Gavin Wax, who turned the New York Young Republican Club into the "vanguard of the Trump movement," is the new chief of staff to commissione
Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones:
For the past six years, Gavin Wax has held court as the president of the New York Young Republican Club, a group he helped turn from a small, stodgy establishment outfit into “a vanguard of the Trump movement,” as he said last year. Under his leadership, the club has moved far to the right. It’s hosted events attended by white nationalists, budding foreign authoritarians, and of course, George Santos, whose congressional campaign it endorsed before he became a convicted felon.
Wax announced this month that he was stepping down as the club’s president, and on Friday he revealed that he would be taking a post in the Trump administration as chief of staff and advisor to Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington. The 31-year-old former day trader has long been a die-hard Trump loyalist.
“Once President Trump is back in office,” Wax said at the 2023 NYYRC annual dinner, according to Politico, “we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man.”
Like Trump, Wax was once a staunch opponent of media censorship and “Big Tech,” and had called for an end to legal protections for social media companies. An online libertarian magazine Wax founded, Liberty Conservative, once devoted quite a bit of ink to trolling Trump’s new benefactor, Elon Musk. (“Elon Musk: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep-State,” was one such 2017 article.)
Much of that rhetoric seems to have vanished since Musk bought Twitter and most of the tech world has gotten on board in support of Trump. Now, Wax’s focus at the FCC, like Trump’s, appears to be mainstream media outlets. In an email, he told me, “The issues of censorship, content moderation, and platform accountability remain important—not just in the context of individual CEOs, but as broader questions of public policy and civil liberties. We’re also focused on ensuring that licensed broadcasters are truly serving the public interest, as required by law. That includes holding legacy media to account just as much as newer tech platforms, and ensuring that all players in the communications space operate on a level playing field.”
In 2023, Mother Jones identified Wax as one of a number of MAGA influencers who’d been defending the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui with op-eds suggested by Guo’s supporters. Guo was convicted of racketeering and fraud last year. Wax had once been the marketing director for Gettr, a social media site allegedly controlled by Guo. But Wax told me that an important part of the FCC’s work now is “defending against foreign influence in our information ecosystem.”
Wax’s ascension to the FCC was met with cheers in MAGA world from everyone from Steve Bannon to Kari Lake.
Gavin Wax, the far-right activist who helped turn the New York Young Republican Club into a MAGA haven, lands a prominent job in the FCC.
Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country,...
Josh Kovensky at TPM:
Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.
This dark vision of the future draws on deeply pessimistic theorizing, on lectures about Marxist anti-government ideology seemingly ripped from the Cold War, on memories of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and on claims that Democrats and the left will be unable to accept a Trump victory. It all comes against the backdrop of senior officials around Trump and Trump himself reportedly having been eager to invoke the Insurrection Act while he was in office, and mulling its actual use if he’s re-elected.
In this situation, a second Trump administration would invoke the law to deploy the military to enforce immigration laws as part of a broader mission at the southern border — a proposal Trump has often spoken about publicly. But it would also make that invocation to do something far more extreme and at odds with American history: use the military against protestors.
[...]
In the minds of Trump’s supporters, this planning is justified — in line with Trump’s promise of “retribution.” In their telling, he’s already borne those same slings and arrows that he envisions for his opponents: years of attempts by the “deep state” to thwart his administration, followed by supposedly unjust political prosecutions. He is punching back. It sets the stage, for Trump and those around him, to claim they are simply engaged in a tit for tat: using the machinery of the state to suppress his political opponents.
And, in a stunning coincidence, those same opponents will happen to be violently rioting just as Trump takes office — at least in the fantasies of these hardcore supporters.
Peter Feaver, a scholar of civil-military relations at Duke University, told TPM that the powers of the executive had “evolved” over the years, and that their responsible use had it come to “depend on electing a principled President.”
Feaver served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He added that the judiciary has long given the executive branch the power to use the Insurrection Act to override state law enforcement, in part out of deference to national security decision-making. Federal troops have been deployed domestically in dozens of situations; to quell the 1992 Los Angeles riots, to ensure desegregation efforts, to break up railroad strikes.
[...]
Higher stakes
For many right-wingers, the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests serve as a benchmark, often invoked when forecasting the kind of developments that they see as inevitable over the coming months, and requiring a tough response following a potential Trump victory. On the right, those protests are regarded as the high-water mark of recent left-wing violence.
As MAGA influencers tell it, the media and local, Democratic-controlled city governments ignored wanton lawlessness and violence, leaving shop owners and police squads to fend for themselves among violent mobs. The sense of grievance that’s emerged ignores the reality that many of the 2020 marches against police brutality were peaceful and managed to avoid burning down any police stations or looting stores. But the memory of that moment of activist mobilization remains powerful, among this set, and continues to inspire fear.
Howell and others said that in their view, the November election would lead to a far greater level of chaos across the country than what was seen in summer 2020.
