What might Donald Trump, the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, do with another four years in the White House? The question is urgent, with a national Times poll showing him ahead of President Biden, 48 percent to 43 percent, among registered voters. Our colleagues in the newsroom have done outstanding work investigating Trump's plans on immigration, justice and other areas, but it's also useful to simply take Trump's allies at their word. And one group of them published 887 pages' worth of words in a dense but fascinating document called "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." I recently spent weeks poring over this blueprint for governing, and I reached one inescapable conclusion: Rather than a plan to dismantle the federal bureaucracy (which it denigrates as a relentlessly left-wing "administrative state"), the document offers a vision for redirecting the executive branch toward conservative priorities, one department, agency and office at a time. At the helm would be a president increasingly unencumbered by oversight or traditional checks and balances. These Trump allies don't want to downsize the federal government, as they often claim. They want to seize it and deploy it for their own ends. "Mandate for Leadership" calls for a relentless politicizing of the executive branch, particularly the Justice Department and the F.B.I., through a flood of presidential appointees. (The Justice Department and the White House counsel must work "as a team," it says, and the F.B.I. director must "align" with the president, much like any other agency head.) It calls for the closing or remaking of agencies on ideological or religious grounds. (The Department of Health and Human Services should be known as "the Department of Life," and the government must "maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.") It portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance. ("The legal function cannot be allowed to thwart the administration's agenda," it says.) "Mandate for Leadership" is part of Project 2025, an initiative by the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with a multitude of conservative organizations, thinkers and activists. The Trump campaign has not endorsed the document, and the authors say it is a playbook for the next conservative president, "whoever he or she may be." But its contributors include many former Trump administration officials, and Trump is mentioned some 300 times throughout its pages. (Nikki Haley is mentioned once.) While there is plenty in it that you'd expect to see in a contemporary conservative agenda — calls for lower corporate taxes, attacks on Biden's climate policies, proposals to militarize the southern border and to purge diversity and inclusion programs from the federal bureaucracy — its most meaningful goal may be to consolidate the authority and erode the accountability of the presidency for the long haul. And it hopes to do so right away. The document announces itself as part of a "unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025."
Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Opinion Today: What a second Trump term could look like
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