In case he wins another term in the White House, former President Donald Trump seems to have big plans for one close adviser, Mike Davis.
“We want him in a very high capacity,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Colorado, where Davis has had a house for years.
If certain people in Trump’s inner circle get their way, “high capacity” could mean Davis serves as U.S. attorney general or acting attorney general.
Davis spoke to far-right pundit Benny Johnson one year ago about what he would do as acting attorney general — or as he referred to it, his “three-week reign of terror.”
“Before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon, I will rain hell on Washington, D.C.,” he told Johnson, reminding him how they’d discussed the subject in the past.
Davis listed his main objectives: fire “a lot of people” in the executive branch; indict Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election; deport “10 million people and growing,” or about 3% of the country’s population; detain “a lot of people” in Guantanamo Bay and “the D.C. gulag”; and pardon those charged over the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We’re going to put kids in cages. It’s going to be glorious,” Davis said of migrant children.
The former president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and far-right pundit Steve Bannon both sang Davis’ praises in a profile of the “Make America Great Again” loyalist published last month in Politico . In front of reporter Adam Wren, Trump Jr. told Davis he wanted him to be attorney general “all four years” of a second Trump term.
Davis had responded to say he would gladly be Trump’s “viceroy” for three weeks.
While Trump Jr. later claimed to be joking, he was reportedly influential in his father’s decision to fill another top slot: his vice presidential running mate. The position went to Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
Davis has also thrown around the word “viceroy” repeatedly.
“I’m going to be Trump’s viceroy of D.C. because I don’t like democracy. I want more authoritory powers,” Davis told Bannon on an episode of his “War Room” show.
The problem is that it’s difficult to tell when Davis is joking. Wren wrote that he didn’t believe even Davis himself always knew when he was joking. And authoritarian language runs rampant through the Trump campaign — Trump has said that he would be a “ dictator ” on his first day back in office.
Davis had “sworn” to Wren that he was not serious when he said he thought Trump critics, including journalists and erstwhile Republican attorney George Conway, should be thrown in “gulags.” But Wren recounted a shocking anecdote to illustrate how seriously others in Trump World take his style of rhetoric. At one point, while trailing Davis for his story, Wren said he was harassed by a woman who demanded he delete his reporting notes and then recruited multiple men to help her physically prevent him from leaving.
Davis, Wren noted, was alarmed at the treatment the Politico reporter received.
Mike Davis, center left, and Donald Trump's campaign adviser Jason Miller talk outside a courtroom before beginning an October 2023 hearing for a lawsuit that sought to keep former President Donald Trump off a state ballot.
On social media, though, Davis continues to joke about the gulags, his “ viceroy ” title, and his idea that Democrats are “Marxist monsters who we must destroy legally, financially, and politically.”
His resume, full of establishment GOP credentials, could make him more palatable in a high-level role.
Davis grew up in Iowa and worked in the George W. Bush administration before moving to Colorado to clerk for Neil Gorsuch, then a federal judge and now a Supreme Court justice. During the Trump administration, Davis was chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, helping push through Gorsuch’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s nominations to the high court. He then launched a conservative legal project called Article III in 2019.
If Trump wins the 2024 election, his attorney general is going to be one of the most powerful people in the country, likely tasked with helping to implement extreme policies on immigration and other areas of American life. Project 2025 — a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican administration, hatched by The Heritage Foundation — calls for the federal government to be essentially remade.
It will undoubtedly provoke an onslaught of legal challenges.
“The most important person in government, I think, after the president, for this cycle, is going to be the attorney general,” Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, said Friday in Georgia.
“Because we really do have to clean house,” Vance said.
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