A disturbing sense of inevitability hangs over the Iowa caucuses on Monday. Donald Trump, with a 34-point lead in the polls, is the all but certain Republican nominee. And despite his legal troubles, Mr. Trump leads Joe Biden in several general election polls in swing states.
The prospect that Mr. Trump will be president again is impossible to ignore. For liberals, this fact inspires dread. And for good reason. In a second term, Mr. Trump and his advisers have promised to weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies, go to war with Mexican drug cartels, detain and deport millions of immigrants and send federal troops into Democrat-run cities to fight crime and put down protests. We know this because conservative operatives have anticipated this outcome for years, developing plans for a better, smoother and more ideologically coherent Trump White House, capable of implementing the former president’s radical agenda and circumventing bureaucratic obstruction.
To achieve this vision, a Reagan-era shibboleth has come back into fashion in conservative circles: Personnel is policy. Conservative organizations have become, as one administration alum put it, “laser-focused on the staffing challenge.” Most prominently, rival think tanks — the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute — are collecting names for potential political appointees, putting forward detailed plans to staff the next Trump administration quickly and efficiently. Both have raised millions for this effort.
Think tanks — Brookings, Rand, the Center for American Progress, even Heritage — have played this role before, for both Democratic and Republican presidents. But conservative groups have placed special emphasis on planning for the transition this time around, in the hopes of avoiding the self-inflicted wounds of Mr. Trump’s first term.
In office, Mr. Trump was notorious for favoring his most obsequious staffers, blithely firing many who challenged him and making personnel and policy decisions in consultation with his television. Though they are loath to admit it for fear of dooming the effort, the architects of these initiatives are working to preemptively contain Mr. Trump’s worst impulses: his capriciousness, his disdain for process and detail, his weakness for sycophancy.
But on the campaign trail this time, the former president seems more Trumpian than ever. He doesn’t want to be contained; he wants to be obeyed. And it has already begun to bedevil the transition plans. A shadow war is raging among former Trump officials, ensconced at their respective think tanks, each competing to serve as his White House in waiting. The king hasn’t returned from exile, but he is already inspiring acrimony and disarray among his courtiers.
Ask Washington conservatives what went wrong with Mr. Trump’s first term, and they’ll almost certainly tell you a version of the same story: He was surrounded by the wrong people. His campaign was a shocking insurgency within the G.O.P.; it broke with decades of orthodoxy — on trade, immigration, entitlements, war — scandalizing and alienating much of the credentialed D.C. policymaker class. As a result, his White House was hastily staffed by a mix of underqualified true believers, opportunistic hacks and experienced but disloyal swamp creatures who colluded with journalists and permanent bureaucrats to undermine the president’s populist agenda.
The solution, then, should be simple: Find, vet and train the right people, and everything will be different.
The Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute have both thrown themselves into this task. Heritage has developed trainings on the inner workings of the administrative state for prospective appointees and is constructing a massive database of vetted recruits — a “conservative LinkedIn.” Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, recently told The Times, “Project 2025 is committed to recruiting and training a deep bench of patriotic Americans who are ready to serve their country on day one of the next administration.”
A.F.P.I. has a similar mission. Founded in 2021 by the Trump administration alums Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow, its Pathway to 2025 Initiative promises “to ensure the strongest policies and personnel are in place on Day 1 in January 2025.”
Beneath the surface, however, ideological and personal rivalries simmer. Heritage should, on its face, be the more traditional and moderate of the two groups. It helped power the Reagan revolution and still has a conventional conservative sheen. But since Mr. Roberts took the helm in December 2021, Heritage has moved in a decidedly Trumpian direction, flirting with isolationist foreign policy ideas, expressing extreme skepticism of aid to Ukraine and supporting certain tariffs to re-shore American manufacturing. It has also brought together a cadre of young ideologues, alums of Mr. Trump’s Presidential Personnel Office, who — under the leadership of a feverishly devoted former assistant to the president named John McEntee (imagine Gary from “Veep,” if he were 33 years old, dashing and ideologically fanatical) — undertook an ideological purge of the executive branch beginning in February 2020.
