Republican wins the presidency. The aim is to scourge the bureaucracy and pre-empt any legal, procedural or moral resistance to the GOP’s radical right-wing agenda.
“We have a seasoned enough cadre, that if we work at it methodically, we can reshape the federal government,” Newt Gingrich said in a speech Saturday.
Trump said they expect to recruit a shadow force of unprecedented scale — as many as 10,000 vetted personnel — to replace “obstructionist” federal officials with loyalists dedicated to Trump and his “America First” agenda. Sources tell Axios their goal is to have 50,000 such personnel approved and ready to go, whichever GOP candidate wins the presidency.
GOP power brokers are utilizing a constellation of right-wing “think tanks” and other groups to realize the plan, including the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
CPI’s task is to place vetted people in the offices of newly elected Republican congressional members at the start of 2023.
CRA will issue policy papers on plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”
“We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,” CRA’s head Russ Vought told Axios.
Former Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s focus, as founder of America First Legal, is on neutralizing potential legal opposition within the federal bureaucracy by recruiting lawyers who would quickly fill general counsel positions in the next Trump administration. According to Axios, these lawyers would “aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.”
Heritage Foundation’s chief Kevin Roberts told 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.”
The Trump-approved think tank America First Policy Institute has received $1 million from the ex-president’s PAC for its 2025 personnel project to identify and vet future MAGA feds.
On the youth side, a new activist group, American Moment, is putting together lists of young people who would work to implement policies promoting family values “rooted in faith and tradition,” “law and order,” restricted immigration and “public virtue.” Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance is a board member. Its goal is to have 2,000 to 3,000 “America First” future feds in his database by mid-2024, in time to help staff a new Republican administration.
Another new group, the Personnel Policy Organization, told Axios the group is doing “quality control” on other groups’ 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.”
And not to be left out, the Koch organization is concentrating on drafting future conservative foreign policy officials.
United by fealty to Trump, or Trumpism, “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,” Axios reports.
Not usually one who succumbs to hyperbole, I call it a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a Night of the Long Knives dedicated to rapidly deploying an army of fanatical MAGA shock troops whose mission will be to purge the federal government and co-opt all government jobs that even remotely touch on making policy. It is one indispensable leg in an ongoing coup to neuter democratic government and impose a strongman-led autocracy.
Trump, new to government and behind the ball in manning his first administration, has learned his lesson — to be an effective demagogue, you must command iron-clad loyalty from hand-picked henchmen who will exert firm control over all levels of government on your behalf.
And, as for hypocritical cowards like Hawley, Cruz, Graham, McCarthy, by cowing and co-opting them — Trump’s first step in coup-making — they will continue to be your enablers, dangerous useful idiots that they are.