Donald Trump has made clear he intends to test the boundaries of the presidency immediately if he's re-elected to a second term, and MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski reacted in horror upon hearing his plans.
The presumptive Republican nominee and his allies have stated his authoritarian intentions for another presidency, and Axios co-founder Jim Vande Hei told "Morning Joe" that the former president would step back into the White House with a stronger grasp of the office and a firm grasp on the Republican Party.
"He already has a Republican Party, a Congress in waiting, that is extremely pro-Trump," Vande Hei said. "All of the restraints, all of the people in positions of power who are his critics, his adversaries, his handcuffs — they're gone. This is a Trump Congress in the House, it's a Trump Congress in the Senate, and you look at what he said he's going to do with that Republican coalition, what he's going to now do with greater immunity. He's been very clear."
"Listen, he is going to use potentially the National Guard and the military to round up millions of people and remove them from the United States," Vande Hei added. "He's going to consider using the military to protect the southern border. He's been very clear that he is going to get rid of people that he deems disloyal, that are civil servants in the United States government.
"He is going to use a unique interpretation of law that he believes he would win in a challenge to get rid of them. They've pre-vetted thousands, potentially tens of thousands of people that they want to bring into the government to do his will, to do his wishes, so that he can move much more effectively and much faster, and imagine that he does win.
"If he wins, the two oldest Supreme Court justices, [Clarence] Thomas and [Samuel] Alito, 76 and 74, the possibility that they could retire in the next term is real. Then you'd have Trump being able to put in two Supreme Court justices, probably in their 50s or 40s, people who would be there for a long time. The end result would be you'd have five justices over the course of his two terms who were appointed by Trump."
Axios laid out the ex-president's plans for another term in a new article that quotes potential vice presidential pick J.D. Vance, a GOP senator from Ohio, saying that few Republicans would stand in the way of his agenda.
"The point of the column is that, love it or hate it, he'd come in as one of the most powerful figures, and he would stress test it immediately," Vance Hei said. "They have very specific plans. This is not the haphazard Trump we covered in 2017. This is a much more organized operation, at least the people in the institutions around him."
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Brzezinski agreed that Trump posed a greater threat to democracy than he did the first time around because he didn't even expect to win his 2016 election.
"I think this is devastating and absolutely frightening and absolutely could happen," she said. "As you said, he came in haphazardly. Donald Trump didn't even know he was going to win. It was one day out of an entire year where everything fell into place, and he won the presidency.
"They were, at the last minute, writing a victory speech, you know, scrambling. That's not the case this time. That means every single person that is going to be around him, they're going to plan for that person to make sure that they take the oath."
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