A LOOK BACK TO SEE WHERE WE ARE HEADING #1

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mike Davis wants to cage kids,
put Trump enemies in a ‘gulag.’
He could be our next AG.

Trump’s dangerous scheme
was thwarted — but only after
all of the top career prosecutors
in Justice, including the current
acting AG Jeffrey Rosen, told
the president they would resign
en masse and go public with
what was happening.

“Within 24-48-72 hours, you could
have hundreds and hundreds of
resignations of the leadership
of your entire Justice Department
because of your actions,”
Richard Donoghue, the acting
assistant AG who was at that
day’s contentious Oval Office
meeting, recalled telling the
45th president. “What’s that
going to say about you?”

Trump backed down, and —
after a violent Jan. 6 insurrection
on Capitol Hill failed to stop
certification of Biden’s victory
— slinked away from the
White House in defeat.

Flash forward three years,
and Trump is the overwhelming
front-runner to again become
the GOP presidential nominee in
2024, with early polls giving him a
chance of defeating Biden in a
rematch. And if he does indeed
become America’s 47th president on
Jan. 20, 2025, Trump seems to
have two main goals: revenge
against his political enemies, and
creating a government teeming
with fervent loyalists who won’t
block his path the way those career
government lawyers did in 2021.

That’s where Mike Davis comes in.
Most folks, except for the most politically
obsessed, have never heard of Davis,
but it’s time for people to learn. The mid-
40s-ish Davis takes the abstract
warnings that U.S. democracy is on
the line in the 2024 election and
brings them to life.

Actually, there are two Mike Davises.

The first you might call “resumé
Mike Davis,” with the Des Moines, Iowa,
native hitting all the right marks for
rapid advancement in today’s
conservative legal movement.
A member of the Federalist Society,
Davis worked as a consultant to
boost the confirmation of Supreme
Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, then
became chief counsel for nominations
to the GOP chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, fellow Iowan Chuck
Grassley. He served Grassley during
the contentious hearings over
eventual Justice Brett Kavanaugh
and the push by Trump and then-
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell to pack the judiciary with
right-wing judges. He now heads
two ultraconservative efforts,
the Article III Project and the
internet Accountability Project.

On paper, it wouldn’t be a stretch for a
Republican president to give someone
like Davis a top post. But the attorney’s
resume doesn’t tell you about the
other Mike Davis — now a verbal pit
bull for Trump and his MAGA movement,
making increasingly outrageous
statements seemingly aimed at
getting the attention of the boss and
his inner circle.

In late September, Davis appeared
on a right-wing podcast, the Benny
Johnson Show, and described what
he might do given three weeks as
an interim attorney general by a
victorious Trump in 2025. He joked
— perhaps — that the new president
would have to grant him a pardon
as he left town after what Davis
described as “a reign of terror”
during which he would “unleash
hell on Washington, D.C.”

What came next was an agenda
very much in line with Trump’s
overheated rally rhetoric, the
not-secret Project 2025 blueprint,
and recent news leaks. Davis
claimed he would demolish the
“deep state” of career politicians,
indict the current president “
and every other scumball, sleazeball
Biden,” and help to pardon the
Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

“We’re gonna deport a lot of people,
10 million people and growing —
anchor babies, their parents, their
grandparents,” Davis added. “We’re
gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be
glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of
people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

Look, we can all agree there’s something
about the podcast format and its jokey
banter that encourages guests to make
outrageous, over-the-top statements
(just ask Charissa Thompson, right?).
The reality, though, of what Davis told
Benny Johnson is that perhaps it should
not be taken literally, but seriously.
This ambitious right-wing lawyer
may or may not be a true believer
but he knows how to audition for
Trump, and it’s working.

“There are a couple people you
could put in positions like that,
we talk about Mike Davis as
attorney general,” Donald Trump Jr.
said during his own podcast.
“You almost have to, just put
them in as interim even, just to
send that shot across the bow
to the swamp … let Mike Davis
and Kash Patel to be like interim
AG’s. Put Laura Loomer as
press secretary for just a couple of days.”

That’s because Team Trump
has coalesced around a worldview
that its leader was denied implementing
his radical vision — including
enforcing the Big Lie of 2020
election fraud — in his first term
because too many political
functionaries from what it
calls “the administrative state”
stood in his way. That’s not
wrong. In addition to the
Jan. 3 revolt among the
Justice Department, you had
principled leaders like
now-retired Gen. Mark Milley,
then the Joint Chiefs chair,
who stood in the way of
improperly calling in
troops on Jan. 6 to
perhaps block the election certification.

Now, the driving force for a
revenge-minded second Trump
term has nothing to do with
fighting inflation or fixing
relations with China. The POTUS 45
inner circle is determined to oust
those pesky bureaucrats and
career pols from Justice, the Pentagon,
Foggy Bottom and whoever else
stands in the way of the dream
for a “Red Caesar” to smash both
“the deep state” and American liberalism.
It would surely take more than one
Mike Davis, after all, to deport
10 million people and enthusiastically
put “kids in cages” at the
southern border again.

Last week, Axios reported that a
massive and unprecedented operation
is already underway — costing tens of
millions of dollars and using
AI developed by Oracle —
to prescreen candidates to replace
a whopping 54,000 entrenched officials
throughout the government. It’s an
army of Trump loyalists who — in the
polite mainstream media phrasing of
Axios — are “willing to
stretch traditional boundaries.”

In recent days, Trump has increasingly
alarmed folks with rhetoric that directly echoes
20th-century fascist dictators like
Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler —
describing any left-wing foes as
“vermin” and claiming that refugees
are “poisoning the blood” of
America. But the overheated words of a
dictator still need an army of storm
troopers to make it happen,
as well as a devoted inner circle
of propagandists, torturers, and eager
“yes men.”

Mike Davis is a sad example of how
this downward spiral works.
It shows how a guy with a
solid resume for an increasingly
conservative Republican Party
devolves morally to the level
where locking up desperate
children from Central America
in cages becomes “glorious.”
He will say anything to curry
favor and advance in the eyes
of the Dear Leader.

To be sure, there are still
big questions about whether
and how this all happens.
Even with the Democrats
in real danger of losing their slim
control of the Senate in the
2024 elections, and with the
retirement of the last sensible
Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney,
would a man who promised to
put political enemies in a “gulag”
be able to win a confirmation
vote? If not, how far would a
Trump 47 be willing to bend the
rules or break the Constitution to
get his way?

That’s why the time to talk
about Mike Davis as attorney general —
and the all-too real stakes of another
Trump presidency — is not on Jan. 21, 2025,
but right now. If Trump gets
the keys to the Oval Office for a second
time, it’s clear he will use any
means necessary to get his way —
to punish his enemies, pardon his
friends, and inflict real pain on
migrants and others. And there’s
only one way to stop him —
on Election Day.