Category: Democracy

Salon – Opinion

The Supreme Court looks set to make Steve Bannon’s dream come true

Conor Lynch – January 20, 2024

Not long after Donald Trump was sworn in as president back in 2017, his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, made an incendiary statement vowing that the new administration would fight an unending battle for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” raising fears that the new president would carry out a blitzkrieg assault on the federal bureaucracy. While the former TV host likely had no inkling of what his more ideological strategist meant by the “administrative state,” it would not be long before Trump himself would embrace similar rhetoric aimed at what he derisively coined the “deep state.” Unlike his advisor (and many libertarian-leaning Republicans), Trump’s hostility towards the federal government stems less from any ideological opposition to “big government” than from his own personal resentment and paranoia. With his agenda stalled early on his term, the president came to blame all of his woes on this supposedly omnipotent deep state, which denoted a quasi-invisible and demonic cabal of entrenched bureaucrats allegedly sabotaging his presidency. 

Fortunately for those who believe in a strong and independent federal bureaucracy, the Trump administration largely failed to follow through on these early threats. Within six months of his inflammatory remark, Bannon was out of a job in the White House, while the embattled president had more pressing concerns than attempting to dismantle the federal bureaucracy. By the time he left office, Trump had done irreparable damage to American democracy and its institutions, but the so-called “administrative state” — an ideological shorthand for the numerous departments and independent agencies inside the federal government, from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — remained standing, if not mostly unscathed.

Still, more than three years after Trump left the White House, the so-called administrative state is under assault like never before — in large part due to the enduring legacy of the Trump administration. This was evident this week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that challenged a forty-year-old case that had established judicial deference to federal agencies like the EPA in their implementation of “ambiguous statutes.” In other words, the philosophy that it is best for judges who know little about environmental standards or the derivatives market or drug development to defer to the “reasonable interpretation” of statutes by experts in their respective agencies. If this challenge to what is known as the Chevron Doctrine is successful, it would open up a floodgate of potential legal challenges to regulations across the federal government, crippling the ability of agencies like the SEC or the EPA to carry out their missions. Not surprisingly, it currently looks like at least two of the three Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump will help to repeal this doctrine and open up the anti-regulatory floodgates. It’s Steve Bannon’s dream come true.

Trump’s toxic legacy is not only felt in the judiciary. Indeed, it is clear from the Republican primaries that the entire GOP is now fully devoted to the once-fringe cause of dismantling the administrative state. Recall Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vow to “start slitting throats on day one.” 

While Trump largely failed to carry out his own threats against the “deep state” as president, his final year in office offered a dress rehearsal for what to expect if he — or any Republican — returns to the White House next year. Over the course of his term, Trump’s obsession with the “deep state” intensified, as did his Nixonian quest to root out his enemies. Shortly after his first impeachment trial, the president tapped loyalists to carry out a purge of any officials who displayed even the slightest hint of dissent. Spearheading the effort was Trump’s former body man, 29-year old Johnny McEntee, who the president appointed to run the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Overseeing the hiring and vetting of the roughly 4,000 political appointments in the executive branch, McEntee quickly pushed out officials deemed disloyal and earned the moniker of Trump’s “loyalty cop.” 

This purge was only a preview of what the administration had planned for his second term. Weeks before the 2020 election, the president signed an executive order known as “Schedule F,” which would have stripped civil service protections from tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees had it been implemented. Though promoted as a measure to enforce accountability, Schedule F was an overt attempt to politicize the bureaucracy. It would have empowered the president to easily purge the civil service of any senior or mid-level officials deemed politically suspect or insufficiently loyal. 

Today Schedule F has more or less become doctrine on the right. Donald Trump’s rise thus ushered in a more radical and dangerous phase in the conservative movement’s decades-long struggle against the federal government. All the major Republican presidential candidates have promised to reinstate some version of the executive order, which President Biden rescinded upon entering office. Indeed, most candidates have even tried to outdo Trump in both their policies and rhetoric. \ The supposed “moderate” in the race, former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador under Trump, Nikki Haley, has put forward an even more radical plan than Schedule F that would not just strip civil service protections but introduce five-year term limits for all positions in the federal workforce — from air traffic controllers and public health inspectors to park rangers and Social Security administrators. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell notes, this would effectively “destroy the basic machinery of government” — which might just be the point.

