Newly leaked video shows one of Donald Trump’s former top administration officials detailing his plans to give the Republican presidential candidate unchecked power to unleash the military on Americans if he wins re-election.
The plan involves creating “shadow” government offices that would create flimsy legal justifications to override objections from military leaders and carry out executive orders, including sending in soldiers against protesters and other perceived enemies, according to a stunning new report from ProPublica.
“We’re trying to build almost a shadow Office of Management and Budget. We’re trying to build a shadow Office of Legal Counsel,” said Russell Vought, who oversaw Trump’s OMB in 2019 and 2020, in a video from 2023.
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Throughout his latest presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly described Democratic lawmakers as “the enemy within” and mused about using the military against his fellow Americans.
Republican pundits have tried to dismiss the comments as all talk, but Vought is expected to be given another high-level government role in a second Trump administration—perhaps even as White House chief of staff, according to ProPublica. He declined the news site’s requests for comment.
During Trump’s first term, lawyers often shot down illegal policy proposals, Vought says in one of the leaked videos. The goal of the “shadow” government is to avoid a repeat of that scenario, he explains.
The plan would basically amount to stacking the Office of Legal Counsel—which has traditionally operated with a degree of independence and objectivity—with Trump loyalists ready to rubber stamp the White House’s executive orders, ProPublica reports.
In one of Vought’s examples, the White House could classify protesters as insurrectionists and then invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy troops within the U.S.
The act was famously used to bring in the National Guard to desegregate schools in the American South after local officials ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
Trump wanted to use it to deploy the military against Americans protesting George Floyd’s murder, but officials reportedly talked him out of it on legal grounds. According to Vought, that wouldn’t have happened with his shadow counsel in place.
