The next attempt to overthrow the American constitutional order may start somewhat later in January than the last one. If Donald Trump is returned to the Oval Office, he intends to change or overthrow the Constitution on January 20, 2025, day one of his next term.
Trump has been clear that he reveres the American flag, which he hugs and kisses at every chance, but not the Constitution. Indeed, in December 2022, Trump claimed that the “massive fraud” that occurred during the 2020 presidential election was so serious that it “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Termination, insurrection, or coup each seems high on the former president’s agenda and the agendas of some of his closest advisors. Unlike the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the coup he will launch next January will be carried out by lawyers and policy advisers, not by a violent mob.
It seems that Trump has learned one of the most important of what Robert Greene calls the “laws of power.” “Get others,” Greene says, “to do the work for you, but always take the credit. Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause…. In the end, your helpers will be forgotten, and you will be remembered.”
Defenders of the rule of law and democracy in this country need to attend carefully to the work that those helpers, especially lawyers, are now doing in anticipation of Trump’s return to power. They should not be distracted by every one of the former president’s outrageous statements.
Trump’s ability to do lasting damage to this country’s political system will depend on the plans and possibilities developed by what George Conway, Michael Luttig, and Barbara Comstock label a “growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men” who are “willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency….”
Like the lawyers who greased the wheels for George Bush’s post-9/11 torture tactics, the lawyers and policy advisers who wish to do Trump’s bidding will write memos and opinions claiming legal authority for his autocratic undoing of the rules that have governed the American political system for more than 200 years.
While lawyers played a key role in thwarting the worse abuses of Trump’s first administration, as Conway, Luttig, and Comstock predict, “Should Mr. Trump return to the White House, he will arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again.”
The next time around, Conway, Luttig, and Comstock warn that he will “stock his administration with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping — if not circumventing altogether — existing laws and long-established legal norms.”
The work of Trump’s minions and allies is now being done rather openly. They hope that if Trump wins in November, he can claim a popular mandate for constitutional change.
Defenders of the rule of law and democracy need to take seriously what they are now saying and pay heed to what Masha Gessen wrote in the shadow of Trump’s 2016 victory. At that time, Gessen offered several rules for surviving an autocracy.
Rule #1 was “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.”
What Gessen said eight years ago is even truer today.
“Trump,” she wrote, “has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation,… but also doing away with judicial restraint—and, yes, punishing opponents.”
And what Gessen said about Trump applies with equal force to those who will whisper in his ear or staff a second Trump presidency.
The latest news of their plans broke on June 8 when the Washington Post reported on the work of Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief. Vought is now leading the Center for Renewing America, which the Post says is “part of a network of conservative advocacy groups staffed by former and potentially future Trump administration officials.”
Vought, a lawyer with a degree from George Washington University School of Law, justifies the coming constitutional coup by claiming that “We are in a post-constitutional moment in our country.”
“Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices,” Vought says, “have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement—a new regime if you will—that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.”
Not surprisingly, Vought blames a left-wing conspiracy for hijacking and destroying the old Constitution. “The Left quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change that left the constitutional system of separate powers in place but radically perverted how they operated, their incentive structures, and their responsiveness to the American people.”
“It has been a slow-moving revolution for over a hundred years, but the Constitution we live under is not the one that our Founders gave us, and the Left understands this…. They just never say the quiet part out loud.”
Vought says we are in a deep crisis and must act decisively to avert its full flowering. Trump’s return to power offers a vehicle for carrying out such action.
Vought himself is now saying the quiet part out loud.
It is time, he says, “to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it.”
After Trump’s conviction in the New York hush money and election interference case, Vought drove this point home in a social media post where he again sounded the alarm and issued a call to action. “If yesterday’s convictions of President Trump did not shake you, nothing will.”
“Do not,” Vought said, “tell me that we are living under the Constitution. Do not tell me that these are mere political disagreements of Americans with different world views. This is only the most recent example of a post-Constitutional America furthered by a corrupt Marxist vanguard pulling out all the stops to protect their own power.”
“The task ahead,” he wrote, “is, in the words of Kipling, to ourselves ‘fill the unforgiving minute, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.’”
Vought pointed the way to the coming insurrection by reminding his readers, “This isn’t just about winning an election to shift the see-saw toward our agenda. It’s about demanding that our leaders destroy this threat at every level with every tool. And if you can’t rise to that level of historical awareness, then simply put, you are not needed.”
Resisting Marxism, destroying threats, rising to the occasion. These are the words of a lawyer and an important voice in Trump’s orbit.
The Post highlights Vought’s prominence by noting that one “sign of Vought’s status as a key adviser” is that “Trump and the Republican National Committee last month named him policy director for the 2024 platform committee…and Trump personally blessed Vought’s agenda at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser for his group and said Vought would ‘do a great job in continuing our quest to make America great again.’”
Continuing that quest will require that Trump be served by what the New York Times calls “a different type of lawyer committed to his ‘America First’ ideology and…[those] who are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause. This new mindset matches Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is waging a ‘final battle’ against demonic ‘enemies’ populating a ‘deep state’ within the government that is bent on destroying America.”
Or as Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump wanted to install as Attorney General at the end of his first term, puts it, “extraordinary times call for extraordinary, responsive legal creativity.”
Steve Bannon says that such creativity will be used in the second Trump administration to “rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it.” Lawyers like Vought and Clark will play key roles in doing that work and in overthrowing the Constitution.
Remember Gessen. Believe what they are saying.
