The second Trump administration is engaged in the first real transfer of power since 1933. What is taking place is an attempt at national transformation, and that is never quiet. “Buckle up, there’s more to come,” I tell friends—not only here but especially those overseas—who express anxiety with what they see as turmoil.
Transfers of power produce winners and especially losers. The losers don’t accept their new status quietly, especially when they’re used to winning. A pliant media amplifies the noise, creating cacophony.
So we are at peak moaning. Go to any gathering inside Washington’s Beltway, and you’ll likely encounter the men and women who used to run the “permanent bureaucracy”—and thus expected to do so permanently—crying in their Chardonnay and spitting spitefully at Elon Musk.
President Donald Trump’s many fans in politics across Europe and Latin America intuit, however, that the rumble they hear means real change might be underway. They are elated because they, too, crave a transformation that will save national identity and end the drive to remake society along woke lines.
But the largest center-right parties—the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, the Tories in the U.K., the Partido Popular in Spain, to cite but three examples—have wanted to continue pretending that for the past few years, what we have been experiencing is politics as usual. They likely fear that what is happening here is but a harbinger of what’s to come to their countries.
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In the U.S., we had been in an age of regime politics for many years, giving us polarizing politics and societal division. As the writer Christopher Caldwell explained in his 2020 breakaway book, “The Age or Entitlement,” we have for a couple of decades engaged in an increasingly raw debate not over normal matters—say, top marginal tax rates—but over how the country was to be constituted.
It was as though we had not just two competing visions, but two competing constitutions. One was hammered out in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, and based on the Declaration’s idea that God had endowed individuals with “unalienable rights.” The other saw identity groups, based on such immutable characteristics as race and sex, as society’s main protagonists.
“Much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something more grave,” Caldwell wrote. “It is the disagreement over which of these two constitutions will prevail.”
Ruling institutions such as USAID, the Smithsonian, public broadcasting, etc., catered to the identity groups and the new constitution.
We were threatened, therefore, by the real possibility of regime change in America. Understanding that meant knowing “what time it is,” a phrase that soon caught on.
What Trump is now attempting is a restoration of the status quo ante with regards to some things (such as the reality that we have two sexes, for example, or the meritocratic ideal), combined with the shattering of some institutions and practices, and a deep redrawing of the two political parties.
That is not a mere change in administration. These have taken place at least every four years, and sometimes eight (though FDR’s lasted a dozen years from 1933 to 1945, precipitating passage in 1951 of the 22nd amendment, limiting presidents to Washington’s two terms in office).
These changes in administrations have not, however, amounted to real transfers of power, though we have called them that. The bureaucracy that FDR enshrined to carry out his increase in government control has either kept the power that it has accrued over time, or has expanded it.
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Even under such conservatives as Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, and Donald Trump in his first term, the bureaucracy that the media has taken to calling the “Fourth Branch of government” (spoiler alert, it’s nowhere to be seen in the 1787 Constitution) successfully fought off all attempts to pare it to size.
Reagan won the Cold War by defeating the Soviet Union, but he did not put a dent on the bureaucracy. In the case of Trump’s first term, it was, in fact, the bureaucracy which, in the person of NSA official Eugene Vindman, provoked Trump’s first impeachment. It was America’s first attempted coup d’etat.
Under liberal administrations such as those of LBJ, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, FDR’s bureaucracy grew by leaps and bounds. FDR created the alphabet soup of agencies and programs—the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the FBI, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and many, many others—to administer his New Deal in the 1930s.
LBJ expanded it with the Great Society, which created the public broadcasters, for example. Carter gave us the Department of Education, and Obama the eponymous Obamacare.
“The way to think about Trump 2.0 is as the New Deal reversed. If FDR began the vast expansion of federal agencies that continued in the 1960s and 1970s, DJT is attempting to turn back the clock: to shrink the federal bureaucracy with a barrage of presidential decrees,” sagely writes the historian Niall Ferguson.
Barrages produce cacophony. But if you despaired about 5,288 to 6,294 “gender-affirming” double mastectomies for girls who could be as young as 12, with diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, with teaching the idiocy that America began in 1619, with viewing all human activity through the “oppressor v oppressed” lens—to the point that you open the borders—then this cacophony is the “orchestral tutti” at the start of a symphony.
