What’s that old Aesop’s fable about how the mountain roared and out came a mouse? We seem to be heading in that direction if Donald Trump’s alleged plan to remake the Executive branch next year actually would actually become true.
According to The (Failing) New York Times, Trump is planning a wholesale change in the direction, size and activity of the Federal Government, unlike anything which has happened since FDR gave us the New Deal.
Who’s doing the actual research to put together this plan? The usual satrap of conservative, D.C. think tanks which are now ‘out’ because Joe is ‘in,’ plus the putzes who worked for Trump the last time around and now need jobs.
One of my chums in graduate school earned his master’s degree, decided he didn’t want to do a Ph.D., and got a job on the staff of one of the Senate committees doing research. At some point I bumped into him as he was walking from the Capitol over to one of the federal agencies to be interviewed to join their staff.
“We lost the majority in the Senate last year,” he explained to me, “and our budget’s been cut so they’ve found a place for me at the SEC. When we regain the majority, I’ll probably move back to the office I had on the Hill. I’ve been in D.C. eleven years and moved three times”
I had another very good friend, a lawyer, who worked for the FTC. She headed the group which wrote the original health warning on the side of cigarette packs. At one point I bumped into her in D.C. at a time when Reagan was saying he was going to cut the government payroll “down to size.”
I asked my friend Judy if she was worried about losing her job. She smiled and replied, “Mike – I’m a lawyer. The government is run by lawyers. It’s a government based on laws.”
These two friends of mine represent, pari-passu, the Deep State. And men, women and LGBTQ will be running the government long after Donald Trump disappears, whether he wins 2024 or not.
Because if you look back at Trump’s career, the one constant which seems to stand out above all others is his inability to understand the fact that the United States is, more than anything else, a government run by laws.
Look who Trump hired to advise him on laws. First, we have Roy Cohn, who never met a law he liked or obeyed. Then we had Michael Cohen, who was tasked by Trump to figure out how to ignore every law that he could. And last but not least, we have Rudy Giuliani, who was last seen snooping around the house of the suspected serial killer on Long Island so that he could - get this! – prepare a segment for his new livestream show.
Of course, leave it to Trump to describe his remaking of the federal government in apocalyptic, larger-than-life terms. Remember that everything Trump does or claims he’s going to do is always something so new, so big, so different and so important that by definition, it’s never been done before.
Ready? Here’s the plan as described by Trump at a Michigan rally last week: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will defeat crooked Joe Biden. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
Meanwhile, notice there’s not one, single word in this rat-tat-tat which actually says how any of this activity does anything to improve the lives of Americans, but that was then explained by a campaign spokesman who said, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”
All of those things will happen when we get rid of the Deep State?
If I had a nickel for every piece of paper which contained a memo for Trump which he didn’t read between 2017 and 2021, I really could quit working and just go shopping every day. This is a guy who can sit still and listen to someone else talk for thirty seconds or less. And the idea he could remake the government which regulates the world’s largest economy is nothing but a joke.
The GOP fought against the New Deal (Coolidge, et. al.) and lost every time out. They fought (Goldwater) when the federal government passed laws in the 1960’s guaranteeing equal rights for minorities and lost again.
This time they want to reverse the gender and ethnic diversities which increasingly reflect America’s population and lifestyles for the last ten years. Which is what all this Trump bullshit about the Deep State is really about.
As grandpa would say, ‘gai macht,’ (read: stick it up your you know what.)
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