Former President Donald J. Trump vowed to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in a wide-ranging, often unfocused speech at a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday.
He eventually promised to eliminate the Education Department, redirect Justice Department efforts and fire civil servants charged with running Biden administration policies with which he disagreed.
And he told his supporters that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading vaccine skeptic who recently endorsed him, will be “heavily involved” in a panel on “chronic health problems and childhood diseases.” Mr. Kennedy became famous as a vaccine skeptic who promoted a false link between vaccines and autism.
At one point Mr. Trump took a dig at Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he has repeatedly accused without evidence of hiding signs that Mr. Biden was unfit to be president, saying he would support changing the 25th Amendment. Constitution making it an impeachable offense for the Vice President to cover up the President’s incapacity. It was a long-shot proposal at best, one that would entail a difficult process that he could not control.
Mr Trump – who spent four years overseeing the federal bureaucracy – stood in front of hundreds of people at an airport holding “drain the swamp” signs distributed by his campaign and vowed to “cut the fat out of our government in a meaningful way for the first time. 60 in the year,” a period that included his presidency.
Many of the proposals in Mr. Trump’s speech aligned with plans reported by The New York Times Broad expansion of presidential power government, and effectively concentrate more power in the White House if he wins in November.
And many of his pledges were associated with the stated goals and proposals of Project 2025An effort by a group of conservative organizations to develop policies for the next Republican president. Mr. Trump has disavowed Project 2025 because Democrats have seized on some of its more radical proposals, though he has said he agrees with some of its efforts.
During his third presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has expressed a desire to end the post-Watergate norm that the Justice Department operates independently of the political control of the White House.
On Saturday, he said he would “completely overhaul” the department to move it away from politically motivated actions, a term he used to cover the cases of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A bid to stop President Biden from taking office.
Mr. Trump again repeated his pledge to pardon those people, saying that his administration would “expeditiously review the cases of every political prisoner who has been unjustly victimized” and that he would “sign their pardons.”
Mr. Trump also suggested that he would root out federal bureaucrats who were not ideologically aligned with him, including some career civil servants charged with executing policies ordered by the current administration.
The Harris campaign said in a statement that Mr. Trump was “obsessed with the payback.”
“If he wins this November, Donald will not lift a finger to help the American people,” Harris campaign spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “With the help of his Project 2025 allies and the Supreme Court, which has granted him near-total immunity, he will use his unchecked power to prosecute his enemies and pardon the rebels who violently attacked our Capitol on January 6.”
During the rally, Mr Trump repeated his recent promise to create a so-called Government Efficiency Commission that had been pushed by billionaire Elon Musk, at one point mistakenly calling him “Leon”.
He vowed to conduct a “clean-up of the military industrial complex” and to fire “every federal bureaucrat” who he said violated free speech. And he said he would dismantle “so-called equity policies,” a culture war target of Republicans.
And Mr. Trump, who railed against the federal public health apparatus late in his presidency, suggested he would rethink it by ridding it of what he vaguely described as corruption at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. and the World Health Organization.
Mr. Trump’s rally, held outdoors at the Central Wisconsin Airport in Mosinee, Wis., was his last scheduled campaign event before Tuesday’s debate with Ms. Harris. Although the focus was on his “renewed call to drain the swamp,” Mr. Trump, in his usual style, jumped all over the map.
As he outlined his nine proposals to “break the stranglehold” of President Biden and Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump digressed to question the size of the crowds at Ms. Harris’s rallies and criticize the announced effort. week to push back on the Russian influence campaign in the election.
Mocking the effort, Mr. Trump mocked Democrats for being overly concerned with Russia. “I don’t know what it is with poor Russia,” he said.
Although American intelligence agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors Mr. Trump, the former president recently met with President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparently sarcastic statement highlighted that he supported Ms Harris. “He endorsed Kamala,” Mr. Trump said. “I was very upset about it. I wonder why he supported Kamala. No, he is a chess player.”
Later, as he criticized the Biden-Harris administration’s stance on the economy, Mr. Trump misrepresented the numbers. Even as the official unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent last month, Mr. Trump took an alternate step to lament that the “real” rate was 7.9 percent. And he once again falsely claimed that all job growth under the Biden administration went to “illegal immigrants.”
Mr. Trump also spent significant time discussing immigration, part of what he acknowledged was an attempt to revive a strategy from his successful 2016 campaign. He pointed to high-profile crimes that authorities said were committed by undocumented immigrants, claiming they offered additional evidence of violent “immigrant crime” that was not supported by available data.
Mr. Trump once again made light of the story that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colo., though The local police have refuted this claim. But as he spoke, his campaign displayed menacing images of supposed gang members with captions such as “Your apartment building under Harris” meant to instill fear.
Then, as he addressed a crowd in Wisconsin — a battleground state that proved crucial in his 2016 victory and his 2020 defeat — he repeatedly mentioned states that political analysts say are out of reach for Republicans in November.
“If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by immigrants, and the governor will be sent running,” Mr. Trump said. He urged his residents to “vote against” and then added: “Illinois is really the same thing. And Maine, another one.
As he sought to portray his opponents as overly liberal, Mr. Trump seized on a culture war issue that fired conservatives, falsely claiming that transgender children were undergoing surgery in schools.
“Can you imagine, you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day at school,'” he said. “And your son returns from a brutal operation.”
And in a continuing effort to redirect political fallout from their role in the appointment of Supreme Court justices, who in Roe v. In overturning Wade, Mr. Trump claimed that six states led by Democrats allowed the execution of children after birth. Mr. Trump regularly tells versions of this lie; Infanticide is illegal in all 50 states.
Mr. Trump also repeated his false and fragmented claims of election fraud in 2020, again making unsubstantiated allegations that the four criminal cases against him were political persecution by the Biden administration.
He once again compared undocumented immigrants to Hannibal Lecter and launched an elaborate defense against Democrats who called him and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, “weird.”
“I’m very solid,” Mr. Trump said. “I have other problems, maybe, but I’m a very solid person.”
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