There’s a very real possibility that former President Donald Trump could become the next president of the United States. If that happens, this country is going to be in for a heck of a ride. Everything that happened from 2017 to 2021, including the out-of-control media bias and unlimited but fake investigations, plus vicious smears on a nonstop basis, not to mention impeachment attempts, will be multiplied many times over.
Let’s consider.
In the first 100 days, a new president needs to populate the administrative agencies with new employees, some 4,000 of them. Normally, this call for talent is answered far and wide.
This wouldn’t be true this time. The last crew that took jobs in the new administration in 2017 very often regretted it and for two reasons: Many of them faced the president’s wrath and were fired (probably rightly in many cases) and then faced long-term unemployment afterward. Professors couldn’t get their jobs back, and the same with corporate leaders. They were professionally blackballed.
It’s hard to know who would be willing to serve this time. To be sure, there are many previous appointees now populating various Trump-connected think tanks who would be ready to go. But the new administration can likely forget about recruiting from academia and the corporate world. Taking such a job would mean a lower salary and an unthinkable level of stress. So President Trump would have to rely on his existing loyalists, including activists and donors.
That could be bad or it could be good. Regardless, it would be different from any previous presidential administration. High-end and known professionals wouldn’t be among them, which would be odd.
Each of these new appointees would be declared enemy No. 1 by all agency bureaucrats. They'll be hated, foiled, ratted out, and pilloried at every turn. Their only choice, and only chance for survival, will be to gut the bureaucracies as quickly as possible with budget cuts and reallocations.
Every decision in this regard will be shouted down and attacked by the media and Congress, no matter what. Each appointee can look forward to a crazed amount of investigations into their private lives and face smears and accusations never before heard in American public life. It will be brutal and bloody.
There’s already a presumption far and wide that the No. 1 goal of the new administration would be to break down the wall that separates the office of the elected president from the administrative state that truly rules the country. This would be done with various executive edicts that would reclassify employees. These would all be challenged in court, and various courts would issue stays on the orders, thwarting the ambition.
Meanwhile, the administrative state would circle the wagons to stave off the attack. They would be on the phone constantly with The New York Times to tell them of the emerging “dictatorship” and unrelenting “threat to democracy.” This would be the line of the day and you would hear it constantly, namely that President Trump has proclaimed himself dictator, even though it will be totally bunk.
The top priority of the administrators—the government’s professional managerial class—would be to protect themselves, their jobs, and their power from any incursion from the elected president. We’ve never seen anything on this level. Not even the Reagan administration threatened the bureaucracy so hard. This would be their opportunity to test their powers of persuasion and smears to make life impossible for President Trump personally.
Meanwhile, his legal bills and challenges would multiply without limit, and he would face constant demands to appear in court to account for hundreds of tiny things in the past and present, anything to throttle and block the operation of government itself and protect the bureaucracy and its power. His presidential immunity would protect him in most cases, but even that will be challenged.
The only way to deal with this entire problem would be for loyalists to act quickly and brilliantly to foil all attempts to stop the counterrevolution. This would take place at all levels of government. It would even affect the military, which would undertake to become independent of President Trump’s control.
The article says: “Donald Trump is sparking fears among those who understand the inner workings of the Pentagon that he would convert the nonpartisan U.S. military into the muscular arm of his political agenda as he makes comments about dictatorship and devalues the checks and balances that underpin the nation’s two-century-old democracy.”
You get the point here, right? The idea is that the leader whom the people elected should have no power over the most powerful agency. It’s completely bosh, but there it is. The Obama and Biden administrations have heavily politicized the military and every other agency, all of which are populated with people naturally favorable to left-wing political views for reasons of job protection. They would be prepared to wage war on President Trump.
Then there’s the CIA, which is more powerful than all the other agencies. President Trump would have to take control with a group of hard-nosed and serious people determined to crush the thing, else he would certainly fail.
Throughout this entire ordeal, should it happen, just remember: When they say President Trump is “attacking democracy,” he’s really attacking the administrative machinery of the state that has gone many decades without challenges. I’m sorry to report to you that it has been a very long time since elected leaders were truly in charge of the country. Mostly, we’ve been ruled by agencies.
Everyone needs to bone up on the Constitution and U.S. history. There’s nothing in the Constitution about some mysterious fourth branch called the bureaucracy that has autonomous rights to rule the country without the permission of the other branches. Still, they believe strongly in their power, precisely because it has never before been seriously challenged.
All presidents in the 18th and 19th centuries were in a position to replace any and all federal employees. He was the boss, the CEO of the government, and he truly controlled the executive branch. We still have an executive branch, but it’s too vast and imperial for a new president to control. Plus, union rules of the public sector prevent them from being easily fired.
In the old days, the right of the president to control the bureaucracy was smeared as the “spoils system.” Actually, it was the U.S. Constitution in operation. That came to be replaced starting in 1883, growing through war and depression to become the beast that currently oppresses Americans.
During COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services shoved through a vast amount of terrible rules without permission from anyone. These included the eviction moratorium, the mask mandates, student loan forgiveness, and vaccine mandates, all with the tacit approval of the Biden administration, which has rubber-stamped anything the bureaucrats wanted to do.
To regain genuine democracy and freedom, this system must come to an end. The Trump administration needs to rein it all in and gut it. Otherwise, the whole four years would be a failure. President Trump mustn’t be distracted by his deeply regrettable obsession with higher tariffs. Those can only harm economic growth, and President Trump needs every bit of economic growth to help his popularity.
It’s hugely important that a Trump administration has a Republican House and Senate. If it doesn’t, it will be throttled at every turn. If it does, and it sticks to the agenda, a second Trump administration could make lasting change, despite the media attacks, litigation, and nonstop smears.
Just remember: You aren’t likely living in a dictatorship but rather experiencing for the first time what it means to have a democratically elected president do something good for the people.
