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WASHINGTON – Dozens of former Trump political candidates gathered at a GOP social club Wednesday night to hear Steve Bannon explain how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure the government.
“If you want to take control of the administrative state and deconstruct it, you have to have shock troops ready to take it back immediately,” Bannon said in a telephone interview with NBC News. “I gave them fire and brimstone.”
Bannon, who led former President Donald Trump’s first campaign and then worked as a senior White House adviser, said Trump’s agenda has been delayed by challenges of quickly filling about 4,000 candidate positions. presidential elections in federal agencies and the steep learning curve for public servants who were new to Washington.
He is not the only one from this point of view. His appearance at the Capitol Hill Club came at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which was formed to create a resource for future GOP officials being asked for federal office.
“There are so many laws and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first walk in,” said Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former head of the Board of Governors of the broadcasting which is one of the organizers of the group. “It is an organization which has a very narrow, clear and indispensable purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not only for the Republican Party but for the country.”
Trump has often publicly criticized the career officials and retainers in the Obama administration that he viewed as obstacles to his agenda, collectively calling them a “deep state.”
Bannon has said he wants to see pre-trained teams ready to enter federal agencies when the next Republican president takes office. For the most part, this means the levels of presidential appointments whose assignments do not require Senate confirmation.
“We’re going to have a landslide victory in 2022 and that’s just the preamble to a landslide victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready – and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not standard Republican policies,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and describing an election victory in 2024 as a “second term.”
The launch party on Wednesday drew a crowd of around 200 former officials from several Republican administrations – albeit mostly Trump appointees – according to one person who attended and who is not one of the group’s organizers.
Shapiro said organizers are still trying to determine who will lead the association, but said the need for institutional memory is obvious.
“What we hope to do is create a base of people who can be available as a support system for political appointees who are arriving for the first time,” he said. “It’s easy, if you know the rules, to achieve your goal.”
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