First, Destroy the Federal Workforce — Then Rule Like an Autocrat

The bureaucracy is one of the last things standing in Donald Trump’s way

by ANDREW DOBBS

President-elect Donald Trump’s greatest advantage is the fact that he is facing a public and a media that have no framework for understanding him. American politics and journalism long ago suppressed and expelled the people who were equipped to understand exactly what the fuck is going on right now.

Instead we’ve been left with a mushy mass of Meryl-Streep-self-righteous-lecturing-liberalism that spent a few days after the election wagging its finger about the danger of “normalizing” Trump, but which has since done just that.

More or less all of their organized responses so far have been what we would have seen if Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio had won instead. There might be a difference in the magnitude of their opposition, but no difference of kind or character.

The upshot is that Trump’s flurry of unprecedented and disorienting activity isn’t being assimilated and understood in a coherent way, and the nature of the threat he poses — not as a “Muscovite Candidate,” but as an honest-to-god dictator — is frankly incomprehensible in their existing framework.

Case in point — Trump and congressional Republicans have effectively ended the federal civil service in the last week or two, and along with erosions of constitutional authority enacted by Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and their immediate predecessors, Trump will very likely have near-autocratic powers almost immediately after he is sworn in next week.

Liberal analysts haven’t wrapped theirs heads around this because it runs entirely contrary to their political norms and expectations. Liberalism’s time for explaining things has reached an end. Trump’s election is both a cause and symptom of this death of liberalism, and all liberal institutions — including the concept of civil service — are dead and dying too.

Four specific actions — among others — have done the most to signal Trump’s shift. First we have the questionnaires the Trump transition team sent to the U.S. Department of Energy about individuals working on climate change and to the U.S. State Department about who was working on gender equality issues.

Trump is a climate change denier and a misogynist, and the clear implication of the questionnaires is that he intends to eliminate these positions.

Next came the announcement by the Trump team that all Obama-appointed political ambassadors would be terminated on Jan. 20, 2017, no exceptions, regardless of circumstance. These positions are both the most political and the least in some ways — these aren’t career diplomats, but rather the chief financiers of Obama’s campaigns who chose a diplomatic post as their post-election goody bag.

At the same time, they direct official business in the courts of the United States’ closest and oldest allies, making extended vacancies in these posts problematic. Trump has broken with tradition and good sense in issuing a formal “tough shit” to these appointees and the embassies in which they serve.

Third came Trump’s war of words against the CIA, his appointment as national security advisor of a figure that the CIA despised and ran out of town and his refusal to receive regular briefings from the intelligence agencies. The so-called “deep state” is the element of the federal bureaucracy most immune to political change, and Trump is taking it on. If Trump can push around the CIA, what hope does the EPA have?

Finally, in the aftermath of public outrage over the GOP’s attempted evisceration of the Congressional Ethics Office, lawmakers sneaked in a return of the so-called Holman Rule, a 19th-century parliamentary procedure that allows any member of Congress to cut any particular federal position’s salary to $1.

In instances when it would be politically sensitive to vote to cancel a program or revoke its authorization in law — say, a federal program promoting women’s rights abroad — it can be much easier to vote for an obscure amendment to technically fund the program but only pay the workers enacting it $1 a year. It’s a chickenshit way of wielding a hatchet against public servants.

Each of these stories has been covered by the press, but to date reporters don’t seem to have seen the clear connection between them all. The ambassador story shows that Trump and his incoming regime view all government posts as political, and that they value their politics over any priorities of policymaking.

The pushback against the CIA shows that there are no limits to where they will assert their will. The questionnaires show that they are searching deep within the federal bureaucracy for their political targets. And the Holman Rule change gives them the weapon with which to strike those targets.

The entire federal bureaucracy will fall in line with Trump’s whims — or it’ll end up on the list of one-buck chumps.