When former homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Olivia Troye began her tenure at the Trump White House in 2018, she said she remembers one particularly “horrifying” meeting when civil servants tried to push back against the former president’s policies.
As Trump officials discussed the former president’s plans to ultimately separate 2,700 children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Troye said Trump officials acknowledged that they had “lost track of where the parents are.”
“The response to that was like, ‘Oh, well, they'll figure it out,’” Troye said, recounting the meeting while she spoke at a July panel held at New York University titled: “Autocracy in America.”
Troye, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who started working on Capitol Hill during the Bush administration, said lawyers and national security professionals spoke up as Trump officials discussed strategies to officially roll out the policy and told them: “You can’t do that, that’s actually not legal, that’s not within our authority.”
“Their response was: ‘So let them sue us,’” Troye said. “'Let them sue us, and let the system catch up to us, and by then, we'll have already enacted numerous things that could damage the system, break the system and overwhelm it.'”
Troye said Trump advisers gained confidence that the judiciary would ultimately side with them, thanks to Trump's appointment of three Supreme Court justices and a relatively high number of federal appeals court judges.
"Everyone's like, 'Oh, well, we've got the judicial system, we've got this," Troye said.
Troye said the Trump officials’ response was cavalier for a policy that ended up having sweeping consequences for thousands of children. “There are legal ramifications, there are actually health consequences, and long-term effects that we're doing to these people,” she said of the policy, which a federal judge halted in June 2018.
As the November election nears, Troye is among a handful of former Trump officials speaking publicly about their concerns that Trump will face much less pushback from administration officials as he embarks to enact his rightwing agenda in a second term.
"It'll clearly be loyalty over expertise and competency," Troye told Salon. "The loyalty will be the test."
She added: "They learned that they need to place loyalists who will do whatever it takes to push a policy without the concerns and, they would say, the red tape of the civil service... It's going to create great damage."
Troye is also among an estimated group of over 100 federal employees who resigned in protest during Trump’s first term, according to a 2021 study by Washington University in St. Louis School of Law professor Kathleen Clark.
Troye and academic scholars told Salon that Trump and his team have learned from their first term — and have spent years creating an apparatus of conservative nonprofits that have allowed former Trump aides to more deeply flesh out MAGA-friendly policy proposals and come up with lists of loyal potential administration picks.
Experts also told Salon that this time around, they expect the more-experienced Trump team to appoint loyalists to key positions, further limit the power of federal agencies and again try to make it easier to fire nonpartisan civil servants en masse and replace them with steadfast followers.
"Trump was frustrated in things not being done at the moment he wanted them to be done," Bowdoin College government professor Andrew Rudalevige told Salon. "The lesson he's taken from that is not that the bureaucracy could be helpful in providing substantive support, but rather that they need to be extirpated, effectively, that you need to either do an end-run or simply replace them."
As president, Trump faced an administration of civil servants dedicated to the rule of law, more moderate appointees who questioned his decision-making and loyalists new to the machinations of Washington.
"When he first came into office, he had no experience being president, and the people he surrounded himself with in his administration had no experience doing their jobs," Dartmouth College sociology professor John Campbell told Salon. "That's all changed now. There are people ready to step into positions throughout the administration now that know how to make government work. So, he has a big advantage going into his second term that he didn't have the first time around."
Trump saw record-high rates of turnover in his administration, according to a database maintained by The Brookings Instutition. Trump saw 14 departures from his Cabinet during his four-year term, compared with three in former President Barack Obama's administration and eight during George H.W. Bush's term.
"In 2016 Trump came in not really knowing anyone," Rudalevige said. "He had no background in public service, so he didn't have the normal network of people that presidential candidates normally do have. A lot of folks from the prior Republican establishment wound up getting appointed... A lot of those people wound up horrified by Trump."
Rudalevige said while some employees quit or told Trump his ideas were illegal or unfeasible, others worked with him. He pointed to revelations during Trump's first impeachment trial in 2020 that the Trump administration broke the law by withholding aid to Ukraine. Politico also revealed that Trump's advisers circulated a draft executive order that would have directed the Pentagon to seize and analyze voting records and machine across the country because of alleged "foreign interference" in the November election.
"A lot of cases, they came up with creative and legal ways to do things Trump wanted to do," Rudalevige said. "But that wasn't always possible."
Republican attorney George Conway, an avowed Trump critic who says he withdrew himself from consideration for Trump's first administration, said Trump believes in steadfast loyalty and pardoning those who break the law while following his orders.
"He understands the need to exclude those people because they kept him from successfully executing the coup that he tried to execute in January of 2021," Conway said at the NYU panel.
A loyal Cabinet and restructured bureaucracy could lead to fewer obstacles this time around for Trump, and better position him to navigate and restructure the bureaucracy that at times stymied his goals.
Trump has vowed to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history, and has floated using detention camps to do so. He also wants to finishing building a wall along the entirety of the 1,900 mile-long Southern border, deregulate oil drilling, require police agencies with DOJ grants to use stop-and-frisk, derail wind energy and clean energy incentives, impose the death penalty on drug dealers and traffickers, replace Obama's sweeping healthcare law, undo a Biden plan to allow people brought to the U.S. as children to enroll in the Affordable Care Act market, undo Biden's protections for transgender people, cut back "excessive regulations" and close down the Department of Education. Experts say his plan to impose tariffs on foreign imports could cost middle-class households $1,700 a year when companies raise prices on products as expected.
In December, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump in an interview: “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”
Trump responded: "Except for day one. I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
Trump then said he'd only be a "dictator" on day one as he later summarized his exchange with Hannity.