“Much more is at stake,” Douglas Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho pastor who has become influential in conservative circles, told TPM. “With the killing of George Floyd, it was simply an opportunity to vent, but no actual power was at stake. And with the presidential election, it would be actual power.”
Setting aside the crimped definition of “power” here, Wilson envisions left-wing self-preservation as further inflaming the imagined post-election violence.
“If Trump wins, a lot of high powered, highly placed people are going to go to jail,” Wilson added. “They don’t want to go to jail.”
Wilson has become increasingly influential among self-described Christian Nationalists, who see Trump as a vehicle to punch through an agenda that would try to reshape American society, bringing it closer to their hardline interpretation of Christianity. Wilson appeared last September at an event held on Capitol Hill called “Theology of American Statecraft.” He spoke immediately after a talk given by Russ Vought, a former Trump Office of Management and Budget director who has taken a leading role in developing policies for a second administration, including through Project 2025.
[...]
A review of the paper that Vought referenced, authored by former DHS acting secretary Ken Cuccinelli and another staffer, shows that it answers an undisputed question: Does the Posse Comitatus Act, which blocks executive branch officials from deploying troops domestically, allow the president to use the military to defend the border?
That part of the paper answers a question that’s long been settled: The Pentagon regularly deploys troops in support of protecting the U.S.-Mexico border, though not in a law enforcement capacity. But as the New York Times first reported, the document makes extensive legal arguments for using troops to arrest people as part of a domestic deployment.
[...]
“This is actually the longest the United States has ever gone without an invocation of the Insurrection Act since the first version of the law was enacted in 1792,” Nunn, a fellow at the Brennan Center, told TPM. (The last time the Act was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when state and local law enforcement briefly lost control of sections of the city.) He noted that the Act is intended for situations in which civilian law enforcement cannot cope; thanks to heavy investment in state and federal law enforcement, Nunn said, those kinds of emergencies have become exceedingly rare.
Using the military against peaceful demonstrators would cut against a foundational element of American public life: the right to freely and peacefully make your views about the government known, absent government retribution.
“To the extent that any candidate or person in the orbit of a candidate is suggesting a preemptive plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, that’s inappropriate,” Nunn said. “The purpose of this law is to respond to sudden emergencies. If you are planning it months in advance, that’s by definition anticipating an abuse of the law.”
Neither of the two missions that the Trump team is envisioning — immigration enforcement or putting down protests — falls remotely within the ambit of why people join the military, Nunn added. “People who join the military don’t do so because they look to be deployed against their fellow Americans,” he said. Domestic law enforcement, among other things, is not seen within the military as its job. “It’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be focused outward, on defense.”
MAGA influencers are seeking to justify use of military force on domestic soil for law enforcement purposes if Trump wins to be used against anti-Trump protests.
The Republican Gala: Bannon's Call for Retribution and Trump 2028
The Republican Gala: A Night of Revelry and Retribution
Late on a Sunday night, within the opulent banquet hall of the historic Merchants’ Exchange building on Wall Street, Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon delivered one of his signature, theatrically charged speeches. This event marked the annual gala of the New York Young Republican Club—a kind of prom for fervent pro-Trump advocates—and…
At an event with key figures within the MAGA movement, the former president repeated comments that he wants to be a dictator on "day one."
Jason Beeferman at Politico:
NEW YORK — The chairman of an Austrian political party founded by ex-Nazis, the conservative Twitter star behind the anti-trans Bud Light backlash and former President Donald Trump all walked into a bar.
Seriously.
On Saturday night in Manhattan, amid butler-delivered bellinis, sequined ball gowns and a five-course French service meal, characters from all corners of the Republican Party’s MAGA faction gathered for “a night of dinner, drinking, and love of country.”
Trump, the New York Young Republican Club’s 111th Annual Gala Keynote speaker, delivered.
“We want to liberate America because we’re in a country that’s in a lot of pain right now, a lot of hurt,” Trump told the crowd, during his 80-minute long speech. “This campaign is on a righteous crusade to rescue our nation from a very corrupt political class.”
On the heels of a reaffirmed gag order, a debate of largely deferential Republican opponents and near slam-dunk poll numbers for the Iowa caucuses just weeks away, Trump made his pledge for a return to the White House.
The former president also addressed his comments earlier this week where he said he would not be a dictator “except for day one” if he returns to office in 2025.
“[Peter] Baker today in the New York Times said that I want to be a dictator,” Trump said, referencing an article from the newspaper’s chief White House correspondent.
“I didn’t say that. I said I want to be a dictator for one day. You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” Trump said, adding that Democrats’ “newest hoax” is to label him a threat to democracy.
The former president was preaching to his base Saturday, as a mix of firebrand conservative media icons, siloed far-right lawmakers and wealthy MAGA-loving donors chanted his name and cheered pro-Trump speeches from carefully-plated banquet tables.
Donald Trump, the North American Hitler aspirant, spoke at the New York Young Republican Club's 11th annual gala Saturday night. During his speech, he doubled down on his anti-American and fascistic "Day One Dictator" message.
