After “Is 2020 another ‘Flight 93 election?’” the question I most often hear is “What happens if Trump loses?”
The answer to the first question, unfortunately, is yes, but more so.
The tl;dr summary of the answer to the second is: much more of the same. More of all the trends, policies, and practices that revolutionized American life in the 1960s, that enrich the ruling class and its foot soldiers at middle America’s expense, erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties, degrade our culture and its people, and dishonor our heritage and history. The war on those who self-identify as Americans, and only as Americans, who love their country despite its flaws—who are certain in their bones that its strengths and glories vastly outweigh its historic and present shortcomings—waged by those who hate America and Americans, who want to destroy the former and crush the latter, will go on.
Two important questions are whether that war will intensify or abate and whether it might abate overtly but intensify covertly. Those questions will be explored in what follows.
First, though, a necessary caveat. A tiresome, sophistic, bad-faith, and inevitable rejoinder to my argument will go something like this: “Trump is the president; therefore, you guys are in charge; this ‘ruling class’ of whom you speak includes him, and you. So you’re lying and contradicting yourself when you criticize an alleged ‘ruling class’ running the country in ways you don’t like.”
No. The only accurate statement in the above summary is “Trump is the president.” And thank God for that; we’d be much worse off if he weren’t.
But the experience of Trump’s first term reveals how weak the presidency really is—not just constitutionally and historically, but, above all, currently. We know the enumerated powers the president is supposed to have, and also those the other branches of government are supposed to have, and not have. The Constitution and other fundamental charters of our liberties—the “parchment”—spell all that out. We also know what the “org chart” of the federal government looks like on paper: a “unitary executive” with an alphabet soup of agencies reporting to the president and therefore, in theory, responsive to his directives.
But the reality, by now, should be obvious to everyone. Our government in no way functions according to the elevated words on the parchment, and President Trump does not control the executive branch. I say this not to disparage the president but only to state a plain fact. No doubt, he has done his best. I doubt that anyone else could have done better. But while facing a near-universal rebellion from every power center in our society, emphatically including the agencies he was elected to lead, naturally he has found it very difficult to make the federal bureaucracy do what he tells it to do.
That difficulty has astonished even me. I worked in the federal bureaucracy for the first four years of the first George W. Bush Administration. I saw from the inside how the permanent government or administrative state or “deep state” or whatever you want to call it undermined a president with whom they mostly agreed. I knew in advance that, were Donald Trump to win the 2016 election, the effort to undercut him from within would dwarf what happened to Bush. For unlike the 43rd president, who merely held a few opinions unpopular with the deep state, the 45th ran on a program of almost complete repudiation of ruling class dogma and practice.
And yet I vastly underestimated how bad the “resistance” would be. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies would try to frame the president with a phony “crime,” launch a pointless two-year investigation over a fraud, then impeach him over the timing of foreign aid payments, all the while lying daily to the American public.
I also saw, again, the beast from the inside during my brief tenure in President Trump’s White House. Given classification and nondisclosure requirements, I can’t say much about that. But I can say this: if anything changed from my time in the Bush Administration, it is that the deep state is vastly more powerful today than it was then, and vastly more willing to use its power—overtly—to flout, undermine, circumvent, and disobey presidential orders. Even, in many cases, to do the precise opposite of what they’ve been ordered.
So we should not gripe about the things not done in President Trump’s first term. We should rather be grateful for all the things he got done—and hope he can do more in a second term.
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