Trump Allies Aim to Ensure Potential Administration Officials Are "Red-Pilled" | Vanity Fair

By Eric Lutz

The destruction from Donald Trump’s first term in office is still reverberating through American politics and culture. But the damage to democracy was somewhat mitigated by Trump’s incompetence, the constant feuding of those tasked with executing his plans, and the checks those who did not share in his authoritarian day-dreams managed to put on his power. But as he runs to reclaim the White House in 2024, Trump’s allies are already looking to remove any institutional constraints that might keep him from realizing his anti-democratic vision of executive power—beginning, it seems, with the hiring process of White House employees.

Axios on Friday published copies of questionnaires Trump allies are apparently using to screen potential staffers—documents, as the outlet noted, less meant to gauge not the qualifications of would-be administration officials than the degree of their loyalty to Trump.

One, used to screen applicants during the waning days of the Trump administration, asks questions like, “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” and “Have you ever appeared in the media to comment on Candidate Trump, President Trump, or other personnel or policies of the Trump Administration?”

Another, which the right-wing Heritage Foundation is using as part of its “Project 2025” to “pave the way for an effective conservative administration,” asks applicants to state whether they agree or disagree with a series of statements, including: “The President should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials.”

The goal, as a former Trump official told Axios, is to weed out those applicants who have not been sufficiently “red-pilled”: “They want to see that you’re listening to [Tucker Carlson] and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff,” the former staffer said.

The questionnaires read not only like ideological litmus tests but like loyalty pledges to the former president, who has campaigned for reelection on an explicitly authoritarian promise to seek “retribution” against political foes and to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” (Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung has rejected the “ridiculous” comparisons between his boss’s rhetoric and that of Hitler and Mussolini, describing critics as “snowflakes”: “Their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”)

Indeed, Trump—the dominant frontrunner for the GOP nomination, despite two impeachments and four indictments to his name—has made little secret of his plans for a more extreme second term, including more immigration crackdowns, targeting political opponents and the media, the use of the military against Americans, and a dramatic expansion of executive power. Meanwhile, allies like Stephen Miller have been working behind the scenes to lay the groundwork for him to implement them.

It’s a frightening prospect. But it need not come to pass if Americans choose not to lose sight of the chaos and corruption of Trump’s four years in office—and be clear-eyed about how much worse four more would be.