Project 2025 blueprint for second Trump term envisages replacing thousands of career staff with political loyalists

America’s career diplomats are braced for the threat of a mass purge if Donald Trump wins the November election and for the potential flooding of the state department with loyalty-tested political appointees.

Rather than leading to a seamless change of course in a rightward Trumpist direction, the diplomats’ union and former ambassadors argue, such an attempted takeover would be much more likely to end in legal challenges, gridlock and chaos.

If elected, Trump has threatened to reinstate a policy he unsuccessfully attempted in his first term with the creation of “Schedule F”, a new category of federal employees which would be applied to tens of thousands of civil servants in “policy-related” jobs, robbing them of legal protections and making them liable to be fired at will.

  • hydroptic@sopuli.xyz
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    5 months ago

    That’s probably the least insane part about Project 2025

    Project contributor Jeffrey Clark advises the future president to immediately deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and direct the DOJ to pursue Donald Trump’s adversaries by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. The Project recommends the arrest, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants. It promotes capital punishment and the speedy “finality” of such sentences.

    Using the military to hunt dissidents and then recommending “speedy” capital punishment is pretty on-brand for conservatives.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yeah if it succeeds it will likely be remembered as similar to our Wannsee Conference. The goal is mass execution of undesirables

      • variants@possumpat.io
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        5 months ago

        Generally the military and police lean into fascism so at that point I’m not sure current rules and law would stop them

      • Carmakazi@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago
        1. That’s why they reference the Insurrection Act. Whether the current situation meets the criteria laid out does not matter to them.
        2. It should be obvious by now that words on the books do not stop fascists. They intend to stack public institution far and deep with party loyalists so that nobody can say “no” to their will…legally, anyway.
        • samus12345@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I looked the Insurrection Act up. This kind of vague, old law is just the kind of thing that fascists love to leverage to install a brutal dictatorship. The GOP learned that they can do pretty much whatever they want and will get no meaningful resistance, so it would be pathetically easy for them to get rid of democracy once they have the Executive and Legislative branches again. The only saving grace is that they’re pretty incompetent at actually getting things done, but we can’t rely on that to save us again.

    • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      It’s humorous (in a hopeless, resigned, utterly defeated nihilistic sort of way) how transparent the fascism has gotten. “Trump’s advisor recommends jack-booted thugs use legal pretext to punish political opponents without due process.”

      At least give me some subtext to decode, don’t slap me in the face with it like a wet slice of bologna.

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The GOP primarily used dog whistles until Trump showed them you can just say the quiet part out loud and MAGA will eat it up.

        • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Hitler’s Germany has shown you only really need about a third of the people to be behind fascism for it to succeed (Hitler won with 35 percent of the popular vote). In the US, it looks like that percentage has already been reached.

      • snooggums@midwest.social
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        5 months ago

        I prefer it to be open and obvious so the people who support it can’t hide behind pretending to misunderstand it.