Trump has said he wants to destroy the “deep state” 56 times on Truth Social
Donald Trump has set the scene for a potential second term as president by laying out a multi-step plan on Truth Social to “demolish the deep state” by gutting the civil service, limiting the power of institutions and experts, and replacing career officials with Trump loyalists. According to a CREW analysis of Trump’s Truth Social from January 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024 Trump has posted about crushing the “deep state” 56 times, and in nine of those posts he laid out specific plans for how he plans to destroy it.
For Trump and his allies, the “deep state” refers to “an alleged shadowy group of powerful bureaucrats and officials who, according to many, wield undue influence over government policies, regardless of the elected administration,” according to one article Trump posted last year. In reality, the “deep staters” Trump refers to are the thousands of nonpolitical civil servants and issue area experts working to provide government services from weather forecasts to mail delivery. Trump cites the “deep state” as the main force that prevented him from accomplishing everything that he wanted to during his first term by supposedly sabotaging him and undermining his power.
Trump’s crusade against the civil service dates back to his first term, when in his final three months in office he issued an executive order which made it easier to fire government experts and civil servants and replace them with loyalists. The plan, colloquially called Schedule F, was never fully implemented because President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order when he took office. It’s clear that Trump and his allies—including those pushing Project 2025—want to pick up where he left off in 2020. Congress should act now to ensure that government service remains based on expertise and merit rather than blind loyalty to Donald Trump or any future leader.
Read more: 25th Amendment? Impeachment? Here’s how Trump can be removed from office early
In his posts, Trump has laid out a ten-point plan to “dismantle the deep state.” First, Trump plans to re-issue his October 2020 executive order, which gave him the authority to “remove rogue bureaucrats,” or government employees who do not express allegiance with him. Trump has made clear that’s a power he intends to “wield… very aggressively.” Even in 2020 Trump and his administration “assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust,” according to an article he reposted. In a video Trump reposted last June, he said he will start the firings with “every corrupt official who targeted Moms for Liberty” and other “patriotic” groups, in reference to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s call for the FBI to protect school employees from threats from parent groups.
Next, Trump plans to “completely overhaul[]” federal departments and agencies by “clean[ing] out the corrupt actors.” According to Trump, national security and intelligence agencies in particular have been weaponized to “target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.” In one video post from May 2023, Trump told a reporter that he will make “very big changes” to the FBI in a potential second term. The DOJ and FBI, Trump said, personify the “deep state” as they are filled with “thousands and thousands” of “RINOs and with Democrats” that have been there for decades. In his first term, Trump said he did a “tremendous job at getting tremendous numbers out.” If put back in office he will finish the job.
Trump’s plans also include “totally reform[ing][Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] courts,” which he cites as aiding the “witch hunt” Russia investigation, and has claimed are “so corrupt that the judges seemingly do not care when they are lied to;” establishing a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission to declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and corruption” manipulating processes like the one used in post-Apartheid South Africa to identify human rights abuses for his own aims; launching a “crackdown” on government whistleblowers who he accuses of “collud[ing] with the media to create false narratives;” establishing a system to “continually monitor our intelligence agencies,” which he accused of spying on his 2016 presidential campaign; and moving large portions of the federal bureaucracy outside the “Washington Swamp” to “places filled with patriots who love America,” or areas populated with his supporters.
In other posts Trump laid out plans to bring back the use of impoundment, or withholding funds that Congress has appropriated for specific purposes, to “Slash Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State!” While Congress currently has the power of the purse, impoundment would give Trump the power to end any program he doesn’t like by simply taking away its funding.
Project 2025
While Trump has recently tried to distance himself from Project 2025, and it recently announced that it was “winding down its policy operations,” the overlap in his promises on Truth Social and the plans laid out in the 920-page report are significant.
In the introduction to Section 1, for example, Project 2025 questions the value of nonpartisan experts in government, saying “When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state…The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan ‘experts,’ who pursue their own ends while engaging in groupthink, insulated from American voters.”
Instead of relying so much on nonpartisan experts, Project 2025 emphasizes the role of political appointees, saying “In order to carry out the President’s desires, political appointees must be given the tools, knowledge, and support to overcome the federal government’s obstructionist Human Resources departments. More fundamentally, the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees.”
It also characterizes civil servants as “a largely underworked, overcompensated, and unaccountable” and recommends that “The next Administration should insist that the federal government’s hiring, evaluation, retention, and compensation practices benefit taxpayers, rather than benefiting the lowest rung of the federal workforce.” In Part 3 of Section 1, Project 2025 endorses bringing back Schedule F.
Trump’s Truth Social posts disparaging and promising to purge longtime government workers are not one off comments—they are part of a concerted effort to reshape the government around loyalty to Trump by increasing emphasis on political appointments and expanding power to fire civil servants.
What should be done?
Leaders in Congress and the executive branch have taken note of the Trump and Project 2025 plans to reshape the government around loyalty rather than expertise, and appear to be taking that threat seriously.
Earlier this year the Office of Personnel Management announced a final rule enhancing the merit system and making it harder for a future president to enact Schedule F by protecting career civil servants from being reclassified and fired at will. CREW strongly supports this rule and remains committed to helping defend it in court if its legality is challenged.
