Donald Trump and his allies are anticipating protests in the streets if the former president wins the White House, and are strategizing to use American troops as a national police force to quell distruption, an inside source has told the New Yorker.
The startling plan was exposed in a lengthy article this week in the magazine on the right-wing administrative architects of an envisioned Trump administration who aim to manage the logistics of pushing through many of the goals of the highly controversial Project 2025 plan, which Trump has publicly claimed he knows "nothing about."
New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer focused on the well-funded Conservative Partnership Institute and its satellite organizations in Washington, D.C., which are prepared to help manage the system and undertake the massive staffing of a Trump administration when as many as thousands of federal workers could be fired and replaced with Trump and right-wing loyalists, he writes.
Those close to Trump are "anticipating large protests" if Trump wins, and allies have been working on plans to impose a "version" of the Insurrection Act that would allow Trump to "dispatch troops to serve as a national police force," Blitzer writes.
When Trump was in the White House he asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley about shooting Black Lives Matter protesters during a 2020 meeting, his Defense Secretary Mark Esper told NPR in an interview.
"Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?" an "enraged" Trump asked, recounted Esper, who said the question took everyone in the room "aback."
The planned changes in a possible second Trump White House would be carried out in part to satisfy Trump's demand that people working for him follow all of his orders as he installs a new government, according to Blitzer's source, which was not the case the last time he was president.
The strategy to use U.S. troops to police American citizens is a small part of a massive envisioned overhaul of the federal government and the president's powers. Much of the blueprint is discussed in detail in the 900-page Project 2025 "Mandate for Leadership" playbook created by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation with the aid of some 70 staff members of the Trump White House.
Some of the plan's aims include shutting down the Department of Education as part of a goal to take apart the federal government, executing — or "obtain finality" for — all prisoners on death row, sanctioning only "heterosexual, intact, marriage" because all other relationships are "unstable" or create "poor behavior," and slashing Medicaid.
Federal workers would largely be classified as political appointees so they could all be fired en masse without violating labor laws and replaced by right-wing loyalists under the plan.
The Justice Department, which has largely operated independently of the executive office over the years, would be turned over to Trump to command, Blitzer reported.
Attorney Jeffrey Clark, the former Trump administration official who sought to mobilize the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election in Trump's favor, is expected to be part of a future Trump administration, according to the New Yorker.
If Clark gets a top job at the DOJ, he'd likely use his position to "remake the department as an instrument of the White House," Blitzer writes.
Clark was indicted in Georgia last summer, where he's charged with violating the state's racketeering law and attempting to make false statements. He has pleaded not guilty.
Many of the plans for the envisioned Trump administration would be launched within "hours" of the moment the former president retakes office, according to the New Yorker — which is why Trump told Sean Hannity late last year that he wouldn't be a dictator "except for Day One," Blitzer noted.
