Trump lays out vision for bending the federal government to his will

MOSINEE, Wis. — Former President Donald Trump vowed to vastly reshape the federal bureaucracy Saturday in a wide-ranging, often unfocused speech at a rally in Wisconsin.

He pledged to ultimately eliminate the Department of Education, redirect the efforts of the Justice Department and fire civil servants charged with carrying out Biden administration policies that he disagreed with.

And he told his supporters that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading vaccine skeptic who recently endorsed him, would be “very much involved” in a panel on “chronic health problems and childhood diseases.” Kennedy rose to prominence as a vaccine skeptic who promoted a disproved link between vaccines and autism.

At one point Trump got in a dig at Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he has frequently accused without evidence of covering up signs that Joe Biden was not fit to be president, by saying that he would support modifying the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to make it an impeachable offense for a vice president to cover up the incapacity of the president. It was a long-shot proposal at best, which would entail a difficult process that he does not control.

Trump — who spent four years overseeing the federal bureaucracy — stood at an airport in front of hundreds of people holding “Drain the Swamp” signs distributed by his campaign and promised to “cut the fat out of our government for the first time meaningfully in 60 years,” a period that includes his presidency.

Many of the proposals in Trump’s speech align with plans reported by The New York Times to conduct a broad expansion of presidential power over government, and to effectively concentrate more authority within the White House, if he wins in November.

And many of his pledges dovetailed with the stated goals and proposals of Project 2025, an effort by a group of conservative organizations to develop policies for the next Republican president. Trump has disavowed Project 2025 as Democrats have seized on some of its more radical proposals, even as he has said that he agrees with some of its efforts.

Throughout his third presidential campaign, Trump has signaled a willingness to end the post-Watergate norm that the Justice Department operates independently from White House political control.

On Saturday, he said he would “completely overhaul” the department to shift it away from what he called politically motivated prosecutions, a term he has used to encompass the cases of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to stop Biden from taking office.

Trump again repeated his vow to pardon those people, saying that his administration would “rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized” and that he would “sign their pardons.”

Trump also suggested that he would root out federal bureaucrats who were not ideologically aligned with him, including some career civil servants who are charged with carrying out policies ordered by the current administration.

The Harris campaign said in a statement that Trump was “obsessed with payback.”

“If he wins this November, Donald won’t lift a finger to help the American people,” Sarafina Chitika, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in the statement. “Aided by his Project 2025 allies and a Supreme Court that has given him near total immunity, he will use his unchecked power to prosecute his enemies and pardon insurrectionists who violently attacked our Capitol on Jan. 6.”

During the rally, Trump repeated his recent promise to create a so-called government efficiency commission that has been pushed for by billionaire Elon Musk, mistakenly calling him “Leon” at one point.

He vowed to fire “warmongers,” to conduct a “cleanup of the military industrial complex” and to “fire every federal bureaucrat” who he said had infringed on free speech. And he said he would eliminate “so-called equity policies,” a favored culture war target of Republicans.

And Trump, who at the end of his presidency railed against the federal public health apparatus, suggested that he would rethink it by getting rid of what he vaguely described as corruption at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

Trump’s rally, held outdoors at the Central Wisconsin Airport in Mosinee, Wisconsin, was his last scheduled campaign event before Tuesday’s debate with Harris. Though the focus was intended to be his renewed calls to “drain the swamp,” Trump, in his usual fashion, jumped all over the map.

As he was outlining his nine proposals to, as he put it, “break the grip” of Biden and Harris, Trump detoured to question the size of the crowds at Harris’ rallies and to criticize an effort announced this past week to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the election.

Mocking the effort, Trump jeered Democrats for being overly concerned with Russia. “I don’t know what it is with poor Russia,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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