The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #173399 Message #4210676
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
30-Oct-24 - 03:40 PM
Thread Name: BS: American Presidential race 2024
Subject: RE: BS: American Presidential race 2024
And here's a new group that should scare the bejesus out everyone: From the New York Times (I think I shared this as a gift so it should open) The Group at the Center of Trump’s Planning for a Second Term Is One You Haven’t Heard of America First Policy Institute didn’t even exist four years ago. But it is poised to be more influential than Project 2025.
Late this summer, a prominent right-wing think tank invited conservatives from around the country to learn how to work in a second Donald J. Trump administration.
In a series of training sessions in Washington, former Trump officials shared strategies with attendees for combating leftist civil servants in the federal government and dealing with the mainstream media. Participants were sent home with a thick binder of materials for further study. One section’s title: “Tales From the Swamp: How Federal Bureaucrats Resisted President Trump.”
The classes could easily have been the work of Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint and personnel project that was created by loyalists to Mr. Trump and that has been turned into a political cudgel by Democrats seeking to link its most radical prescriptions to the former president.
But the meetings had nothing to do with that enterprise or its principal backer, the Heritage Foundation. Instead, they were the work of the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank that has, with little fanfare or scrutiny, installed itself as the Trump campaign’s primary partner in making concrete plans to wield power again.
Founded by three wealthy Texans in late 2020, the group, known as A.F.P.I., has quickly inserted itself into nearly every corner of Mr. Trump’s political machine, and is closer than any other outside player in his planning for a second term.
Mr. Trump chose one of its leaders, Linda McMahon, a former member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and a longtime friend, as co-chair of his official transition team. Brooke Rollins, who also worked in the Trump administration and is currently the nonprofit’s chief executive, has been discussed as a candidate to be Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. The institute’s ranks are stocked with other former Trump administration officials who have spent the past several years planning for a return, and in recent weeks several have quietly moved over to work full time for the campaign’s transition team.
They've looked at how government worked in spite of Trump. And this group is learning from what it sees as the (conservative) Heritage Foundations "mistakes":
The Agenda The institute’s policy book, titled “The America First Agenda,” is slimmer than the much-debated plans espoused in Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership.” Absent are attention-grabbing proposals such as banning pornography, prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills or ending the Justice Department’s status as an independent agency.
But its vision is no less Trumpist: It calls for halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders.
It also goes significantly further than Project 2025 in one key area, calling for the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees — a strategy supporters believe will allow Mr. Trump and his aides to root out career staff members who they believe stood in his way in his first administration.
“Agencies should be free to remove employees for any nondiscriminatory reason, with no external appeals,” the institute’s policy book states.