Despite the scale of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, he is expected to face a crippled yet hostile opposition, combative media, and the ‘deep state.’
Chicago: In his gripping spy novel Predators and Prey, author Abhinav Agarwal describes “Lutyens Delhi,” or “Delhi Durbar,” as an eternal whorehouse that, over time, has developed an impervious and unaccountable ruling class of bureaucrats. “Kings have sat on the throne and reigned but rarely ruled… Prime Ministers have come, and Prime Ministers have moved on. On the other hand, sir ji, we have been the only constant in this land for a thousand years,” declares one of the novel’s characters.
In the United States of America, that same impervious and impregnable class is variously known as “the Beltway,” “the Deep State,” or “the Swamp.”
When Donald J. Trump came down the escalator in the Fifth Avenue Trump Tower in New York in 2015 and announced his bid for the White House, he made an ambitious promise of draining “the swamp.” This promise galvanized the ordinary working-class Americans who were sick of the virtue-signalling elites of the media and academia and the unfettered power grab by the administrative state. Mr Trump, however, failed miserably in his agenda of draining “the swamp” in his first stint at the helm of the White House.
With the pesky Russiagate hoax, two impeachments, and constant attacks by a hostile media, Mr Trump stood no chance in delivering effective governance, let alone draining the swamp. In addition, Mr Trump’s government was also sabotaged by internal bickerings and feuds on the one hand and his administration’s relationship with the bureaucracy, including the military brass, on the other. Mr Trump’s presidency became defined by constant quibbles over who could access the President’s ears, multiple firings, resignations, and cabinet shifts. His conflicts with his national security advisor, John Bolton, are well known. We also became nauseatingly familiar with James Comey, the Steele dossier, the Mueller investigation, and the “China virus.”
Mr Trump also lost out to the military, which, in theory, is expected to follow the directives of its civilian leadership. Military officials thwarted Mr Trump’s desire to withdraw from Syria. They misled Mr Trump, the Commander-in-Chief, about the number of troops deployed in Syria and convinced the President not to withdraw American troops from there. The actual number of troops in Syria was a lot more than the 200 Mr Trump had agreed to leave behind. Some officials put the exact number as high as 900. Trump’s top military brass also held a “top-secret“ meeting to block President Trump’s nuclear access and told staff to disobey the Commander-in-Chief.
Mr Trump’s first stint in the White House was known for an economic boom and low unemployment, including among blacks and minorities. He did not start a single international war and was the only US President to achieve that feat in decades. Yet, there are reasons to believe that in the end, the censoring of President (then candidate) Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden’s laptop story by the US media and Big Tech may have sealed the fate of Mr Trump’s 2020 re-election bid. Top 51 US intelligence community members signed a letter falsely claiming that the news about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian misinformation.
In the past four years out of the White House, Mr Trump was demonized and called fascist, Nazi, misogynist, criminal, etc. He was unfairly subjected to extremely politicized lawfare by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice. People hatched assassination schemes against Mr Trum, and he even got shot once.
Despite all odds, Mr Trump handsomely won the 2024 presidential election. In doing so, he became only the second President to have served two non-consecutive terms in office. Grover Cleveland—who won the 1884 election, lost the 1888 election and then won the 1892 election—was the first. Unlike his eventual Democratic presidential rivals—yes, Mr Trump had to face two Democrat presidential candidates—Mr Trump beat every primary challenger within his party with brutal margins. He also gained control of the Republican National Committee, the primary committee of the GOP, with a significant war chest.
Despite the scale of Mr Trump’s 2024 victory, he is expected to face a crippled yet hostile opposition, combative media, and the “deep state.” The election result had a clear message from the lower-income and non-college degree adult voters who switched their voting preferences in large numbers for Mr Trump to put him over the top. These voters prefer hard work over doles, meritocracy over affirmative action, equality over equity, and independence over government overreach.
Since the announcement of election results, though we were still counting votes in California at the time of writing for these pages, Mr Trump has made a series of nominations to fill his cabinet, including a Department of Government Efficiency with entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as its head. This Department intends to cut red tape and government corruption. The Department is expected to make recommendations to shrink federal bureaucracy and cut federal spending by $2 trillion. The nominations of Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Peter Hegseth, Jay Bhattacharya, RFK Jr., Marty Makary, etc., indicate the resolve to revamp the functioning of the government and reform the bureaucracy to make it more transparent.
But it is much easier to talk about reforming the government than actually doing it. Some of Mr Trump’s nominees have faced intense scrutiny in the media, the opposition, and some of it from with the GOP itself. Much of it is justified. However, the irony of treating a conservative and a liberal in the media with different yardsticks is not lost on anyone.
One criticism of Mr Trump’s nominations has been about how he allegedly politicized and weaponized the government against political rivals. However, the current administration has already achieved this goal, reflected in numerous frivolous cases against Mr Trump himself.
Mr Trump is also accused of rewarding loyalty and servility in his political appointments. However, it would be unfair to claim that such expectations are uniquely Trumpian. The “bureaucratic betrayal of the American people is everywhere in our time, whether undermining any conservative president’s policy goals or deploying the FBI against the last one,” writes Daniel Henniger, a Wall Street Journal columnist. “If the obsequious succeed in corralling Washington, few will complain.”
The underlying assumption in a democracy is that elections have consequences. However, our experiences tell us that bureaucracies change extremely slowly, if they change at all. Bureaucracy is now part of everyday life. The next four years will pass into history like any other. Left behind, though, will be a permanent swamp in which many Americans today have no trust. These swamps are challenging for the Trumps of the world to control. It may not be far-fetched to conclude that this swamp is uncontrollable and inviolable. However, the Meleian (Argentina President Havier Melei) experiment gives us some hope. We shall see.
* Avatans Kumar is a Chicago-based award-winning columnist.