The acting White House chief of staff said he had told the president he is likely to be impeached a second time if Republicans do not regain control of the House of Representatives in November.
Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning that taking back the House would empower the president to push on with tackling the “deep state” and overhauling the civil service, as well as embarking on a second phase of tax reform.
He described how the president asked him whether he was likely to face a second impeachment challenge.
“We need to get the House back,” he said. “People ask me all the time. … The president asked me: ‘Do you think I’ll be impeached again?’
“I said, ‘I don’t know, you tell me who’s in charge of the House after the 2020 elections. If it’s Nancy Pelosi, the answer’s sure, why not? But if it’s Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans, we’re going to have a really good couple of years.’”
Among the priorities for a second term, he said, were making permanent some of the temporary measures in the president’s 2017 tax overhaul and reducing corporate tax rates.
And he said he wanted to press ahead with civil service reform.
“I really tried to get people to sink their teeth into it in the first term, but it’s not sexy,” he said. “But I think now after almost four years of the first term of this president, people are starting to realize there is something that’s there, that no one wants to talk about. … We call it the ‘deep state.’”
The aim, he said, was to ensure that civil servants carried out their duties without bias.
“You want bureaucrats who work just as hard for Donald Trump as they did for Barack Obama,” he said. “That’s only fair. They’re taking your tax dollars, they have to be indifferent.
“They have to work hard to get Obama’s policies in and the day that Donald Trump takes over, they have to work just as hard for DT. And that has not happened.”
He also defended the administration’s response to the growing coronavirus epidemic.
