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Trump announces Ken Paxton as possible AG pick: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/20/donald-trump-ken-paxton-attorney-general/
This is interesting because 1) Paxton is an aggressive partisan willing to engage in skullduggery, exactly the sort of person project 2025 would want and 2) he’s one of the few people trump has shown loyalty to. Also unlike Greg Abbott, who turned down the VP job, he seems to want the job. Also, last time he was out of office Abbott appointed his own chief of staff as attorney general, so it’s not like that would strip mine the Texas state government of conservative talent.
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr, and an aggressive consiglieri in the AG seat is probably what trump needs to be effective.
The thought of Paxton prosecuting the Tides Foundation the same way this administration prosecuted the NRA is wonderful, but will he be able to get the staff and bureaucratic whips together to do it?
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
That depends on what you mean by 'succeeding.' Trump went into his first term with no plan for how to staff his administration. As I see it, the main goal of Project 2025 is just to work on that stuff in advance so that if Trump wins another term he won't have to start from scratch the day after the election. Will it revolutionize the US government forever? No. But at least this time he'll have a list of names he can draw from to fill government positions with loyalists.
And they don't really have to be competent. It would be an improvement over the first term if the bureaucracy was just not actively working against Trump's administration.
You're assuming that Trump is actually behind the compilation of these lists. From what I've read, it's all conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have proven in the past they don't give a shit so much about loyalty to Trump as they do advancing their own agendas. Using these outside lists when he didn't have a clue himself is a big part of what got him in the position he was in during his first term. Asking them to come up with more names isn't going to change that. And competence does matter. At a certain point you're getting less into people whose job consists of making policy decisions and more into the realm of everyday managerial functioning. For instance, say that Trump thinks the ATF's FFL application review process is too strict and wants to make it more liberal, and he fires the guy responsible for this process with a gun nut who's dedicated to making sure practically anyone who applies gets an FFL with minimum hassle. That may be great in theory, but if the guy in question has no clue about how the review process works and ends up bumbling through his job to the point where delay times are so long that applications that would have been a breeze under the old guy are suffering inordinate delays, the exact constituency he's trying to appease isn't going to be very happy. I can just see the article in The Atlantic now: "He thought Trump would make it easier for him to run his gun store; instead it's become a nightmare."
I feel like it would be an improvement over the first term if he manages to fully staff his administration with people who are willing to at least pretend to be on his side.
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Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
I'd caution that the NRA and its members are technically the 'victim' in the current New York lawsuit, but that didn't stop James from threatening the entire organization's mandate, digging through and almost-certainly leaking a ton of internal records, and pretty much crippling both the legal and political expenditures for one election already and probably a second. Tots coincidentally, no insurance provider in the state is willing to work with the organization, a ton of competent personnel have fled the ship or started planning competitors with all the inefficiencies and lost time that demands, so on. We won't know the full reckoning for a bit (June?), but the possibility that the org ends up under a hostile state's conservatorship is absolutely still in the cards.
Tides doesn't face that threat, but it's not because the state can't fuck over a badly operated donor funnel; it's because Republicans don't have the infrastructure to make that push.
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It doesn't matter what you get them for as long as you confiscate their money and give it to regime-supporting organizations through settlement agreements, like Obama did. The famous "120 mil to the govt or 40 mil to La Raza" option.
You seem to buy the leftist propaganda that "owning the libs" is about bullying rather than destroying the enemy's ability to wage war.
Fine them 60 billion for not having enough signage on their disabled parking spaces, whatever you can pin on them. Tesla had to pay a hundred mil because a black guy said "nigga" without being fired, bet we can find plenty of hostile workplace materiel in "literally slaughter colonizers and their children btw my coworkers are specifically the colonizers I'm talking about" if we really try.
Of course the real golden ticket is finding that the tides foundation is conspiring to fund criminal activity and launder money from that activity.
Which starts by getting sentences on street level antifa groups and working up until you can get all their lawyers disbarred.
Even setting this as a goal counts as a win when Conservatism spent years trying to "win debates" in a bow tie.
I have not heard of this, and my googling isn't coming up with anything. Can you provide more specifics?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-prohibits-settlement-agreements-that-donate-money-to-outside-groups/2017/06/06/c0b2e700-4b02-11e7-bc1b-fddbd8359dee_story.html
http://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-getting-that-bank-settlement-cash-1472421204
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-justice-departments-bank-settlement-slush-fund/2016/08/31/a3b4da7a-6eec-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.747f8283a443
https://rtp.fedsoc.org/paper/improper-third-party-payments-in-u-s-government-litigation-settlements/
https://www.judicialwatch.org/doj-give-leftist-groups-cut-b-settlement/
Obama is a Chicago politician, and US politics is now running on the Chicago model, shaking down entire sectors of the economy to fund their machine politics. Trump ended the policy rather than using it to fund the right, and now Biden has restarted it to keep leftists swimming in cash. As if they didn't get enough of it from the billions handed to them in the "inflation reduction act"
It is hard to overstate the value of actual evidence in these discussions. thank you for making a habit of providing it.
I'll get banned anyway so it doesn't help
Possibly, but probably not for posts like this one. "I am angry" is not generally the type of post this place is built to facilitate. "Here is why I am angry" is much better. "Here is the situation, and here is why it is producing anger" is better still. Actual evidence provides much better grounds for discussion than raw assertion.
I greatly appreciated your previous post linking to Derrick Bell as well, in addition to the writeup on the Ctrl-Pew prosecution.
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Ken Paxton has a core staff of highly competent people that are loyal to him personally- they left the AG office to defend him during his impeachment- and the opportunity to recruit almost unlimitedly from red state governments, even ignoring project 2025 lists of potential conservative hires.
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