Unmaking the Leviathan Part IV: Who Decides? Trump and the Bureaucratic Backlash

Donald Trump did not invent any of the crises that we see in DC today. He exposed it.

When Trump rejected the rule of unelected bureaucrats and insisted that elections should have consequences, that the duly elected President and other representatives of the American people should decide, should govern, the system declared war against him. Russian collusion, Ukrainian quid pro quo, impeachment, lawfare—all of it was camouflage for the real conflict: who governs and who decides?

Is it the people and their elected president? Or is it the permanent state, the unelected judiciary, the sprawling web of powerful, undelected career civil servants, who as Churchill put it so aptly, are no longer civil and are no longer servants?

Trump’s great crime was not corruption. It was clarity. It was exposing a very corrupt form of government that in no way resembles what the Founders envisioned for this country. It was his rejection of the premise that the Administrative State and Rule of the Bureaucrat were legitimate He essentially declared and said what no one else dared: "I decide. Because the people decided. And because of that, there will be changes in foreign and domestic policy."

For that, he was branded a traitor. He was impeached twice. He was hounded by unrelenting lawfare for years in an attempt to bankrupt and destroy him. But he fought back and won, again.

What the American people need to do now is watch what will unfold over the next almost four years of the second Trump term and see the world through a different pair of glasses. 

The media isn’t really an honest press; they’re corporate propagandists. Their “anonymous” sources are likely powerful bureaucrats who view Trump as an existential threat to their status quo. The Left, and by that I mean the Democrat Party writ large, isn’t about representative democracy at all. When they say “our democracy” it’s really them conflating the Administrative State and its bureaucrats with what Democrats want “democracy” to look like, which in reality has absolutely nothing to do with democracy at all. 

Donald Trump has the moral and political courage to fight this fight: he’s demonstrated it in spades over the last decade. The question is will the Republican Party have the same courage and will the American people see the world and DC for how it actually is and reject the illusions being forced on them? Only time will tell.