Donald Trump‘s campaign promises for a second Trump term are part of a codified plan being organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington, D.C. think tank. Called Project 2025, the transition plan cooked up by Heritage with input from dozens of other conservative organizations proposes a large-scale purge of what the GOP’s MAGA adherents commonly call the “deep state” or the establishment and a broad expansion of presidential powers.
The initiative includes plans to reclassify thousands of nonpartisan, unappointed government jobs as positions to be filled by the administration, with partisan loyalty ranking about merit and expertise in a revamped qualifications schema.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, told ABC News recently that in vetting people to work with the RNC in battleground states, part of the interview includes gaining an understanding of a candidate’s beliefs about whether the 2020 election was rigged or stolen — presumably to favor those candidates subscribing to the debunked theory that it was, which many MAGA influencers, including Trump, continue to promote.
Asking if the election was stolen will not reveal “critical thinking.” People who say “no” are simply sane, people who say “yes” are nuts. No critical thinking required. https://t.co/WdoKZHJbhI
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) March 29, 2024
Though Leavitt says a potential employee’s beliefs about the integrity of the 2020 election is “not a litmus test,” she goes on to say that the Trump team wants “critical thinkers. ”
By that she means those who will consider true things that are not true, says Democratic attorney and election law specialist Marc Elias, who has defended most of the cases that Trump and his fellow plaintiffs have brought to try to prove the election was corrupt. Elias has prevailed overwhelmingly in these cases, with no court having found significant fraud occurred.
“Asking if the election was stolen will not reveal ‘critical thinking’,” Elias writes. “People who say ‘no’ are simply sane, people who say ‘yes’ are nuts. No critical thinking required.”
[NOTE: Leavitt has also been actively talking up another of the campaign’s priorities in pursuit of so-called “election integrity,” which the Republican National Committee, she says, plans to ensure by “putting soldiers” at polling places.]
This is insane even for a Trumpian RNC. It means that everyone in the place — every researcher, lawyer, fundraiser, receptionist — is an avowed election denier. How does the Committee ever recover from this?
Maybe the answer is it shouldn’t.https://t.co/qiQeguUh6a
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) March 27, 2024