Democrats use Trump to deflect concerns about Biden's cognitive health
Fox Business' Hillary Vaughn asks Democratic lawmakers if President Biden is 'mentally fit' for office on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'
President Biden's administration and liberal supporters in Washington are bracing for a possible Donald Trump victory in November by installing "roadblocks" to limit the latter's ability to fire thousands of government workers, according to a new report.
The Associated Press reported that a cabal of left-leaning experts, legal advisers and others are confident Biden will be re-elected but are urging him to prepare for the worst: another Trump presidency beginning in 2025.
"My impression is the Biden administration is taking very seriously that potential threat and is trying to do things now," Michael Linden, former executive associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under Biden, told the AP. Although he added there was no "magic bullet" to stop Trump if he took office again. "Nobody should be under any illusion that there’s anything that this president can do in advance to prevent the next president from doing things that are very damaging, potentially catastrophically."
The AP reported the "Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s chief human resources agency, will finalize a rule by April against reclassifying tens of thousands of workers so they can be more easily fired, according to OPM spokesperson Viet Tran." A Biden campaign spokesperson said Trump was "already telegraphing plays straight out of the authoritarian playbook — gutting the civil service of people he deems disloyal and plotting revenge on his political enemies."
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. (Getty Images)
A hypothetical Trump administration would take months or even years to unwind it, the AP wrote. The wire service added that other options for Biden to "thwart" a potential succession could include "promoting expanded collective bargaining agreements with federal personnel to beginning the complicated bureaucratic task of designating more government posts as policy-dedicated, thus making workers harder to fire."
Conservatives supporting Trump argue he could finally put an end to liberal government careerists stymying the agenda of a duly elected president.
Fox News Digital reported last year that the Heritage Foundation, one of the country's most influential conservative think tanks, has drafted a policy book that includes input from more than 50 right-leaning organizations and is designed to give an incoming president a 180-day playbook of policy changes – including a "high priority" overhaul of DOJ and FBI. Those recommendations are part of the group's Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project.
"While it is true — as with other federal departments and agencies — that there are committed career personnel across the Department who perform their duties faithfully and with the best intentions… the Department has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda upon the American people — and the defeat of political enemies," according to the document.
At the end of his term, Trump's administration tried to reclassify tens of thousands of federal employees as "Schedule F," which would make them more akin to political appointees that are easier to terminate with a new presidency. Biden revoked it after taking office in 2021, but Trump has said he would revive the effort, the AP reported.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Charleston Area Convention Center in North Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday. (AP/David Yeazell)
Trump has long railed against Washington's "deep state," a term for the permanently entrenched civil servants and bureaucrats that remain in positions of influence regardless of who's in the White House.
"Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state," Trump said at a rally last year, alarming progressive critics and media commentators who claim he will remake the government with loyalists who won't check his authoritarian impulses.
"Trump’s drive to eviscerate this permanent bureaucracy… will bring about a return to the early American spoils-and-patronage system, wherein jobs were won through loyalty to a party or president rather than merit, and which the century-old laws that created the modern civil service successfully rooted out," The Atlantic's Russell Bermwn wrote last year.
The front-runner to capture the Republican nomination in 2024, Trump could become only the second U.S. president to win back the White House after being previously ousted. Grover Cleveland served as the 22nd and 24th president, winning in 1884, losing his re-election bid in 1888 and winning again in 1892.
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The White House and a Trump spokesperson didn't respond to requests for comment.
Fox News' Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.