When Trump won eight years ago, no one really expected it to happen– including himself. He was a total political outsider who had a few months to try to cobble together a disorganized government, and he didn’t have nearly enough loyalists or MAGA die-hards on hand to populate a cabinet and a whole upper echelon of an executive structure.
He ended up defaulting in many cases to people who already knew how things worked in Washington, who were by and large ideologically on a similar track but much more staid and observant of the rules, norms, and laws of the capital. There was no bench of bona fide MAGA true believer talent to draw from, and in the years since his 2020 loss, his entourage and the broader movement that coalesced around him — cannibalizing once traditional, if hyper-conservative, organizations like the Heritage Foundation and creating new intellectual homes in think tanks, academia and other ideological training grounds — determined not to make the same mistake again.
While the Project 2025 effort — which Trump once spuriously disavowed and which now seems to be moving once more to the fore — is best known for its policy planks, like disbanding the Department of Education, it also features an extensive personnel database of right-wing operatives that can be a sort of plug-and-play administration for a second Trump term. This reflects a central preoccupation of the first Trump era, that this reliance on DC insiders and “establishment” political figures essentially stymied rather than helped enact the agenda.
When Trump — and, if we’re being honest, mostly his hard-right zealot retinue, as the man himself truly seems to believe in little beyond his own adoration and edification — heard a staffer or even an agency head say “that’s not legal” or “that’s not practicable” or “that’s not ethical,” they never really got past the “no.” The other words were filler, because there’s nothing that they valued more than pure loyalty and execution of an overarching ideological vision. This culminated most spectacularly with Trump and cronies’ rage at Vice President Mike Pence for having the gall to refuse to help Trump steal the 2020 election, as exemplified by the immortalized “hang Mike Pence” chants by his own supporters during the January 6 coup attempt.
Things are going to be different now. While the Project 2025 database is mostly geared towards mid-range and lower-level staffers, all eyes are focused now on Trump’s cabinet and executive-level picks, who will really be steering the ship of an administration that has all but promised to be openly authoritarian. So far, it doesn’t look good.
Of the domestic policy and administrative positions publicly selected so far, most have to do with what might be Trump’s signature issue: immigration. This week, news has broken that Trump will name Stephen Miller, the effective architect of his first term’s anti-immigration policy framework, as deputy chief of staff for policy. I think Miller has been seared into the minds of a number of liberal-leaning political observers as some sort of policy bogeyman, but I don’t think the average voter (even a reasonably well-informed one) has any sense of the sheer extent to which Miller personally reshaped immigration policy under Trump.
Miller had his hands in everything. Most infamously, he was involved in the development of the Trump-era family separation policy, but that’s only scratching the surface. The one-time aide to Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who would himself go on to be one of Trump’s attorneys general, had a role in practically weekly immigration shifts, many of which flew under the surface — denaturalization task force, so-called Muslim ban, shifting USCIS application requirements, the public charge rule, the citizenship question on the census, the asylum safe third country rule, and what is likely his crowning crowning achievement, the Title 42 expulsion policy, among many others.
The man is an anti-immigration dogmatist in the truest sense of that word, and, it pains me to say, a pretty meticulous one. A lot of what the Trump administration threw at the wall never stuck because it was so ham-fisted or obviously illegal, but a big part of the reason a chunk of this agenda ended up working is because Miller was committed to finding every possible pressure point in the law to make immigration more difficult and immigrants’ lives more difficult and unpredictable. Now, he’ll be even more centrally located, directing policy at the highest levels of the White House.
Then there’s Thomas Homan, an acting director of ICE in Trump’s early term, who embraced the administration’s much wider enforcement mandate with gusto and became a very vocal public face of the Trump era’s sadism as he defended family separation and other policies forcefully in the media. He resigned (some would say was pushed out) after Senate Democrats made it clear they would not move on his nomination to be permanent director and pivoted to being a full-time talking head and conservative border luminary, in which capacity he contributed to Project 2025, among other things.
Just last month, he was interviewed on CBS News, where he responded to a question about the issue of separating families when an undocumented parent is detained or deported and taken away from U.S. citizen children by saying that “families can be deported together,” apparently not understanding or perhaps not caring that there is no legal way to deport a citizen. In any case, Homan has now been named to the somewhat nebulous position of “border czar,” which probably means he’ll be in charge of the broader range of enforcement functions: ICE and CBP at least, and perhaps others. He’s already been discussing some of his approach, telling Fox and Friends this week that there would be a ramp-up of workplace raids.
On this, he’ll probably be working with another recent Trump pick, who you might best remember for going viral for her account of shooting a puppy to death in a gravel pit: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, the erstwhile ultra-right figure who rose to national prominence after refusing to institute a state mask mandate during the Covid pandemic. She will reportedly be named Homeland Security secretary, putting her atop the vast post-9/11 bureaucracy that now houses the various immigration agencies that handle both enforcement and domestic adjudication of immigration applications. Unlike the other two, Noem does not seem to have any specific expertise in immigration or national security, but appears to have been picked out of her heavy boosterism of and loyalty to Trump.
There are a few other appointments to watch for when it comes to the administration’s immigration plans, including the actual director of ICE, the CBP commissioner, the USCIS commissioner, and the attorney general, who as the head of the Justice Department also oversees the immigration courts. Beyond immigration, Trump has already announced a few selections, including his campaign manager Susie Wiles as chief of staff, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik as U.N. ambassador, New York Rep. Lee Zeldin as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and former Pentagon official and Florida Rep. Mike Waltz as National Security adviser.
Just yesterday, he stunned observers by picking Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary, running the nation’s military and sprawling defense bureaucracy. Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy were selected to run some kind of advisory office known as the Department of Government Efficiency — yes, it’s a meme name, DOGE, which also caused the memecoin cryptocurrency Dogecoin to spike in value, previewing the absolute orgy of self-dealing and corruption that awaits us — to slash government funding and services. All have in common a commitment to Trump personally, which seems to be a key requirement for populating the administration.
What they all leave clear as well is that, in case anyone doubted it, some of the extreme portions of the agenda were not bluffing. Homan and Miller are hardliners, as deeply committed to the project of mass deportation as you can be. We’ll have to see how things actually play out, and there are a lot of wildcards including the extent to which states and localities do or do not cooperate, but the stage is set for a follow through on his most expansive and most draconian efforts.
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