“It Will Be a Revenge Machine”: Why a Second Trump ...

“It would be the inverse of election security. They would militarize the elections process,” Harvey said. “They would have sheriffs that agree with them, reservists, potentially even active duty soldiers standing outside of polling places. They would do anything possible to intimidate their political opponents from casting a ballot.”

He and I spoke before the 2022 midterm elections. When the vote rolled around, reports surfaced about armed men in Kevlar vests (self-described “ballot watchers”) monitoring polling places in states like Arizona. Voters said the MAGA-aligned private citizens were trying to intimidate them, and some took the complaints to federal court.

If the Next Trump deploys DHS forces as ballot watchers, there won’t be any such recourse. All of it will be done under the guise of preventing fraud in the elections and providing security for the voting public. In reality, the goal will be to terrify the political opposition. The playbook has been around for many, many decades—in foreign dictatorships.

The MAGA movement learned a hard lesson in Trump’s first term: people are policy. The president appointed a vast array of public figures to key government posts, most of whom didn’t know the mercurial businessman. And they certainly weren’t willing to carry out policies that were plainly irresponsible, immoral, or illegal. In some cases, the internal resistance set Trump back years in carrying out his true intentions.

John Bolton saw himself as one of those people. The former ambassador agreed to serve as White House national security advisor part-way through Trump’s term. For a time, Bolton thought he was shielding agencies from Trump’s disruptive mood swings and sudden changes in policy direction. But the more the ambassador objected to the president’s bad ideas, the more he got left out of the conversation.

“There would be secret meetings at Mar-a-Lago on national security issues,” a former aide to Bolton told me, “and [John] would call me and say, ‘What the fuck is going on? Why am I not in this meeting?’ ”

Afghanistan was the tipping point. Trump was angry about the modest Afghan War plan we’d persuaded him to adopt in 2017 and returned to demanding a sudden pullout. He wanted to host Taliban leaders—the same people who’d harbored the al Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11—on U.S. soil at Camp David for talks just days before the anniversary of the tragedy. Bolton objected strenuously. Trump cut him out of the decision-making process, tweeted the summit into existence, and fired his national security advisor soon after.

Then Trump put in motion a hasty framework for exiting Afghanistan. What was the point, I wondered, of the months, the meetings, and the misery we had endured trying to get Trump to do the right thing, only to have him reverse the decision?

I put the question to Warrick, the DHS civil servant who led counterterrorism policy. Warrick was less defeatist.“We bought an extra two years of the United States staying [in Afghanistan] and killing terrorists and protecting the country,” he said.

Bolton agreed that moments like this—when staff persuaded President Trump to take the prudent course, even if only temporarily— bought just enough time to protect the country from the worst possible outcomes.

But a second MAGA administration “would do damage that is not reparable, especially in a White House surrounded by fifth-raters,” he predicted.

Nearly every Trump appointee I spoke with made a similar prediction. Another MAGA president won’t hire a stable of experienced public servants. From the start, he or she will populate the administration with a “D Team” of political operatives who pledge allegiance to a cult of personality, not the Constitution.

“[Trumpism] is like a progressive disease,” Bolton explained. “It might remit for a while, but it never gets better.” Or as a Pentagon leader under Trump told me: “In Round Two, you won’t see Jim Mattis and John Kelly. It will be the fucking enablers.”

People I spoke with predicted widespread career resignations under another MAGA presidency. The result will be a younger civil service without the knowledge, experience, or wherewithal to run government agencies. White House appointees will be forced to fill in the gaps as a result. In a hurricane, for instance, you might have inexperienced political operatives trying to handle the crisis instead of experts.