“Of course we aren’t fucking bluffing.” That’s the message one close Trump adviser and former administration official — who requested anonymity to speak candidly — wants to get across to the press and public, when asked about Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign vows of “retribution,” unprecedented force, and militaristic action.
Indeed, this sentiment is shared widely among the upper echelon of Trumpland and the MAGAfied Republican Party, with various officials and conservatives with a direct line to the former president insisting that so-called “moderates” or alleged “establishment” types will be tamed or purged, if Trump retakes power next year.
Rolling Stone spoke with a dozen sources who are playing roles in Trump’s “government-in-waiting” or are in regular contact with the ex-president, including GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers, MAGA policy wonks, conservative attorneys, and former and current Trump aides. They universally stress that the former (and perhaps future) U.S. president and top allies are serious about following through on his extreme campaign pledges. These promises run the gamut from siccing active duty military units on not just American cities but also Mexican territory, all the way to prosecuting and potentially imprisoning Trump foes.
Several of these sources say that a wide range of litmus tests, loyalty screenings, and “guardrails” are already being implemented, or discussed with Trump, to root out so-called “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only) and MAGA-skeptical conservatives from embedding themselves within a possible second Trump administration. These processes would be largely aimed at drastically curtailing the number of squishy Republican officials who would be able to get in Trump’s ear to, in the words of one GOP lawmaker on Capitol Hill, try to “scare Trump off of what needs to be done or should be.” This lawmaker cited former senior administration officials such as Mark Esper and John Kelly who, at times, urged the then-president to moderate his policy desires.
According to Esper, the then-defense secretary worked to talk Trump out of doing things such as ordering the actual shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters.
One idea regularly kicked around Trump’s government-in-waiting is a dramatic increase in the use of “lie detectors” across the federal apparatus, to root out or charge leakers and other subversives. These devices, called polygraphs, are frequently unreliable and inadmissible in courts of law. Then-President Trump and his then-attorney general, Jeff Sessions, mulled expanded use of polygraphs during the first term, when leaks to the media were especially copious.
Sources close to the former president and several of those counseling him on second-term policy add that one big reason they feel confident a revived Trump White House won’t be, in their minds, tamed in the ways it was during the first term is because Trump presumably won’t be running for reelection. The fact that Trump would be termed-out if he steps into the Oval Office in 2025 would, in theory, relieve pressure on Trump when it comes to enacting policies seen as political liabilities or a threat to his standing with swing voters.
Further, many of Trump’s political and policy allies feel emboldened by the federal judiciary being (thanks to Trump) significantly more right-wing than it was when he first came into office. This would allow Team Trump, in the words of one conservative attorney close to the ex-president, to “get away with a lot more” than elected Republicans used to, in the face of an expected barrage of constitutional challenges to their executive actions or policies, if Trump wins in November.
And, for as much as Trump and the MAGA elite love to rant against “the establishment” in the Republican Party and in Washington, D.C., the former president has something else playing to his advantage for a potential second term: He and his policy ideas are the Republican establishment now, and have been for years, due to his hostile takeover of the party starting in 2015 and the devotion he commands from conservative elected officials and GOP voters. Trump’s outbursts that were once shot down by fellow senior administration officials — including ones about invading and bombing Mexico — are now so thoroughly accepted as reasonable positions in the mainstream of the GOP that there are entire legislative and nonprofit apparatuses pushing the idea.
“Yes, we do really want to burn it all down,” says another Republican close to Trump, referring to the so-called GOP “establishment” remnants who may wish to shackle Trump’s hard-right impulses. When asked about potential court challenges in a Trump second term, this source simply replies: “Who cares?”
Still, Trump and his inner orbit are now promising a MAGA laundry list of extreme measures that will invariably face significant resistance, should he take power again. The list runs profusely long, but it includes criminally probing and possibly imprisoning political enemies and the prosecutors who’ve gone after him; unleashing troops on Democratic-controlled cities whenever he wants; cracking down on legal and illegal immigration on a draconian, unprecedented scale; further solidifying his anti-democratic lies about the 2020 election into policy and party dogma; insulating himself from his own array of indictments; and turning the Department of Justice and other nominally independent organs of the U.S. government into his own personal protection racket.
Those involved with diligently crafting these legal and policy blueprints — including at an array of conservative think tanks aligned with Trump — will often brief the former president and provide regular updates and ideas for his campaign. They also frequently insist that if Trump is reelected, the policy rollouts won’t be slapdash the way they were circa 2017, given that Trump now has so much institutional backing for his agenda. For instance, various lawyers in the upper ranks of Trumpland have long been mapping out how to achieve the former president’s dreams of imprisoning prosecutors like Jack Smith, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, to the point that they’ve already identified specific parts of the U.S. criminal code that they can exploit in increasingly convoluted ways, if only to provide Trump and the Justice Department with a road map for terrorizing those who’ve crossed him.
