Remember when the media mocked Donald Trump for being incompetent? Well, that is now old news. Nowadays a new narrative is developing that Trump is actually very competent and that terrifies many journalists including Gabriel Sherman, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair.
Sherman wrote a nasty book about Fox News boss Roger Ailes titled The Loudest Voice in the Room that came out ten years ago. (Trump was mentioned once, very briefly.) He described his terror on Thursday with a piece titled “Inside the Terrifyingly Competent Trump 2024 Campaign.” The subtitle of his horror tale even included this terror alert for others, “How worried should you be? Very.“
If Trump wins back the White House, his increasingly extreme and violent rhetoric is poised to become policy. The New York Times reported Trump plans to order mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and detain them in deportation camps. Trump has promised to direct the Justice Department to prosecute Joe Biden. At a rally in February, Trump said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that doesn’t increase military spending. Veterans of Trump’s first administration are sounding the alarm. “He is the domestic terrorist of the 21st century,” former communications director Anthony Scaramucci has said. Former attorney general Bill Barr testified to the January 6 Committee that Trump was “detached from reality.”
GASP! You mean Trump might use lawfare to imprison his political enemies via a politically weaponized DOJ? Who ever heard of such a thing being done in America? Oh, and the sheer shame of actually enforcing immigration laws is absolutely intolerable!
And now we come to the real source of poor Sherman’s terror: the new Trump loyalists won’t leak to the leftist press!
But here’s where a second Trump administration might really distinguish itself. While his 2016 agenda was frequently stymied by infighting and incompetence, available signs point to a second West Wing staffed by loyalists who would actually carry out his policies. The takeover of the Republican National Committee, which Trump recently completed, installing his daughter-in-law Lara as cochair, is a blueprint to keep in mind.
“President Trump knows who can deliver and who can’t. The backstabbers who were around in 2016 won’t be in this next White House,” Trump’s senior campaign adviser Jason Miller told me.
…In 2024, Trump’s inner circle is made up of heads-down operatives Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Miller, and James Blair, who don’t play their agendas through the media. “You have experienced people who don’t leak,” longtime Trump confidant Stone said. Trump trusts his senior team to do their jobs. In the past, Trump worked the phone constantly, soliciting advice from a wide circle of friends, family, Manhattan business associates, and media personalities. Trump’s style of pitting staffers against one another created an incentive to leak. “The side whose opinion lost would run to the media,” a 2020 campaign veteran explained. “This time, he’s not talking to randos.”
Finally we get an apocalyptic warning from Sherman about competent Trump’s supposed threat to democracy:
So how extreme could a second Trump administration get? One thing is certain, few of the guardrails that protected American democracy during his first term are still standing.
…Whether through enhanced discipline or legal circumstance, it appears ever more likely that a second Trump administration would be better primed to achieve its goals.
Beware! Beware the competent Trump unhindered by the “guardrails that protected American democracy.” Maybe he will be so competent that using lawfare via a politicized DOJ won’t boomerang on him as has happened to Biden.