Biden says Trump's civil service plans make him unfit for office

President Biden on Tuesday told supporters that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump should be locked up—“politically,” he added—in light of the former president’s plan to upend the nonpartisan civil service and other authoritarian statements he has made in recent years.

“This is a guy who also wants to replace every civil servant, every single one; thinks he has a right under the Supreme Court ruling on immunity to be able, if need be, if it was the case, to actually eliminate—physically eliminate, shoot, kill—someone who is, he believes, would be a threat to him,” Biden told Democrats in Concord, N.H., per pool reports. “I mean, so, I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like—I said this five years ago—‘you’d lock me up.’ We gotta lock him up—politically lock him up.”

Biden was referring to Schedule F, the abortive effort at the end of Trump’s term in office to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers in “policy-related” positions into the government’s excepted service, effectively making them at-will employees. Trump has vowed to reinstate the program if elected this November, and at least one think tank founded by former Trump aides have called for the entire federal government to become “an at-will employer.”

Good government groups and public administration experts have excoriated Schedule F since its first unveiling in October 2020 as a plan that would effectively end the nearly 150-year-old non-partisan civil service as loyalism to Trump eclipses merit in the federal hiring and firing processes. And they have warned that if elected, there may be little in the way to halt or slow down Trump’s plans.

The remarks come amid increasing focus on Trump’s overtures toward increasing presidential power over the executive branch. Trump has mused about serving as a dictator “for one day” at campaign rallies, and ex-aides recently reported to The Atlantic that Trump admired Adolf Hitler’s control over the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Trump’s campaign has denied those allegations.

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump reportedly said in a private White House conversation. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

And The New York Times reported Tuesday that former Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly believes Trump is a fascist.

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he told The Times. “So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America, again, back to this issue of democracy is complicated, messy to operate, probably the worst kind of government there is except for all the other ones—I think Churchill said that . . . But certainly, the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators--he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist, for sure.”

Vice President Harris, who is running against Trump this November, sought to highlight Kelly’s comments Wednesday in a brief speech in front of the U.S. Naval Observatory.

“Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans ‘the enemy from within’ and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens,” she said. “And let’s be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within: anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify in his mind as the enemy within—like judges, like journalists, like nonpartisan election officials . . . Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrail against his propensities and his actions.”