They Want to Replace Us – The Growing MAGA Government in Waiting

Project 2025 Recruiting Tent at the Iowa State Fair

“When your government is evil or out of line, that’s what the sheriff is there for, protecting them from that.” 

 Dar Leaf, chief law enforcement officer for Barry County, Mich.

The conspiracy of the “deep state” – that massive federal bureaucracy of leftwing radicals dedicated to the destruction of the MAGA movement and all things “Trump” – is at the core of our rising Trumpian autocracy. But the reality of recruiting a massive MAGA cadre of replacement government workers is well under way. Thousands of eager applicants are lining up, simply waiting for what they believe is the ascension of Donald Trump as the 2024 President of the United States, one way or the other. It seems like a matter of “our deep state can beat your deep state.”

Lest we forget, Trump’s last tenure in office included the severe stripping down of the US Postal Service, the Environmental Protection Agency and consumer protection agencies dedicated to financial and product/service regulation. The new Supreme Court appointments further loosened restrictions on guns, stripped away the most meaningful provisions of the Voting Rights Act, left most gerrymandered districts intact and reversed Roe vs Wade. Lower federal court appointments also limited the power of federal agencies, notably the Food and Drug Administration, and supported actions against all forms of gun control. We must not forget the impact of a Bible college graduate, with a history of railing against public schools, given the helm of the Department of Education, which she promptly tilted toward religious education and charter schools… assisting the Trump policy of whittling down the department with an eye to dissolution.

There is an arrogance among the right, the bulwark of White Christian Nationalism, that their way is not only the best path… but in fact the only path to preserve America as they see it. But it is the MAGA movement, with powerful organized institutional support like the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank, often the source of conservative judicial appointment and potential government staffing for MAGA officials in charge, that should concern us all. If Trump 2017-2021 replaced the Washington D.C. swamp as he described it, he absolutely began appointing a designer swamp of his own.

Writing for the September 4th Associated Press, Lisa Mascaro writes of one frightening Heritage Foundation-led effort to staff Trump’s expected “next federal government.”: “With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own…

“With a nearly 1,000-page ‘Project 2025’ handbook and an ‘army’ of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the ‘deep state’ bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers… ‘We need to flood the zone with conservatives,’ said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking… ‘This is a clarion call to come to Washington,’ he said. ‘People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’ ’

“The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.” Civil Service limitations would be swept away, liberals and in fact anyone not on board with Trumpian principles would be purged from every corner of the federal government.

It's not as if this effort is relegated to the federal government, although Project 2025 is hell-bent on hitting the ground running and not wasting Trump’s expected first year of a second term; there are official state scofflaws well-situated everywhere, including in state law enforcement. “[T]he Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Assn., founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack… teaches that elected sheriffs must ‘protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government’ by refusing to enforce any law they deem unconstitutional or ‘unjust.’

“‘The safest way to actually achieve that is to have local law enforcement understand that they have no obligation to enforce such laws,’ Mack said in an interview. ‘They’re not laws at all anyway. If they’re unjust laws, they are laws of tyranny.’… The sheriffs group has railed against gun control laws, COVID-19 mask mandates and public health restrictions, as well as alleged election fraud. It has also quietly spread its ideology across the country, seeking to become more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training, the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found.” AP. For those seeking examples of where such thinking takes us, I recommend studying the rise of the pre-WWII Fascist Party in Italy and the Nazi Party in Germany. The parallels are frightening.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Americans really need to know how fragile true democracy really is and how close it is coming to being removed by force by well-armed minority White Christian Nationalists who cannot fathom governance except as they unilaterally determine.