Sources with direct knowledge of the matter say Trump has not just been having discussions and briefings with government-in-waiting types and former senior administration officials — Trump has been actively soliciting new ideas for how they can do things that didn’t work the first time around, including demanding novel legal theories for eliminating birthright citizenship. Numerous legal scholars argue that Trump cannot do that via executive order, which is why the former president is eager for MAGA-friendly lawyers to concoct outlandish work-arounds.
Moreover, according to three sources who’ve spoken to him about it, Trump has repeatedly told confidants since leaving office that one of the biggest regrets of his presidency was allowing then-Secretary of Defense Esper to push back on Trump’s furious demands for a bigger show of force against racial-justice protests that occurred in 2020, including in front of the White House.
“Using the military more is something [Donald Trump] sounds very committed to doing … when he talks about it [nowadays],” a source with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone. “It is possible he doesn’t, but I wouldn’t place a bet on him not … He says he’d have the authority to do it, and that as president sometimes you need to be really ‘tough.’ He talks about using the military for all types [of things] including gang violence in major [U.S.] cities.”
There are some Republicans who worked in Trump’s White House who now warn that his return to the West Wing would be a grave threat to the republic.
“During the first Trump term, some of the policies he was dissuaded from — wanting to pull the U.S. out of NATO, family separation, things like that — he was able to be dissuaded from those things, because of some of the personnel around him,” says Sarah Matthews, who served as one of Trump’s deputy White House press secretaries. “In a second Trump term, he is not going to have any of those people around him ,and he’s going to go ahead and move forward with these kinds of controversial policies he wanted to pursue during his first term … He has nothing to lose if he wins a second term, because he wouldn’t be able to run for another term.”
Matthews endorsed Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, but says she is planning on voting for President Joe Biden in the 2024 general election because “Trump is someone who has shown he won’t uphold the constitution and I can’t in good faith support the first American president to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. And also, he hasn’t shown any remorse whatsoever.”
Matthews adds, “When he first came into office, Trump didn’t know what he was doing. But now, he understands the levers of government in ways that he can manipulate it and game the system. I take him and his people at their word when they say they’re not bluffing … The personnel he’s going to surround himself with now, it’s going be a bunch of Yes Men who will not push back on some of his more radical ideas. That’s something that is super concerning to me about what a second term would look like.”
A similar process is already playing out on the campaign trail. Under the leadership of Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee has reportedly been asking job applicants if they adhere to Trump’s “big lie” conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “stolen” through fraud.
Numerous sources with direct knowledge of the situation say it is widely expected in Trumpworld that if the ex-president wins back the White House, hard-right conservatives in the vein of Stephen Miller and Mike Davis will be handed positions of considerable power and influence. And these Trumpists are very open and explicit about their intentions, and often dismiss allegations that they are just trolling.
Davis, a prolific tweeter, has threatened to indict, detain, denaturalize, and deport a handful of Trump critics with whom he argues on Twitter, including former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan and Tim Miller, a former GOP operative and now a journalist at The Bulwark.
As Trump has faced criminal prosecution in a number of cases, Stephen Miller, a former senior policy adviser in the Trump White House, has called for Republicans to “return lawfare in kind” against their Democratic opponents. Casting Democratic policies as criminal conspiracies, he told Fox News in April 2023 that Republicans in Congress should “begin crafting criminal referrals to the Department of Justice which can then be taken up in 2025 under an honest DOJ.”
Miller has also tried to brush away claims that Trump’s apocalyptic talk on immigration is mere bluster. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” he told The New York Times in late 2023.
Many activist groups and civil rights organizations do not doubt Trump’s resolve on these issues. In fact, they are already actively wargaming and planning for taking on a second Trump presidency, should Biden lose in November. (Much of the high-quality 2024 polling currently shows a dead heat between Trump and Biden.)
“We are taking very seriously his claim that he will enact even more extreme policies in a second term, including the use of the military,” says Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project, who served as the group’s lead counsel in challenging various Trump policies like family separation. “As we did in the first term, we are prepared to use every tool we have to combat that, including litigation. We are very concerned about the use of the military for domestic law enforcement, as we are his claim that there will be a massive round-up of immigrants in the interior, and an end to asylum, and all the racial and religious screenings.”
Despite the rhetoric, there are some signs that aides are still able to stifle the former president’s urges every once in a while.
Earlier this year, Trump offered far-right conservative activist Laura Loomer a job on his campaign, but the campaign quickly rescinded the offer after some senior staff bristled at the idea of bringing her on board.
