Trump and his allies
are planning
a major expansion
of the powers of the executive branch,
according to The New York Times.
Those plans
include bringing
independent agencies
under direct President control.
That would include the
Federal Communications Commission
and the Federal Trade Commission
and chiefly the Justice Department.
He also would refuse to spend money
Congress has appropriated for programs
he does not like,
and he would remove officials
he does not like from in
intelligence agencies.
With us
now, Alyssa
Farah Griffin,
CNN political commentator
and former White House
communications director
for the Trump administration.
Alyssa, let's say it's 20, 25.
Trump is president once again.
What do you think it will look like
if he is able
to increase his authority
over every part of government,
knowing what you know about him
having worked for him?
Well, listen,
Susan Glassner has a great analogy
she uses in her book
talking about the Trump
time in office
where she compares him
to a dinosaur in Jurassic Park,
learning to open the door, saying
he could be more dangerous
in a second term
because he understands
how the machines of government
actually work.
And I've warned about this.
I can confirm everything
that's in that New York Times piece,
because most of it was stuff
that the former president
wanted to do in his first term.
But aides like myself
and others talked him out of.
And at the time, the argument was,
this is too unpopular with the public.
You need to focus on your reelection
But one that stands out to me
and I've kind of been raising
alarm bells about
is this this effort
to basically eliminate the civil service
or basically make it so it's so,
so much easier to fire career
subject matter experts.
That is an effort to make the government
purely partizan
and is staffed with loyalists
who are going to carry out his agenda
and having been in the
the Trump White House during COVID,
I can't even really express
how dangerous that would be had
we not had experts there.
So this is incredibly
important reporting.
People need to pay attention to.
So one of the people mapping out
this new approach is someone,
you know, former
Trump White House aide John McEntee.
He was the personnel chief.
Here's what he told The New York Times.
Quote, Our current executive
branch was conceived of by liberals
for the purpose of promulgating
liberal policies.
What's necessary
is a complete system overhaul.
Unquote.
Do you think the system needs
an overhaul?
No.
I think Johnny McEntee
needs a civics lesson.
There's nothing conservative
about trying to strengthen these,
trying to increase
the power of the presidency
and the executive branch.
I'm old enough to remember
when I was working for conservatives
on Capitol Hill,
and we wanted to rein
in the executive branch from overreach.
What's laid out in The New York Times
reporting is
the opposite
is making the president
significantly more powerful
than the co-equal branch as the judiciary
in the legislative branch.
And it's kind of being pitched under
the guise
of dismantling the administrative state,
something that
is popular with conservatives.
But that's not, in fact,
what Donald Trump wants to do
He wants to basically strengthen
every agency with loyalists to him,
staff them with loyalists to him,
and then bring any independent
agencies under his purview.
So he has more authority over them.
Well, I mean,
the slippery slope of it is even if you,
for instance,
think that, Donald,
you want to give Donald Trump
that power, not you,
but somebody watching
wants to give Donald Trump that power.
And then Donald Trump gets the power
and he gets to take away CNN's license
to broadcast
or let's
actually I don't think we're regulated
by the FCC.
Let's say he takes away
CBS license to broadcast CBS News.
Well, guess what?
There will be a Democratic president
at some point.
Does he get to take away someone else's?
I mean, that's how it works, right?
Well, once these standards go away,
they go away for everybody.
And by the way,
the press will come under attack.
I don't know.
This wasn't in the reporting, but
CNN's Kaitlan Collins knows
well that the former president,
when Trump was in office,
he wanted to eliminate seats
from the press briefing room.
He wanted to relocate the press
into a completely different part
of the actual White House campus
to create you know, to take away that
that era of being able
to oversee and report
on the comings and goings.
So the absolutely be impacts.
It's not dissimilar,
frankly,
from the argument that Mike Pence
could overturn the elections,
because if you want to set up
that precedent,
then you're saying Vice
President Harris can as well.
It's not conservative,
it's not Republican,
and folks need to pay attention to it.
What would have been interesting news
for Vice President
Al Gore that he could have sent off,
he sent Florida back to the states
and declared himself president.
Thank you so much, Allison Farah Griffin.
I really appreciate your talking to us.