When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 and took office on Jan. 20, 2017, he was handed a mandate to change Washington, D.C., and the federal government in a dramatic and radical fashion.
In his inaugural address, dubbed the “American Carnage” speech, Trump made clear that he intended to deliver on the mandate for which he had been elected: to change Washington from the inside and repudiate the establishments of the Democratic and Republican parties.
“Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people,” Trump said. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. … The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country.”
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” he said.
The speech heralded the beginning of a presidency that was supposed to change Washington from a self-serving bubble to a seat of government that was accountable to the people who elected it.
But that promised presidency never materialized. In his four-year term, Trump largely failed to accomplish the goal he was elected to achieve, to drain the “swamp,” even as a good deal of this failure was not his fault but that of his determined and often unhinged opponents. But if he is successful in his bid to return to the job he lost four years ago, there is reason to believe things will be different. A new Trump administration might finally deliver on the promise to drain the swamp, and that is why he must win.
Flying blind
Trump’s status as a newcomer to politics was his greatest strength and greatest weakness. He was untainted by the machinations of the political establishment that governed both parties. But at the same time, this lack of familiarity with how the government works allowed nefarious actors who did not support his policy agenda but professed to support his administration to weasel their way into positions of importance across his administration.
Staffing an administration is a gargantuan task that, in recent years, has rarely been completed. Each administration fills close to 4,000 government jobs that control the policy directions of each agency, and roughly 1,200 of these positions require Senate confirmation.
The presidential transition in 2016 was initially run by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who had endorsed Trump early during the primaries after his own presidential bid fell flat. Christie vetted a cadre of would-be political appointees who would have felt right at home in any Republican administration, including one led by one-time 2016 Republican front-runner Jeb Bush, the last in the Bush dynasty to seek the nation’s highest office and whose family embodied the political class that Trump was elected to repudiate.
After he won the election, Trump fired Christie and replaced him with then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who brought with him the conservative movement’s governing philosophy of fusionist conservatism. This meant a strongly socially conservative agenda mixed with a trickle-down approach to economics and a strong and aggressive foreign policy.
Aside from the socially conservative positions he staked out in 2016, Trump’s campaign agenda was largely at odds with the transition’s fusionist agenda, which quickly became the agenda of the administration. The populism that had fueled his political rise was largely tamed.
On many occasions throughout his administration, Trump, the elected president, was thwarted in his efforts to enact major policy changes by the very political appointees he had installed. This was a natural consequence of the fact that when he entered office in 2017, he was flying blind. While most politicians enter office with an army of longtime advisers and aides, Trump lacked a political network to tap into that was not aligned with various aspects of the establishment of the Republican Party. This forced him to rely on existing networks with which Pence, his vice president, had long associated and other groups that had influenced Republican administrations in the past.
Four years to get wiser
At the end of four years in office, Trump had largely figured out who was really on his side and who was undermining him. For instance, less than a week after Election Day, Trump unceremoniously fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had resisted several directives to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a move largely opposed by the majority of Republican political leaders.
But the project of weeding out dissidents within the administration was far more involved. In 2020, before the election, the Trump White House installed a new vetting process for political appointees to ensure the administration, which was planning a second term, was not hamstrung by appointees who did not support the president’s agenda. Effectively, in the lead-up to 2020, Trump formed the political network he was lacking when he won the presidency in 2016.
At the same time, his new cohort of allies in government was drawing up plans to rein in the liberal career bureaucrats in federal agencies who had sabotaged Trump’s agenda at every turn for four years. While not a silver bullet, the Schedule F executive order would have given the president the means to begin ensuring that the government elected by the people is the one that governs. The order would have removed career job protections for an estimated 50,000 federal employees who hold policymaking positions throughout the federal government. It spooked the political establishment so thoroughly that the Biden administration enacted a regulation in a bid to slow down the implementation of such an order should Trump return to office.
Finally drain the swamp
If Trump succeeds in his quest to reclaim the White House by the time all the votes are counted this week, he will finally be able to deliver on the promise he made in his inaugural address. He can once again say definitively that the nation is “transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people.”
Trump will change Washington if he wins the presidential election. In his first term, he was hamstrung by the realities of being a political outsider who had hijacked the Republican Party to lead a revolutionary political movement against the establishment leaders of both parties.
But the failures of his first term in office and his four-year exile from the White House provided him with the necessary tools to clean house and finally drain the swamp.
A Trump victory is about more than the man. It is about delivering a blow to the political system that has governed the nation for decades at the behest of lobbyists and special interests. A four-year term, without the specter of a reelection campaign, will give Trump the latitude to produce lasting change in the political and bureaucratic system, change that will not be easily undone. It is the most compelling reason to cast a vote for him.
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The swamp knows it, too. Reports have already surfaced that career officials throughout the federal government who have deliberately ignored the will of the voters for decades are dreading Trump’s possible return to the White House and are already making lifestyle changes with the expectation that they will soon be out of a job they expected to hold until retirement.
If the United States is once again to be a nation whose government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, then the federal bureaucracy must be fully broken and rebuilt. Only the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office will ensure that that process can begin in earnest and in a manner that is not so easily reversed. A vote for Trump is a vote to drain the swamp and end the American carnage.
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