“Take it from me, President Trump’s campaign is the only place in the political world where you can be hired for a job by the man himself in his office and then find out later that you actually won’t be hired due to intervention or sabotage from staff. It’s a situation that is unique to Trumpworld,” Loomer tells Rolling Stone.
Still, that moment did little to quell Trump’s yearning to stack the federal government with absolute MAGA zealots.
Since the incident first leaked to The New York Times in April, Trump has on multiple occasions expressed his desire to have Loomer in a second administration, according to two sources familiar with the situation. Still, decidedly mixed feelings among his campaign officials persist.
But as the campaign season has heated up — and as Trump’s myriad criminal cases move through the courts — Trump’s rhetoric has turned darker and more explicitly authoritarian. When friendly interviewers have tried to offer the former president off-ramps to explain away his vengeful promises as rhetorical flourishes, he has explicitly rebuffed them.
That was the case in a December 2023 Trump appearance on Hannity’s Fox News show. When Hannity suggested that Trump was “promising America” that he “would never abuse power as retribution against anybody” and that the media unfairly “want to call you a dictator.” Trump disagreed. “Except for Day One,” adding later that he would only be a “dictator” that day.
Trump and his campaign spent a subsequent news cycle pushing back on the suggestion that the candidate who vows to voters that “I am your retribution” was not bent on revenge, with Trump telling another Fox host that the comment was only made “in jest.”
Multiple sources in and close to Trump’s presidential campaign tell Rolling Stone that there is fear among several of the ex-president’s top advisers that him talking too much publicly about “autocrat-sounding shit” — as a GOP operative close to Trump 2024 phrases it — damages him with crucial independent voters.
More recently, TV personality Dr. Phil tried to get Trump to walk away from the idea of “revenge” against his political adversaries. During an interview earlier this month, Dr. Phil prompted the former president with suggestions that, as president, he wouldn’t have the time for vengeance and that a “race to the bottom” is “too much.”
Trump wasn’t persuaded.
“Sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil,” the former president countered. “I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”
Donald Trump speaks to members of press aboard Air Force One
Trump’s Year of Media Capture
This was the year when public broadcasting was gutted and hyper-partisans prospered, when the First Amendment was exhaustively praised and opportunistically abandoned. It was the year when media capture came to America.
Before 2025, “media capture” was a term used exclusively overseas, describing the compromise of a free press to curry favor with the regime in power. Sometimes this happened through threats and intimidation, greased by partisan group think. Other times, the cudgel was money: wealthy administration allies would buy independent news organizations and neuter them to fall in line with the state-backed version of facts.
Hungary is often cited as a prime example of media capture — and so it seemed notable that Hungary’s elected autocrat Viktor Orban was repeatedly praised by Donald Trump and Republicans during the 2024 election. It was a clear sign of intent.
One year later, we’ve gotten used to Baghdad Bob-like lies from Trump administration flacks and absurd sycophancy from Cabinet secretaries. We expected spinelessness from the vast majority of congressional Republicans. But the lack of leadership inside news media when faced with an explicitly hostile executive branch has been surprising, largely driven by corporate owners who hid behind a fig leaf of “fiduciary responsibility” to shareholders and genuflected when threatened. They shoveled out millions to Trump for perceived slights (and there is always a perceived slight) that never would have held up in court.
The total is more than $90 million dollars to date. ABC News agreed to pay Trump $15 million for his library after anchor George Stephanopoulos discussed Trump’s conviction for sexual abuse against E. Jean Carroll. Likewise, Paramount paid Trump $16 million for the routine process of an edit to a CBS 60 Minutes interview — in this case, of then-Vice President Kamala Harris — during the 2024 campaign, after Trump refused to participate. Editing a long interview down to time is not evidence of bias; it is a normal part of the news business. But it seemed that parent company Paramount needed to pay the vig in order to sell its company to the Trump-friendly Ellison family — and so it was paid. In a totally coincidental move, CBS announced it would shut down the one of the highest-rated broadcast late-night shows in America, hosted by the beloved comic and frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert.
Trump has sued the New York Times (subsequently calling them an “a serious threat to the national security of our nation”) and the Wall Street Journal (over their reporting on the Epstein files) — who admirably refused to back down. He sued YouTube, who decided to abandon the protections of Section 230 just this once and pay Trump $24 million dollars for suspending his account after the January 6 attacks. Meta and X forked over millions, as well. Showing that capitulation only encourages more aggression, Trump just announced an absurd $5 billion suit against the BBC for editing the speech he gave before the attack on the Capitol. This would be a bad joke if it didn’t come from the president of the United States.
