This

is the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, that's come up with this plan, Trump 2025.

Yes. So let me give some context here. Trump announces he's running for president. The Republicans think it's a joke. They think he's not going to win. They make everybody sign a pledge that they have to support the nominee. They don't think it's going to be him. He signs the pledge. He becomes the nominee. Okay. He doesn't even know what the deep state is at this point. Trust me, I know because I worked on the campaign. But the narrative of what the deep state is, just for our listeners outside the United States, is the Steve Bannon right-wing Breitbart, this conservative newsletter that goes out and this blog, is that there's a very large group of people that work inside the United States government that are by and large liberals. They have permanent jobs, and there's actually even a union associated with them. And the reason they have permanent jobs is that there's a lot of things that happen in the government that aren't political and are not partisan. And so they want these people to have some security to their jobs, depending on the political whims. And when I got to the White House and I had my first intelligence briefing caddy, the analyst said to me that there are workhorses in the government and there are show horses in the government. And you're going to learn very quickly who the workhorses are in the government. And so right now we have at the civil servant level, to equate it to the UK, we have 2.9 million people that work in the United States government as civil servants. We have over 12 million people that are in the government if you take it out to the military, the Pentagon, armed services, everything. It's literally the largest, most powerful entity in the world. And so the question is, do you want somebody that's elected for four years to totally dismantle and disrupt that? The right wing wants that. But if you are a traditionalist and you are a believer in the American system, you actually don't want that. And there were reasons why it was set up this way. It was to prevent partisans from meddling in the day-to affairs that have to happen in the government. And I'll say one last thing, okay? Those people in the government who are permanent in the government, they view the politicians, the elected leaders as the Christmas help. Okay, you know how you get the Christmas help to come into the department store for two weeks? Okay, these are temporary people that are showboating around Washington. They're the holiday surge. They call them the Christmas help. So I'm showing my biases here because I am a traditionalist. I love my country and I love the system of government. I love the flatness. Okay. What's different from Europe in this country is there's really no power structure at the top. It's totally diffused, a result of which people like me that grow up in a middle-class environment or low middle-class environment can rise. Okay. Or to quote Abraham Lincoln, two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, he rendered it, he wrote in his diary, there is no permanent labor class in the United States. And in order to keep that going, you got to get nonsense like Donald Trump out of the mix. And he can do a lot of damage to this infrastructure through executive order. And I would encourage people, we don't have time on this podcast, but go read the things from the Heritage Foundation. They're a very organized group of people. Trump is running a very organized campaign. These people believe this nonsense and they want to execute it on the American government.

Yeah, I think, I mean, that is worth pointing out. And you mentioned the 2016 campaign, casting no aspersions on your good self, Antonis Garamucci, but it was a little bit chaotic, right? They were not ready for prime time. I

said this to the Senate Intelligence Committee when I had to spend all this money to go down there and I got subpoenaed. I said, guys, we weren't even colluding with ourselves. How the hell are we going to collude with the Russians? Steve Bannon and I were in a food fight almost every day on that campaign. I

know because I was speaking to people on the other side in the Biden campaign and they were saying, we don't understand it. We're drawing up all of these documents and we're drawing up all of these transition papers to help them understand how stuff works in all the different branches of government. And nobody's reading any of them. And they felt a little bit like their nose was put out of joint because they'd done their homework and the teacher wasn't reading the homework. But they were pretty surprised at how unprepared the Trump people were when they came in. If you think that is the replica for what's happening this time around, you're very wrong. This is a much more disciplined, much more focused campaign. They are drawing up policy papers on everything from abortion to trade to communications regulation. And there is this plan known as Schedule F. If you want to sound kind of super geeky about American politics at the moment, you flash around the word Schedule F a lot, which is the way you would make civil servants, you would take them out of the category of being lifelong civil servants who had permanent jobs, and you would make them at-will jobs. And if you do that to hundreds of thousands of civil servants, this is the rationale of the Trump campaign, you can get rid of all of these people who are permanent employees and who are blocking the kind of MAGA agenda. And you can put in their place, effectively, hundreds of thousands of political appointees who are allies of Donald Trump's, loyalists to his cause, and who will allow them to move much faster to make, for example, the Department of Justice more beholden to Donald Trump. So he could, as he has said he wants to do, launch investigations against Joe Biden, for example, or launch investigations against his political enemies, or get rid of the lawsuits that are pending against him. He has talked about wanting to put more Trump allies, for example, into the Federal Communications Commission, which is the organization that controls the media. Some Trump allies have said that there are left-wing television outlets here, like MSNBC, that he would like to effectively get rid of so that they don't have hosts talking about Trump in a negative way on television. So there are things that you can see that he wants to do with this Schedule F. My question is, even though I keep hearing that this is a much more organized, disciplined campaign, this would be a massive change to the way that American democracy has worked. And it wouldn't just last for this four years. It would potentially work. I mean, then a democratic president could come in and do exactly the same thing. Do you think they could actually pull it off? Do you think they can make the American professional civil service a political body?

