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Report Claims Public Interest Groups, Lawmakers ‘Quietly Devising Plans’ to Thwart Trump’s Efforts if Re-Elected

Pundits say report suggests treason, verifies existence of ‘Deep State’

Published: January 15, 2024
  |   By Chris Karr
Report Claims Public Interest Groups, Lawmakers ‘Quietly Devising Plans’ to Thwart Trump’s Efforts if Re-Elected

A new report claims that a network of public interest groups and lawmakers are concocting plans to obstruct former President Donald Trump’s efforts to accomplish what could be perceived as his political agenda.


NBC News reported “those who understand the inner workings of the Pentagon” are “nervous” and “fear” what could happen if Trump is re-elected president in 2024.

“Now, bracing for Trump’s potential return, a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater to his political needs,” the outlet reported on Jan. 14.

“Those taking part in the effort told NBC News they are studying Trump’s past actions and 2024 policy positions so that they will be ready if he wins in November,” the report states. “That involves preparing to take legal action and send letters to Trump appointees spelling out consequences they’d face if they undermine constitutional norms.”

The outlet cited Trump’s March speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference as cause for alarm.

“If you put me back in White House, their reign is over,” he said at the time. “In 2016, I declared, 'I am your voice.' Today I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

When asked about his promise for retribution at an Iowa town hall in January, Trump said, “I’m not gonna have time for retribution.”

The report also cited Trump’s comment that he would be a dictator on “Day One” in order to close the border and drill for oil as a cause for “anxiety.”

In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump said his remark about being a dictator “was said in a joking manner.”

“Detractors,” NBC wrote, “aren’t buying it.”

“Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will,” Leon Panetta, former defense secretary and CIA director during the Obama administration, told NBC.

“He’s going to be one creative motherf----- when it comes to trying to figure out how to abuse it [power],” predicted Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash). “Whatever your guess is, open up your imagination a little more.”

The corporate press outlet said certain individuals are concerned that Trump will use the Insurrection Act, passed in 1792, “to involve the armed forces in the face of domestic protests or if the midterm elections don’t go his way.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is currently working on a bill that clarifies the law and provides Congress and the court system with some involvement in its use.

Blumenthal anticipates “an array of horrors” resulting from Trump’s “unrestricted use” of the act: “A malignantly motivated president could use it in a vast variety of dictatorial ways unless at some point the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order. But that places a very heavy burden on the military.”

William Cohen, a former defense secretary in the Clinton administration, described Trump as “a clear and present danger to our democracy [whose] support is solid.”

“I don’t think people understand what living in a dictatorship would mean,” he added.

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton said, “A second Trump term would be day after day of constitutional crisis — the Justice Department one day, the Pentagon the next and Homeland Security the next. It would be unremitting.”

Leaders of public interest groups are “think[ing] through the most damaging types of things that he might do” and “preparing to use every tool in the toolbox” to mount legal challenges against Trump.

Pundits on X wielded the NBC article as proof of the existence of the Deep State, defined by Merriam-Webster as “an alleged secret network of especially nonelected government officials and sometimes private entities … operating extralegally to influence and enact government policy.”
















Others suggested the report anticipates treason against a potential sitting president.
















Dismantling the Deep State has been a key promise of Trump’s current and past campaigns.

“Either the Deep State destroys America or we destroy the Deep State,” Trump said during a March rally in Waco, Texas.

In a recent campaign video, the former president described the upcoming election as “the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State.”


Others drew comparisons between the latest NBC report and the famous TIME article from 2020 titled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”

The author, Molly Ball, wrote that “Trump was right” when he said, “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

The article continued:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President.

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