A.F.P.I. has close ties to Trump, too; eight former Trump cabinet-level officials and dozens of senior staff members are on its team. But despite its name, the organization has ties to conservative orthodoxy: Its leadership team includes a free marketeer who bitterly opposed the Trump tariffs, a former chief of staff to John Bolton, the foreign policy adventurist despised in Trumpworld for his apostasy, and Ms. Rollins, a domestic policy adviser who advocated police and sentencing reform, policy ideas which have fallen far out of fashion with the Trump base.
Both groups are trying to make Mr. Trump a “better” president: more effective, more ruthless, more beholden to conservative dogma. But Heritage and A.F.P.I. represent different cliques in the Trump universe, and each is suspicious of the other. A.F.P.I. partisans see Heritage as a latecomer to the Trump train, establishment wolves in “America First” clothing. Some at Heritage see A.F.P.I. as a redoubt of precisely those unreliable Trump appointees — grifters and RINOs — who trade on their relationships with the president to ensure they can continue to run the show.
“A.F.P.I. and Heritage hate each other with a passion,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast in November. “The Heritage people look down on the A.F.P.I. people like they’re a joke. And the A.F.P.I. people look at the Heritage people like they’re phony MAGA.” In September, one of Mr. McEntee’s colleagues sent a blistering email to the leader of A.F.P.I.’s transition project, calling the outfit a “Trojan horse by which the establishment can retake control of personnel.” “I understand that all the America Last Republicans are afraid of being cut out of the next administration,” he sneered. “They should be.”
This squabbling and name-calling (“I know you are, but what am I?”) has the flavor of sibling rivalry. A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump’s team issued a rebuke of the “I’ll turn this car around right now!” variety.
In a joint statement on Nov. 13, the Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said, “We are seeing more and more stories about various groups’ intentions for leading a Trump transition. These stories are neither appropriate nor constructive.” They declared, “none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign.” They also threw cold water on Heritage and A.F.P.I.’s transition plans: “These reports about personnel and policies that are specific to a second Trump administration are purely speculative and theoretical. Any personnel lists, policy agendas or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions.”
The statement had several purposes. For one, it was the campaign’s way of reasserting control, inspired by a wave of news reports that conflated Heritage and A.F.P.I. plans with their own. (An “official transition effort,” Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita said, would be announced at a later date.) Mr. Trump and his team had also become anxious that outside groups were siphoning donors away from Mr. Trump himself. “There’s a competition for Trump donors, and every dollar A.F.P.I. soaks up is a dollar that’s not going to get Trump elected,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast. Mr. Trump has reportedly insisted that Ms. Rollins and A.F.P.I. owe him money for using his brand to fund-raise for the think tank.
Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita issued another shot across the bow in early December: “Let us be even more specific, and blunt: People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump … and themselves.” Mr. Trump, they said, “is not interested in, nor does he condone, selfish efforts by ‘desk hunters.’”
Most of all, the rising tension between these rivals, and Mr. Trump’s decision to clip their wings — punishment for depriving Daddy of resources and attention — is a reminder of the tenuousness of their task. Heritage and A.F.P.I. may see themselves as ideological foot soldiers in the cause of Trumpism, but Mr. Trump, in his old-fashioned machine politician way, seems to see them as rogue cronies seeking favor and graft, or worse, attempting to usurp his authority.
This discord is a symptom of a deeper problem. The sociologist Dylan Riley, relying on a typology from Max Weber, has proposed thinking of Mr. Trump as a charismatic leader (deriving his authority from the force of his personality) whose model of governance is essentially patrimonial. In other words, Mr. Trump ran his White House more like a mafia boss (or a king) than a president, treating affairs of state as his personal affairs, as if he were managing his family — his patrimony.
During his first term, that mode of rule proved utterly incapable of running a large, rational, bureaucratic state apparatus. Mr. Trump’s personal network of friends, family and advisers, writes Mr. Riley, was “simply too small” to staff federal agencies with people who were both competent and loyal. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy treated Trumpian patrimonialism as a “foreign body” within its structure, a pathogen to be expelled. The friction that dynamic created, as incompatible modes of governance ground against one another, accounts for the dysfunction and, ultimately, the weakness of the first Trump administration.
Project 2025 represents an effort to reconcile Mr. Trump’s patrimonialism with the demands of governing a modern bureaucracy; personnel recruits are to be vetted and trained as technicians and true believers, experts at wielding the levers of state and members of the family (initiates, made men). Schedule F, meanwhile, would reclassify thousands of civil servants as political appointees, subject to the president’s whims, extending the logic of patrimonial loyalty to a larger portion of the administrative state — ideally, enough to overpower the inevitable immune response of the bureaucratic apparatus.
Will it work? In the end, it may be Mr. Trump’s charisma — not his corruption — that undermines the smooth functioning of his executive branch. The Heritage vision depends on seamless coordination, delegation and preparation; charismatic authority is hostile to methodical management and organizational structure. As Reinhard Bendix, a student of Weber, wrote, the charismatic leader “dominates men by virtue of qualities inaccessible to others and incompatible with the rules of thought and action that govern everyday life.” There’s no way to plan for Mr. Trump. He is the indispensable man, the one who can destroy it all. And he likes it that way. As a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone, “The thing A.F.P.I. and all of them need to remember is: You are not running the show. Donald J. Trump is.”
If he continues on as he always has, hiring loyal incompetents and business-world cronies all while refusing to cede control to the eggheads, the second Trump administration may resemble the first: with all the internal dysfunction and recrimination that hampered his agenda last time. That means four more years of bureaucratic paralysis and friction, lots of sparks and light but little fundamental change — a system of government too busy attacking itself to help most Americans, and just functional enough to bestow financial rewards on Mr. Trump’s friends while inflicting sporadic pain on his preferred enemies: immigrants, the nonwhite poor, trans kids and university professors.
Despite all the contradictions I’ve noted, it’s not impossible to imagine something worse. Neither Heritage nor A.F.P.I. is likely to get its way entirely; the transition will involve a division of spoils among various constituencies: think tanks, the corporate world, Trump cronies and big donors. But there is little doubt that a second Trump White House would be better prepared to seize the reins of power, to “hit the beaches” on Day 1, as Steve Bannon recently put it in conversation with the Project 2025 director Paul Dans on Mr. Bannon’s podcast. As Heritage’s own transformation attests, movement conservatism has been reshaped in Mr. Trump’s image. The backbench of policy entrepreneurs dedicated to Mr. Trump’s agenda is orders of magnitude deeper than it was in 2016. And many fewer moderate G.O.P. officials are likely to join (or to be permitted to join) the administration with the goal of constraining Mr. Trump.
Those involved with the transition efforts seem to be convinced that Mr. Trump himself understands — as he did not last time around — that executing his agenda requires not just personal intransigence or ideological ferocity but bureaucratic finesse: putting the right people in the right places to wield state power for conservative ends. If they’re right, a second-term Trump could resemble the Caesar-like sovereign liberals have always feared and certain Trumpists have longed for.
“Liberals love power,” Rick Dearborn, a former White House deputy chief of staff now advising Heritage, told an audience in November. “They put all the plumbing into government. They know where all the levers are. They know exactly how to manipulate our government to achieve their own agenda and their own ends.” By contrast, Mr. Dearborn said, “Conservatives want to give all the power back to the people. Conservatives want to live their lives. But if we go on just living our lives and we’re not engaged, then we’re going to leave our government to liberals. And you get what you sow.”
Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) is a co-host of the podcast “Know Your Enemy.”
Photograph by eelnosiva/Getty Images.
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