Donald Trump, perhaps looking jealously at Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, seems to be planning a purge of the federal government and the officials appointed by Obama, if elected.
According to audio obtained by Reuters, Chris Christie told a closed meeting on Tuesday that the Trump campaign is currently making plans of who to fire. Names of those in the Republican’s little black book haven’t been released, but you can imagine that with the party’s paranoia, it will be rather large.
Christie also expressed fears that the plans of a Trump takeover could be stymied by President Obama. If Obama makes those political appointees civil servants, firing them could be more difficult.
According to Christie:
“You take them from the political appointee side into the civil service side, in order to try to set up … roadblocks for your successor, kind of like when all the Clinton people took all the Ws off the keyboard when George Bush was coming into the White House.”
Obama’s possible strategy doesn’t deter Trump’s team however. They are now planning to lever a Republican-controlled Congress into bringing forward new legislation which would make the firing of civil servants easier.
On this, Christie said:
“One of the things I have suggested to Donald is that we have to immediately ask the Republican Congress to change the civil service laws. Because if they do, it will make it a lot easier to fire those people.”
Other plans covered in the meeting included a change of leadership in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and a plan to allow business people to serve in the government part-time.
There’s a lot that can be said about the Republican platform. Its prejudices are out there for all to see. This scheme, however, takes governmental reshuffling to a new extreme of quasi-Stalinism or the grim undertakings of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
This does at least give an answer to just when, in the eyes of Trump’s campaign, America was “great.” Apparently, it was during the McCarthy era.
H/T to Reuters
Check out Trump as he accepts the nomination as the Republican presidential nominee:
