“Fire Every Single Midlevel Bureaucrat” Trump Allies Seek to Reshape American Law
(Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump’s allies are working to reshape American law into a weapon against their political enemies, according to Jesse Wegman in a scathing editorial for The New York Times.
Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is a key example of this effort. Vance embodies the far-right’s commitment to the controversial Project 2025 plan, which aims to transform the government into an authoritarian loyalty cult for the GOP.
Vance, Wegman noted, “predicted … that the former president, who had been recently disgraced by his insurrectionary attempt to overturn the 2020 election, would nevertheless run again in 2024. Should Mr. Trump win, Mr. Vance said, he had some advice: ‘Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.’ And if the courts ruled against him? No problem, Mr. Vance said: Just blow them off.”
Wegman argues that this approach is already in motion, pointing to District Judge Aileen Cannon, another Trump appointee, and her decision to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, which special counsel Jack Smith is appealing.
Cannon concluded Smith, “was not validly appointed to his post because no federal law authorizes the appointment of someone from outside the Justice Department to perform that task,” wrote Wegman. He notes that this conclusion was based solely on a non-majority concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas in a case granting Trump a presumption of immunity in a separate case.
“As a matter of law and fact, this is not merely wrong, it is flagrantly, embarrassingly wrong … It is not a close or complicated legal question,” Wegman wrote. He referenced a 1974 Supreme Court ruling that explicitly allows such appointments, a precedent Cannon ignored.
Wegman concludes that these actions by Vance and Cannon represent what to expect if Trump were to secure a second term. “This is what a second Trump term would look like,” he warned. “Ambitious judges who may not have been Trump loyalists at first will watch what’s been happening in recent days and get the message about what it takes to advance their careers.”
In this vision, Wegman argues, “Judge Cannon embodies the future that Mr. Vance described in 2021. She is part of a legal elite raised on Trumpism that will use their perches in the judiciary and legal world to enforce a one-sided version of law that is about power and outcomes over any liberal principle.”
Wegman paints a dire picture: a reality where “the rule of law is for suckers or, worse, only for specific people. Our people.” This editorial underscores the potential transformation of American governance into a system where legal outcomes are driven by political loyalty rather than impartial justice.