This regulation is important, but it could be undone by a future administration that is fixated on gutting the civil service. That is why Congress must pass legislation protecting government experts and civil servants while they have the chance. Senator Tim Kaine and Representatives Gerry Connolly and Brian Fitzpatrick introduced the Saving The Civil Service Act (S. 399 and H.R. 1002), which would protect the merit based civil service and prohibit any future president from bringing back Schedule F through executive action.
As Trump’s Truth Social posts show, Congress needs to prioritize protecting experts and civil servants from the loyalty purges that Trump’s Project 2025 allies are planning and that he has repeatedly promised.
Trump talks regime change in Iran after strikes, but history shows that could be very hard
Barely an hour after the first U.S. and Israeli missiles struck Iran, President Donald Trump made clear he hoped for regime change. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny,” he told the Iranian people in a video. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”
Doesn’t sound complicated. After all, with Iran’s fundamentally unpopular government weakened by fierce airstrikes, some of its top leaders dead or missing and Washington signaling support, how hard could it be to overthrow a repressive regime?
Possibly very hard. So says history.
Washington has a long, complicated past when it comes to regime change. There was Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, and Panama in 1989. There was Nicaragua in the 1980s, Iraq and Afghanistan in the years after 9/11, and Venezuela just weeks ago.
There was also Iran. In 1953, the CIA helped engineer a coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected leader and gave near-absolute power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But as with the shah, who was overthrown in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution after decades of increasingly unpopular rule, regime change rarely goes as planned.
Attempts to usher in U.S.-friendly governments often start with clear intentions, whether hope for democracy in Iraq or backing an anti-Communist leader in Congo at the Cold War’s height. But often those intentions stumble into a political quagmire where democratic dreams turn into civil war, once-compliant dictators become embarrassments and American soldiers return home in body bags.
That history has long been a Trump talking point. “We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change,” he said in 2016.
“In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said in a 2025 speech in Saudi Arabia, deriding U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The “interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
Now, after Saturday’s actions, a key question emerges: Does today’s U.S. government understand what it’s getting into?
It’s unclear what regime change would even mean
Iran’s economy is in shambles and dissent remains strong even after a brutal January crackdown on protests left thousands of people dead and tens of thousands under arrest. Many of the nation’s key military proxies and allies — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad government in Syria — have been weakened or eliminated. And early Sunday, Iranian state media confirmed Israel and the United States had killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The United States hasn’t laid out a postwar vision and doesn’t necessarily even want a complete overthrow of the Iranian leadership. As in Venezuela, it may already have potential allies in the government willing to step into a power vacuum.
“But there’s a lot that needs to happen between now and a possible scenario along these lines,” said Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank that is deeply critical of the Iranian government. “There needs to be a sense that there is no salvation for the regime as such, and that they will need to work with the United States.”
In a country where the core leaders are deeply united by ideology and religion, that may be extremely difficult.
“The question to my mind right now is have we been able to penetrate the ranks of the regime that are not true believers that are more pragmatic,” Schanzer said. “Because I don’t believe that the true believers will flip.”
It’s simply too early to know if — or how much — the political winds are shifting in Tehran. The leaders who come next could turn out to be equally repressive or seen domestically as an illegitimate U.S. stooge.
“We’ll see whether elements of the regime start moving against each other,” said Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “Air power can damage a leadership,” he said. “But it can’t guarantee that you’ll bring in something new.”
US intervention in Latin America has a long history
In Latin America, Washington’s history of intervention in goes back a long way — to when President James Monroe claimed the hemisphere as part of the U.S. sphere of influence more than 200 years ago.
If the Monroe Doctrine began as a way to keep European countries out of the region, by the 20th century it was justifying everything from coups in Central America to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Very often, historians say, that intervention led to violence, bloodshed and mass human rights violations. Therein, they say, lies a lesson.
Direct U.S. involvement has rarely “resulted in long-term democratic stability,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the London think tank Chatham House. He points to Guatemala, where U.S. intervention in the 1950s led to a civil war that didn’t end for 40 years and left more than 200,000 people dead.
Or there’s Nicaragua, where backing of the Contra rebels against the Sandinista government in the 1980s contributed to a prolonged civil conflict that devastated the economy, caused tens of thousands of deaths and deepened political polarization.
While large-scale, overt U.S. involvement in the region mostly petered out after the Cold War, Trump has rekindled the legacy.
Since assuming office last year, Trump launched boat strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, ordered a naval blockade on Venezuelan oil exports and got involved in electoral politics in Honduras and Argentina. Then, on Jan. 3, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan strongman leader Nicolás Maduro, flying him to the U.S. to face drug and weapons charges.
What followed in Caracas may signal what the White House hopes will happen in Tehran. Many observers thought the U.S. would back María Corina Machado, who has long been the face of political resistance in Venezuela. Instead, Washington effectively sidelined her and has repeatedly shown a willingness to work with President Delcy Rodríguez, who had been Maduro’s second-in-command.
“There are those who could claim that what we did in Venezuela is not regime change,” said Schanzer, at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The regime is still in place. There’s just one person that’s missing.”
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Tim Sullivan has reported from more than 35 countries for The Associated Press since 1993. Danica Kirka in London and Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
