If Donald Trump is elected, he will take office in 2025, having learned lessons from four years of legal battles in his first term, during which his team’s inexperience, improvised policymaking and his own indifference to the functioning of the federal government made their agenda especially vulnerable to legal challenges.
The 2024 Republican nominee already has a clear idea of how he would kick off a second term, with plans to immediately implement strict immigration policies and dismantle civil service protections for thousands of federal employees.
His allies, including the influential conservative organizations that participated in the effort known as Project 2025, drafted policy documents and evaluated potential Trump-aligned employees who could be quickly hired by the federal government so that his vision could be implemented quickly and effectively. (Trump himself has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but many of his policies and goals overlap).
“Honestly, the Trump administration has often been careless in the way it has enacted these executive orders, including the first Muslim travel ban,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson told CNNreferring to the ban on entry of immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries, which has been the target of nearly 100 lawsuits filed by the State of Washington against the Trump administration.
Ferguson said his office was “building the plane as we flew it” at the time. Now the Washington Democrat — who is running for governor — has spent the last year putting together a legal playbook so that his successor will be ready to take action if Trump wins again.
This kind of preparation — researching case law, writing memos, rearranging teams — is being done across the country by liberal advocacy groups, Democratic states and other organizations that have fought Trump in the courts.
They are thinking about the types of plaintiffs they would recruit, where in the country they would file their cases, how they would shape their legal arguments to fit the judicial landscape that has changed in recent years, and strengthening their litigation teams.
“We have every reason to believe that this time, just as we learned lessons, the officials and strategists who would make up the second Trump administration also have a more sophisticated playbook,” said Deepa Alagesan, who leads the Relief Project’s litigation team. International Refugees, a refugee advocacy group.
When Trump took office, Alagesan’s organization had no in-house attorney. But their experience litigating travel bans helped convince the refugee group that they needed to form their own team, which has now grown to about 10 lawyers.
Several other advocacy organizations told CNN that the number of lawyers they employ or work with has grown exponentially since the beginning of Trump’s first presidency.
“Assembling the team is a big part of being prepared,” said Elizabeth Taylor, executive director of the National Health Law Program, which opposes reductions in public health programs that are often targeted by Republicans. “It’s going to take teams to be ready to challenge things that are coming quickly.”
Part of the preparation has been revisiting what worked and what didn’t in the legal fights of the first Trump administration. One lesson was how legal proceedings could help increase public pressure on the administration by drawing attention to a controversial policy, as was seen with the legal challenges to Trump’s immigration practice known as “family separation.”
Another lesson, according to ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, was that every day a Trump policy was blocked or delayed by court order was a victory, even if a higher court ended up reinstating it. Litigation surrounding the Muslim entry ban, for example, forced his White House to rewrite the ban three times before it was finally upheld by the Supreme Court.
“Litigation will be a key tool to preserve the status quo and buy time,” Romero said, noting that cases brought against a second Trump administration will be argued before a judiciary that has been transformed by both Trump and his successor, President Joe Biden. .
The Supreme Court is much more conservative now than when Trump was inaugurated in 2017. Following its signals, lower court judges have become less willing to grant national injunctions and more skeptical about the ability of organizations, rather than individuals, to serve as authors of processes.
The ACLU is preparing for these changes in the legal landscape as well, Romero said, by building relationships with the types of grassroots organizations across the country that can help the civil liberties group find clients for its legal challenges.
Project 2025 shapes the plans
Project 2025, the broad policy agenda led by the conservative organization Heritage Foundation, is expected to play an important role in shaping a second Trump presidency, especially since its authors include several former members of the first Trump administration who could be expected to take on senior roles. government in a second Trump term.
This has become a point of contention in the 2024 campaign because his proposals have gone beyond typical Republican promises.
“This time, Project 2025 provides a very detailed overview of the issues on which a leading conservative organization like the Heritage Foundation is likely to press the Trump administration,” Romero said.
Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, and some policies became such a political liability for the Republican candidate that his campaign managers celebrated the news that the project’s director, Paul Dans, was stepping aside amid criticism that the policy agenda was receiving from Trump and his campaign.
Part of Project 2025’s effort has been to collect and evaluate thousands of potential employees to serve across the federal bureaucracy of a future Trump administration.
Central to the conservative coalition’s goals is a maneuver known as “Schedule F” that would strip protections from tens of thousands of federal employees in the civil service, effectively turning a large portion of the federal bureaucracy into a political appointees and making them much easier to remove and replace.
Trump signed an executive measure putting Schedule F into effect at the end of his first term, but it was not fully implemented until he left office.
Progressive legal advocacy organizations are looking for ways to help traditional groups that protect federal employees, such as unions, if Schedule F is implemented.
The ACLU and other groups are debating how to build the infrastructure that would connect federal employees to legal representation if they are subject to harassment, retaliation or other types of illegal conduct by their superiors.
Memos and matrices
Democracy Forward, an organization that formed in 2017 and filed more than 100 lawsuits during Trump’s first term, created a so-called “threat matrix” to outline a variety of far-right proposals, such as ending the right to citizenship. per birth, withhold Medicaid funding from states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion, and limit adoption by same-sex couples.
The matrix analyzes which federal agencies would likely be tasked with implementing the policies and whether they could be enacted without congressional action.
The group is also preparing for the possibility that a Trump Justice Department will stop defending federal policies that conservatives are currently challenging in court, such as the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulation of the abortion pill or the minimum wage. for federal contractors.
The group is identifying and analyzing these processes to understand what could be done to intervene in these cases to defend policies.
“We believe it is imperative that people in communities have the tools to resist illegal and harmful extremism,” he told CNN Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman. “We are working with a variety of organizations that can prepare people in communities to resist, including by filing litigation against these proposals.”
The National Immigration Law Center — which began its preparations following a New York Times article in November that previewed the immigration restrictions the Trump team is planning — is drafting plans that outline both a legal response to the proposals and how the group can mobilize protesters against expected policies.
“We are really looking at every possible tool we have at our disposal,” said Kica Matos, president of the organization.
Meanwhile, the ACLU has been releasing a series of analyzes of possible legal and legislative responses to Trump’s potential policies. Publishing the legal arguments the ACLU is exploring is, in part, an attempt to solicit feedback from other groups, Romero said, facilitating “peer review, in real time, before the crisis.”
“If we have an analysis that is a little off, or could be refined, better find out before January,” Romero said.
The current project — covering topics such as voting rights, abortion, immigration and the criminal legal system — expands on what was a single, much more superficial memo that the ACLU released in the summer of 2016. (In the previous two elections, the ACLU also published memos evaluating the policies of Trump’s Democratic opponents).
While the 2016 analysis of Trump’s plans was “superficial,” Romero said, it was still instrumental in his organization’s ability to sue the day after Trump signed Version 1.0 of the Muslim travel ban.
“I’m glad we had that, but we’re going a lot deeper this time,” Romero said.
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