They can do a lot of damage, Katty. They have a lot of things they can do through executive power. He's a norm pusher. Okay. So he will push the norms. If you're, as he's doing with the immunity case, the founders are like, okay, there'll be gentle men and maybe possibly a hundred, 200 years from now, gentle women that are our heads of state. They're not going to be sociopathic, crazy people that are heads of state. So they didn't get that right because we got one and he will push the norms. And by the way, if he gets elected, we'll be doing this podcast, okay? And I'll probably have a voice modulator and I'll be like in an undisclosed location. We're going

to be in Oslo. We've already had offers to go and host the show in Oslo.

I might be in Oslo. I'll likely be in Antarctica. Maybe Trump will make me the ambassador to Antarctica. I have good rapport with the penguins down there. But he's coming for people like me because I am a person that speaks out against him. And Bannon has already said he's got his list. They're ready to go. That is un-American, by the way, as you know. That is un-American. I

realize that. And it's kind of super weird that we're even having this conversation because I've now covered six American elections and I have never heard Republicans, when a Democrat gets elected, say to me, oh, my God, this Democratic president is going to come after me or vice versa. I did not hear the John Kerry people in 2004 when George Bush was elected, reelected, saying, oh, my God, now the Bush people are going to come after me because I opposed him. This conversation isn't a normal American political conversation to be having. When you say, and I hear other people who have opposed Trump say the same thing to me, that he's going to come after me, what do you actually mean? How would he come after? And would it be Trump and the organs of government coming after you? Or kind of separately, would it be like Trump supporters going rogue?

So if he's capable of fully corrupting the Justice Department, as he's saying, and he's told some of his defense attorneys he wants to use the FBI as a Gestapo, they will do certain things. I'll be under IRS audit. They'll view all documents. Tax audits. Yeah, tax audits. They'll accuse me of fraud. Trump is very upset that he's been accused of business fraud. And so he'll go out and accuse people of business fraud, whether it's specious or otherwise. It'll tie you up in the court system. It'll hurt your reputation, hurt your business. If he's capable of weaponizing the Department of Justice, and it's an interesting thing because the executive branch controls the Department of Justice, but there was a gentleman or gentlewoman's agreement that even though it's controlled by a Republican or a Democrat, it's justice. There are two scales. We're going to make sure that this is nonpartisan. It's an infliction of justice that's nonpartisan. It's the immortal words of Cicero from 2,200 years ago. We are slaves to the law in order to be free. So no one is above the law and we'll treat it with objectivity and impartiality. Trump is saying, no, I don't want to do that. I'm going to slant this to favor me. Okay. But these are all problems. No big deal. course, I'll be living here in America, part of the healthy vocal opposition. But if I have to move to Oslo, you can find me in Oslo. The other thing is we have to put this out there. If he is convicted in this current case, and he is a felon, they will be running advertising from now until election day that he's a convicted felon and you have a convicted felon on the ballot. And I am telling you, Caddy, I know the country reasonably well. I traveled all over this country with Donald Trump and I travel for business. This would be a nightmare for the Trump campaign because they got to get some of these independents and they're already under the gun with the women's rights issues. They've ceded the women's rights issues to the Democrats. Now they're telling you that we're going to remove Hispanics that we think are illegal and they may or may not be illegal. Maybe there's someone that's speaking out against Trump and they just say, well, you know what? We're going to put him in the illegal bucket. Let's get him deported. This is so dangerous. He has created a Trump vaccine for all of us where our immune systems are now down from all the outrageous stuff. If you were in 2004 and John Kerry was talking like this, there are World War II veterans that were still alive. They'd be hitting every alarm bell in the system. But it's now 2024 and we have 10 years of him talking like this and we're used to it and we don't even overreact to it. But he's got a group of very serious people that want to work with him to affect this. And that's the danger, Caddy.

Yeah.