“He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator,’” Trump said.
Project 2025 – the 922-page manifesto backed by The Heritage Foundation, over 100 other conservative groups and scores of former Trump officials – lays out a plan to “remove thousands of bureaucrats” and replace them with Trump’s own appointees. The manifesto also calls for placing the Department of Justice and FBI under the president's control, along with scores of rightwing proposals including ending free weather reports from NOAA and restricting access to abortion pills, transgender care and emergency contraceptives.
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, and in some ways, the plan goes farther than what Trump has publicly said on key issues.
For example: Trump has declined to comment on access to abortion pills, said Project 2025 goes "way too far" on abortion, said abortion policy should be left to the states and said he strongly favors exception for abortion for rape, incest and the life of the mother. Project 2025 calls for the reversal of the FDA's approval of abortion pills, the elimination of "dangerous tele-abortion and abortion-by-mail distribution" and for improved collection of data and records for every abortion.
Still, Trump cheered the overturning of Roe v. Wade and has repeatedly made false claims about late-term abortions.
Overall, the policy book often offers an expanded vision for pieces of Trump's own platform.
"He put in people that didn't understand how government ran," University of Cincinnati College of Law dean emeritus Joseph Tomain told Salon. "So, this time, the plan would be to install, most importantly, political loyalists. And Project 2025 goes into great detail on how that would be accomplished."
Tomain said if Trump prizes loyalty above experience and expertise for hiring, that would stymie the role of agencies in grappling with complex societal issues from climate change to the next pandemic.
And his loyalty-first focus could impact more day-to-day governmental duties popular with broad swaths of society — from who delivers our mail, to how we handle Social Security payments, according to Wake Forest University School of Law professor Sidney Shapiro.
Asha Rangapa, a former special agent in the New York Division of the FBI, said she's worried about an increased likelihood of the kind of warrantless surveillance and fabricated intelligence seen, for example, under the Bush administration.
"There was pressure there," Rangapa said at the panel. "I mean, just imagine that exponentially."
The Trump administration often lost battles over its policies when they ended up in court. The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law found the administration lost over three-fourths of those fights from 2017 to 2021.
Shapiro told Salon that Trump could have seen a higher success rate by working better with civil servants — and he said that attitude could still stymie his potential second term.
"They could have made more progress towards their environmental and other views and been more deregulatory had they actually engaged the very people who are really good at this," Shapiro said. "And they would have responded with: 'No, you can't get rid of this environmental regulation because we need it, and there's good proof we need it. But here's what you could do to make it more palatable.'"
Shapiro said he doesn't believe the courts en masse will hand over Trump massive wins that flat-out violate the law.
"I just don't think the court's going to cover up for him," Shapiro said. "Maybe that's wishful thinking."
Still, other observers warn the tide could change in a second Trump term at a time when the Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings in line with Trump's vision: from administrative law decisions further limiting the power of federal agencies, to a landmark ruling extending broad presidential immunity for conduct in office.
"In some ways, the court kept him in check and ruled against some of his agenda and some of his policies," Pomona College politics professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky told Salon. "But we're seeing a dramatically restructured and reshaped court for Trump's second term, and we're also seeing a Trump administration that has no incentive, really, and no desire to temper itself."
She continued: "There's not going to be some kind of gentleman's agreement to rein in Trump on certain things. I think that is gone, and it's replaced by nothing but kind of the most pure, raw, worst impulses of Trumpism and in a judiciary system that's no longer able or willing to check him in the same way. So, the courts will not save us."
Trump could also cite the presidential immunity ruling to further push what's known as unitary executive theory — a legal doctrine first cited by the Reagan administration that Vanderbilt University political science professor John Dearborn described as "an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House."
"It basically asserts that the president should control the entire executive power, and therefore have control of the executive branch," Dearborn told Salon.
Dearborn said he expects Trump to launch legal battles to challenge the independence of regulatory commissions and agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump recently vowed to oust the chairman of the SEC on day one of his second term as part of his efforts to court the cryptocurrency industry as donors at the July Bitcoin 2024 conference.
Dearborn said even if Trump doesn't accomplish everything he wants in a second term, he's poised to have a significant impact.
"There's certainly no guarantees they would be able to do everything they want, but if they attempted everything they want and got even a significant part of it, particularly on some of these unitary executive kind of plans, it would not only be a significant transformation of the federal government, but also an attempt at a culmination of a 40-plus year project of the conservative legal movement," Dearborn said.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Trump lawyers didn't appear to understand the intricacies of the Administration Procedures Act when Democratic and sometimes Republican attorneys general sued his administration.
"Now they do," Ellison, a Democrat, said at the panel. "And so, I just think it's important to bear in mind we're not looking at a replay. We're looking at something different."
Troye, the former Trump administration aide, said amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she recalls Trump officials bullying Dr. Anthony Fauci and former FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn while stymying the release of CDC guidance on gown re-washing.
And she said during meetings on Trump's ban on travel from a list of Muslim-majority countries, she recalled Trump advisers asking the intelligence community for information that would justify adding more countries.
Troye said she had to "go to bat for the intelligence community" and say: "'I'm sorry, our assessments don't support what you're saying, and we won't budge on this growing list of countries that you're using for political purpose while you try to politicize intelligence community efforts from a community that has spent hours and hours coordinating trying to figure out how we navigate this. And in addition to that, you're also hurting our national security. You're hurting our national security standing on the world stage as well, because you're not thinking about the repercussions of what's happening here globally, and how foreign governments are looking at us.'"
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the travel ban.