America’s leadership in the world has always been based on the power of our example as much as the example of our power. And just as the ideals of the “good America” as a beacon of freedom and democracy have been undermined, the voice of America to the wider world has been silenced. Right out of the gate, one of Trump’s first actions was to shut down the Voice of America and public diplomacy stations that offer free information to autocratic nations.
Vladimir Putin has long railed against Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — which began broadcasting into the Soviet Union during the Cold War and helped destabilize that totalitarian regime. Trump was quick to give Putin that gift, freezing more than $75 million in funding previously appropriated by Congress. Their struggle to secure new revenue streams led to the legendary R.E.M. to remix and re-lease their first single Radio Free Europe as a promotion. (Full disclosure, my wife Margaret Hoover is the host of Firing Line on PBS and sits on the board of RFE/RFL.)
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long believed that the Cuban people should be freed from the Castro-founded communist regime, he presided over the abrupt shutting of Radio Marti. As a New York Times headline succinctly stated, “Trump Did What the Castro’s Couldn’t: Take Radio Marti Off the Air.” Likewise, Team Trump talks tough about standing up to Beijing, but they gave China’s Communist Party a boost by dismantling Radio Free Asia. It’s springtime for autocrats around the world.
Conservatives have been threatening to kill the Corporation for Public Broadcasting since the 1960s, when Mr. Rogers famously saved it with his congressional testimony. The expense is a rounding error and the benefits include offering kids in remote rural areas and inner cities alike access to educational programing — and their parents a dose of culture the algorithms don’t deliver. Trump put it on his hit list and of course congressional Republicans obligingly voted to pull the trigger on Bird Bird. Among the casualties of these cuts is the award-winning documentary series the American Experience. One of the greatest communicators of civic education is silenced in time for America’s 250th birthday. It is darkly ironic and entirely fitting.
The greatest, currently incomplete media acquisition of 2025 had to do with the fate of Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of HBO and CNN. During negotiations, the Ellisons were seen as having the upper hand for federal merger approval precisely because of their close relationship to Trump. This was stated as fact in straight news articles — ignoring what a complete rupture such partisan favoritism reflected on the American system. I’m actually sympathetic with David Ellison’s stated aim of creating news for the middle 70 percent of Americans. But reports that the Ellisons offered Trump assurances that their programming would be more friendly to his administration and even offered to fire specific CNN news anchors with whom Trump is apparently displeased showed the contradictions in this position. The latest news that the CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — a heterodox opinion journalist who founded the now Ellison-owned Free Press — apparently spiked a 60 Minutes story on forced deportations to Salvadoran prisons hours before it was set to air, recommending that journalists get Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller’s perspective included in the segment, did little to re-center perceptions. As it stands, Netflix made the successful bid for WBD streaming and studio businesses and CNN’s future remains unclear. But the world needs a strong and independent CNN.One of the great debates of the 2024 election inside legacy newsrooms — including CNN — was whether Trump should be covered like any other candidate. Like many colleagues, I felt that covering Trump fairly required crucial context, including his previous attempt to overturn an American election on the back of a lie that led to an attack on our Capitol. Some executives felt that calling out Trump’s lies was divisive, that it was already baked in the cake of public opinion. But the day that a news organization decides that lies will go unchallenged from people in positions of power is the day that news organization loses its true north star.
One year later, the list of degradations is endless. To anybody who rationalized their 2024 support for Trump because they didn’t like “woke” kids on social media, they got a full jettisoning of objective journalists at the Pentagon because real news organizations refused to sign what amounted to an administration loyalty oath in exchange for access. Likewise, the White House press pool created special seating for right wing bloggers while the Associated Press was banished for refusing to go along with Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. The Washington Post purged much of its editorial board to project a more Trump-friendly face while ditching its traditional center-left liberalism. The Federal Communications Commission is run by a Project 2025 contributor who removed the description of his agency as being independent to reflect its fealty to Trump and threatened ABC to suspend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Taken together, it is a cartoonish caricature of worst-case scenarios floated before the 2024 election.
This is not simply partisan warfare conducted through the press. The Trump administration and its apologists are creating an architecture of alternative facts. The greater danger is that we will be unable to reason together as fellow citizens — and that is how American democracy works.
Right now, the bad guys are winning. But just because the truth is under attack does not mean that facts cease to exist. Trump can use his election lies as a loyalty litmus test for appointees but that does not mean that American citizens need to surrender their conscience or common sense. The fact that so many corporations have felt they have a financial obligation to kiss the ring when confronted with threats speaks ill of the incentive system we’ve created. Going forward, it will be up to independent journalists and independent minded owners of news organizations to help fuel a fearless, fact-based alternative to the media capture that is making American citizens more compliant at a time when we need to be courageous.