Whatever Republicans like Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota may claim, Donald Trump was not “being funny” about governing as a dictator (only on “Day 1,” he promises). We know he meant it because we saw what he did in his first term, including after his 2020 loss. We also know he’s not joking because he has an army of right-wing activists who are bent on carrying out their own authoritarian agenda for the Christianization of the federal government, especially at the Department of Health and Human Services.
That agenda is all laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” the nearly thousand-page document cited in recent media coverage as the blueprint for a possible Trump second term. As it was in Trump’s first term, HHS will be the epicenter of imposing the Christian right’s agenda on all Americans, under the guise of protecting the “conscience” and “religious freedom” of people who oppose abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Severino makes clear that punishing blue states remains a key goal.
As Heritage’s blueprint has sparked a raft of unfavorable stories, the Trump campaign has sought to distance itself. But the author of the mandate’s section on the department is a former Trump appointee: Roger Severino, director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights under Trump.
Now at Heritage, Severino is a lawyer and longtime anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights activist who, in 2018, used his political appointment and coordinated support from outside organizations to create a new enforcement structure in the agency, the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division. “We’re institutionalizing a change in the culture of government, beginning with HHS,” Severino said at a launch event at HHS headquarters, “to never forget that religious freedom is primary freedom, that it is a civil right that deserves complete enforcement and respect.”
Bragging that the division was “open for business,” Severino…
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