2024-03-26
5 分钟I'm Carlos Lozada, an opinion columnist at the New York Times and co host of the Matter of Opinion podcast.
Recently, I read a detailed playbook for governing that several conservative groups, including a lot of people who served in the Trump administration, have put together with the aim to be ready to go on January 20, 2025, which is inauguration day.
That document is called Mandate for leadership.
Mandate for Leadership is part of an initiative known as Project 2025, which has been organized by the Heritage Foundation, a longtime conservative think tank in Washington.
It's almost 900 pages long, and it breaks down the executive branch, department by department, agency by agency, office by office.
I should stress, this is not an official Trump campaign document.
The campaign has not endorsed mandate for leadership or Project 2025.
In fact, it's gone out of its way to say that no one speaks for the president except the president.
All that said, the document is very consistent with Trump's aspirations for control and for power.
It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering the career civil servants at every turn, and agencies and offices abolished or stood up on overtly ideological grounds.
It mentions Trump some 300 times in less than 900 pages.
So I do imagine that this document would wield some influence should Trump win the presidency once again.
At the very least, it's a good signal of what some of Trump's allies and some people who might staff the next administration would want out of a second term.
And what I find especially striking is the attitude that mandate for leadership has toward the Department of Justice.
Donald Trump has often complained that the DOJ is weaponized against him.
They've weaponized the Justice Department, they've weaponized the FBI, and they've come at me with the worst indictments.
But he's also suggested that in a second term, he could weaponize the DOJ himself and use it to go after his critics and his political rivals.
That means that if I win and somebody wants to run against me, I call my attorney general.
I say, listen, indict him.
And this document details how a president could try to do that.