Don Junior Previews Lunatic Staffing Of Next Trump White House

DONALD TRUMP JR.: She’s a bulldog, man, I will say that. She gets after it. I’d love to see her as press secretary just to watch D.C. just explode. There’s a couple of people that you could put in positions like that, you know. We talk about, like, you know, Mike Davis as attorney general, one of those guys. You almost have to. Just put them in as interim even just to send that shot across the bow of the swamp, you know? Like — you want to play?

You want to play? And then you can get someone, you know, the guys that wouldn’t get affirmed or otherwise. But let like Mike Davis, you know, Kash Patel be like interim AGs. Put Laura Loomer as press secretary for just a couple of days just to, you know, these losers in the — they’ll figure out exactly how easy their job is, you know, before that, so that’d be pretty funny.

Following his 2016 election, Trump stocked his White House and administration with an array of familiar faces from his television screen, including at least 20 former Fox News employees. As the former president has widened his media diet since leaving office to include even more unhinged sources, it’s not implausible that a future administration would feature denizens from the right-wing fever swamps.

Here’s who Trump Jr. is suggesting be given power under a potential 2024 Trump administration.

Laura Loomer

Loomer is a conspiracy theorist who recently joined Rumble as an exclusive host — a fitting collaboration since the platform hosts right-wing conspiracy theories and bigoted rhetoric. (Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski hailed Loomer’s addition.)

According to The New York Times, former president Donald Trump wanted to hire Loomer for his current presidential campaign but was talked out of it. Since then, he has repeatedly praised Loomer, and campaign adviser Jason Miller recently appeared on her program, where he called her “the best” and said of Trump: “I know he's very appreciative for everything that you do, Laura.”

(Ironically, one of Loomer’s biggest critics is member of congress and anti-Muslim bigot Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has called Loomer “a documented liar,” among other things)

Loomer is virulently anti-Muslim. She has said that she is “anti-Islam” and a “proud Islamophobe,” stated that she never wants “another Muslim entering this country EVER AGAIN,” and asked, “How many more people need to die before everyone agrees that Islam is cancer & we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world?” Here is a summary of some — but certainly not all — of her anti-Muslim rants.

• Loomer described herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and wrote: “I never want another Muslim entering this country EVER AGAIN!”
• Loomer called Muslims “savages” who “ruin everything.”
• In response to July 2017 news that “over 2,000 migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean so far this year,” Loomer tweeted: “Good. [clapping emoji] Here's to 2,000 more.”
• Loomer wrote of the 2019 mass murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand: “Nobody cares about Christchurch. I especially don’t.”
• Loomer said: “How many more people need to die before everyone agrees that Islam is cancer & we should never let another Muslim into the civilized world?”
• Loomer has argued that “it should be illegal in America to take your oath of office on the Quran,” explaining, “There must be a full blown effort to prevent these people from further infiltrating our government.”
• Loomer complained in 2021 of former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy: “Kevin is very pro-Islam. He wouldn’t allow the NRCC to support my campaign last year because I’m anti-Islam and he doesn’t like that I speak out about Sharia law and Islamic terrorism/ immigration.”

Loomer also said during a podcast: “Someone asked me ‘Are you pro-white nationalism?’ Yes. I’m pro-white nationalism.”

Mike Davis 

Davis served in the Justice Department during the Bush administration, oversaw judicial nominations as a staffer to then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and played lead roles in the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. He founded the Article III Project, which he described to The New York Times in 2019 as an effort to “take off the gloves, put on the brass knuckles and fight back” on judicial issues. That article characterized Davis as “a take-no-prisoners conservative eager to challenge the left with hardball tactics.”

In practice, Davis has spent the last several years offering unhinged and authoritarian diatribes, conspiracy theories, and pro-Trump sycophancy on his social media feed and across a constellation of right-wing media outlets.

He has excused Trump’s withholding of government documents by claiming presidents can effectively “wave a magic wand” and declassify them; urged House Republicans to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and President Joe Biden; said that Biden is “the perfect guy to put in the White House if you want a puppet to control”; described Trump’s various criminal indictments as “a political hit by Biden and Garland to take out Trump for the 2024 presidential election” that will “have a very chilling effect on democracy” and the district attorneys and the special counsel investigating Trump as “partisan hitmen sent by Biden to take out Trump”; and argued that the New York civil suit against Trump was “only constitutional in Third World Marxist hellholes” and was essentially “legal terrorism."

Davis has put forward a chillingly specific platform for what he would do if appointed attorney general, which he describes as his “reign of terror.” He claims to have “five lists, ready to go and they're growing,” which consist of political enemies he would fire, indict, deport, or imprison in the “DC gulag” or Guantanamo Bay, as well as political supporters who would be pardoned, including “every January 6th defendant.”

When Media Matters’ Jason Campbell reported on those remarks in September, Davis replied that he was “excited to put” Campbell “and all the leftwing freaks at” Media Matters on the lists for indictment, deportation, and imprisonment at the “DC gulag” or Gitmo. When Media Matters’ Matt Gertz noted that “Trumpists are becoming unusually explicit in acknowledging they want to regain power so they can engineer political prosecutions of people they disagree with,” Davis responded, “Fact Check: True,” adding that Gertz had been added to the indictment and gulag/Gitmo lists.

Trump Jr. also mentioned Kash Patel as a potential attorney general. Patel previously worked as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller during the Trump administration. He is now a right-wing pundit who, along with other senior Trump officials, has spoken at events featuring Hitler-promoting antisemites. He’s also embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory.