by Christopher Roach
It looks like Donald Trump is going to win. I always thought he would in a fair fight. But winning the election could prove to be a Pyrrhic victory if Trump does not take very specific steps to wrest control of the federal government from hostile elements in the permanent bureaucracy.
Setting aside who really won in 2020, no one disputes that Trump did win in 2016, but after that victory, he was still not allowed to govern. Instead, he was harried by the coordinated activities of entrenched interests. His naivete about the many backstabbers in the executive branch and within his own party further enhanced their ability to disrupt his first term.
Outright lies from the intelligence community gave birth to the “Russian Collusion” accusation, which permitted the Obama administration to spy directly on Trump’s campaign through secret warrants on key campaign personnel. This lie also gave birth to a distracting and invasive special counsel investigation, which concluded early on that no such collusion took place but dragged on for two years out of spite.
The fifth column extended beyond the intelligence community to ordinary bureaucrats, high-level military officers, and his own cabinet. Though duty-bound to follow his directives, these executive branch officials took it upon themselves to act as “checks and balances” on the president. They collectively forgot that the executive branch finds its sole source of authority in the elected president, from whom lower officials receive whatever authority they hold by delegation.
By the end, the people who were supposed to follow his orders were openly conspiring against him. They vaingloriously called themselves the #resistance, but they had more in common with the late Soviet Union’s KGB than anything else. That is, rather than being champions of democracy, these members of the anti-Trump resistance were simply defenders of the status quo and their various perks and privileges within it.
Taming the Bureaucracy
Trump’s presidency will have little permanent effect if he does not devote himself to the task of reform. The first order of business, as illustrated above, will be to take full charge of the bureaucracy. Loyal people, including many from outside of government, should be identified for key positions. This will be easier than the last time he was president, as there is something of a “bench” among those loyal appointees who acquitted themselves well during his first term.
In keeping with these efforts, Trump should lead the Republican Congress to pass legislation scaling back civil service protection. Theoretically, a professional and nonpartisan civil service has certain benefits. But we do not have such an apparatus now. Instead, we have a highly partisan and not-terribly-competent civil service, which has trouble respecting the right of elected officials to control it.
No government worker making a six-figure income should be beyond the president’s power to fire. Obviously, many regulations and jobs also need to be eliminated, but first, we must take control of what exists.
Immigration Restriction
Along with reform of the executive branch, restricting immigration is of singular importance. In 2016, the battle cry was “Build a Wall,” which is still a great idea. Today, of equal importance, is mass deportation.
There are tens of millions of people here illegally, either completely off the grid or on politically motivated “parole” from the Biden administration. They are beginning to be very noticeable and stress out social services in places where they are concentrated.
This is not something time alone can sort out. The quality, motivations, and sheer numbers of recent immigrants are incapable of being assimilated without massive efforts by native-born Americans. This is all made worse by generous welfare benefits for new arrivals, which encourages a culture of idleness and scamming.
We can absorb some immigrants, just as we have in the past, but we can’t absorb as many as we used to. The education system is now in the hands of anti-American leftists. This means that immigrants and their children are being given anti-assimilation instruction and are being encouraged to cleave to a subculture that is more left-leaning, ignorant, and hostile to America’s traditions than at any previous time.
The current immigrants are also more likely to be alienated from and disruptive to our society. Our nation may have a creed, but its essence can only be found in the American people, which possesses an identity and a culture just like that of any other nation.
Among immigrants, there are degrees of distance from our people’s culture. Certain pre-political habits—the ability to trust and be trusted without blood ties, for example—are critical for thriving in our system and for our system not to be undone by free riders and newcomers.
Historically, England was always the closest match. Its long habits of freedom and self-government were the foundations of our own system. Western Europe in general was next, and then outward from there.
Right now, national unity is breaking down. Perhaps after a few generations of intermarriage and common experience, we can all find a new way in polyglot America. We see some hint of this future with Trump’s oddly multicultural coalition. But this process will not be able to achieve any results if the influx of more than one million immigrants a year continues.
With all of the maudlin tales of Ellis Island and the associated “nation of immigrants” ideology, we have forgotten that one of the reasons the last, mostly European immigration wave assimilated was because of a 40-year period of low immigration beginning in the 1920s. This natural process was augmented by the unifying effects of mass military service during WWII and high rates of interethnic and interfaith marriage.
Even if the new America will be quite different from what exists today—just as post-New Deal America was quite a bit less liberty-oriented than what prevailed before—there are still degrees of disorder, disunity, and decline.
We have to try.
Rebuilding Our Industrial Base
Another important and truly generational challenge is restoring America’s industrial capacity, particularly as it relates to national defense. Two decades of outsourcing and financialization mean that critical defense needs now depend upon supply chains that stretch into the lands of our potential enemies, particularly China. Even as a Trump administration scales back our foreign policy adventurism—an unalloyed good that he mostly stuck to in his first term—rebuilding our industrial and defense capacity should remain a high priority.
Trump’s background as a builder is one of his great strengths. He recognizes and respects the tangible in a way that consultants like Mitt Romney or lifelong politicians like Biden do not. He does not worship an abstract GDP but rather seeks to cultivate enduring monuments and symbols of success and prosperity.
Compared to the country Trump grew up in, the country is weaker and uglier. It does not do as much and does not make as much. Our public spaces are a mess, as is much of our infrastructure. Our character has changed.
Even when we do things, they take forever. It took more than a decade to rebuild the World Trade Center, and the foundations stood empty for years. Tariffs will help, but additional policies should be explored to punish offshoring and encourage the reshoring of factories and investment capital, as well as the employment of Americans to do high-paying manufacturing work.
We will be at the mercy of hostile foreign powers if our industrial apparatus and other critical industries continue to rely on anyone but ourselves.
Prioritizing Excellence
Finally, wokeness, affirmative action, the DEI system, or whatever it is calling itself this week, needs to end. It arose perhaps from good intentions to right the wrongs of Jim Crow and give a leg-up to previously-discriminated-against black Americans, but it has gone on now for 50 years. It was always self-contradictory to combat the effects of discrimination with new, de jure discrimination in favor of the former victim groups.
More important, even for those who found this appeal to restorative justice defense persuasive, the argument has less and less salience over time. No one of working age today has worked in a world without civil rights protection. Indeed, since the early 1970s, different degrees of affirmative action have been extant in nearly every industry and institution.
One reason I expect Trump may actually pursue reform in this area is that affirmative action is unpopular with essentially everyone. His opponent, Kamala Harris, is its living embodiment. She is clearly in over her head, the product of a lifetime of being put in positions she had no business doing. Her psychological brittleness combined with her objective disqualification leads her to lash out at anyone of competence who makes her feel inadequate.
One reason she is failing to launch and faces so much opposition from men, I believe, is that she is a very familiar human type. There is someone like her in every company, and this type of person is notable not for strengthening those around her but for stirring up drama, harming productivity, doing “make work” that cuts into the salaries of the productive, and breaking anything important she has responsibility over.
Whether it is a naval ship sinking off of New Zealand, a biotech company that fakes its lab results, or a police officer who is worthless when the chips are down, the pattern is similar, and it flows from prioritizing diversity and representation above competence and excellence. When bad things happen where affirmative action is at least a plausible contributing factor, there is a failure in almost all cases to examine the systemic effects of letting people with one to two standard deviation deficits in ability do a job because they have the desired sex or race.
The pervasive lying and euphemisms are exhausting. We are told repeatedly that diversity is our strength, even though proportional diversity has only been accomplished through lower standards, which leads to many small failures and inefficiencies accreting throughout society’s interlocking and complex systems. The problems end up metastasizing, as standards are lowered for everyone in order to maintain the fiction of equal competence, extending the rot even to those not formally designated as beneficiaries of the system.
Trump and his friend Elon Musk are about excellence. As goals, excellence and diversity come into frequent conflict. Excellence means finding the best person for the job. This is how we get real achievers like the Tuskegee Airmen, not fake placeholders like Kamala Harris.
Trump needs to be singlemindedly focused on these reforms. Anything less will simply be undone when he leaves office, just as Biden rapidly unwound Trump’s successes on the border.
Trump’s enemies wrap themselves in the flag and claim to be the defenders of democracy, but even now, they are planning preemptively to undo his electoral victory if he succeeds. They have earlier shown they will do everything possible to thwart his ability to govern and, in so doing, to thwart the ability of the American people to be governed in a manner of their choosing.
Thus, preliminary to the agenda proposed above, an important question remains unanswered from Trump’s first term: Are elections allowed to change the course of government?
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel.
