And as he does, the extremists around him move closer to power.

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A disintegrating Trump puts Vance a heartbeat away from the presidency, but there’s more than Vance to fear. Although Trump has publicly disavowed the architects of Project 2025, any distance between him and the scheme is a mirage. We know, for example, that at least 140 people who once worked for his administration have contributed to the plan, which was orchestrated primarily by the Heritage Foundation. Vance even wrote the forward to a book written by Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Trump has to fill a second administration somehow – and for years, his allies in Washington, D.C., have been strategizing for just such an occasion. “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” said Russell Vought to a pair of undercover British journalists this summer. Vought, a former Trump official, is widely considered to be a candidate for Trump’s prospective chief of staff. He added that “we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”