Across the board, then, Republicans have embraced the Trumpian vow to “destroy the deep state.” They have also adopted the former president’s conspiratorial rhetoric about the federal bureaucracy and civil service, which is now depicted as a national fifth column. The traditional Reaganite critiques of big government waste, inefficiency and onerous regulations have been increasingly supplanted by radical fulminations against the “deep state” that sound more like The Turner Diaries than The Road to Serfdom. 

This is evident throughout Mandate for Leadership, the 920-page manifesto published earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation-led 2025 Presidential Transition Project (or Project 2025), which aims to recruit and vet up to 20,000 potential staffers for a future Republican administration after the anticipated purge. Writing in the book’s introduction, project director Paul Dans, who served in Trump’s Office of Personnel Management during his final year, breathlessly proclaims that the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” giving credence to a notorious conspiracy theory that has long floated around white supremacist circles. With the federal government ostensibly captured by “cultural Marxists” and “globalists,” Dans frantically proclaims that it has been “weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”

This kind of siege mentality has become the official posture of the right since the rise of Trump. “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” proclaimed the Republican frontrunner last March at his first campaign rally, which he symbolically held in the city of Waco, Texas, just seventeen miles from where the FBI got into a deadly standoff with the apocalyptic Branch Davidians cult almost three decades before. Besides inspiring the far-right terrorist Timothy McVeigh in his bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, the “Waco siege” also galvanized various anti-government militia movements that would ultimately contribute to the storming of the capital more than a quarter century later. The symbolism of holding his opening rally in Waco was not lost on Trump’s allies. “We’re the Trump Davidians,” Bannon quipped to ABC News journalist Jonathan Karl when asked why the Trump campaign would choose Waco for its opening act. The rhetoric of both Trump and his “Davidians” leaves little room for doubt about their intentions if he wins in November. 

For the millions of MAGA zealots, Trump’s election is less about achieving specific ideological aims than about satisfying their thirst for revenge. On the other hand, the authors of Project 2025’s manifesto have more concrete ideological goals that happen to align with Trump’s revenge fantasy. In his forward to Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts alludes to the unifying goal when he states that the “top priority” for the next Republican president must be to “dismantle” the “administrative state.” Or as Dans puts it, the goal is to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” 

Republicans have been harboring fantasies about gutting the federal government since the Reagan era. But what distinguishes today’s right from the past is its greater willingness to employ explicitly authoritarian means to achieve their ends. Indeed, a growing number of conservatives now appear convinced that the next Republican president must be granted something close to dictatorial power if their movement is to stand a chance against the “cultural Marxists” who allegedly control the state. 

To legitimize an autocratic power grab by Trump or any other Republican president, many conservatives will no doubt employ the dubious legal theory of the “unitary executive,” which was first popularized during the George W. Bush administration to justify the president’s illegal policies in the war on terror. The unitary executive theory asserts that the president is effectively above the law and has absolute control over all departments and agencies in the federal government (including independent and quasi-legislative agencies like the EPA or the NLRB). This controversial interpretation of Article II grants the president something close to dictatorial power, giving him or her total control over the hiring and firing of two million federal employees and “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding,” as one of the theories leading proponents, Bill Barr, wrote in a memo shortly before Trump appointed him attorney general.

While most conservatives continue to cloak their vision of a strongman executive in contentious legal theories, a growing contingent on the right has more or less abandoned such pretenses. Since Trump’s defeat, the idea of a so-called “Red Caesar” coming to rescue the beleaguered republic has caught on in more reactionary milieus. “Red Caesar” was first coined by conservative author and former national security official in the Trump administration, Michael Anton, who in a 2020 book predicted that a “red America that feels sufficiently imperiled by the leftist coalition might well look to unify behind one man with authority.” For Anton, the coming of Caesarism — defined as “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” — appears almost historically determined. “Just as tyrannies give way to aristocracies and republics on the upswing, so do democracies collapse into decadence, anarchy, and back to tyranny on the downswing,” he writes. In Anton’s telling, the cyclical historical forces at work in America today are no different than those in ancient Rome, where Caesar and his successors restored order and — for a time — greatness to a decadent republic. “When and where Caesarism comes, it arises only because liberty is already gone,” writes Anton, offering a preemptive justification of a Trumpian assault on the country’s exhausted democratic institutions. 

With the now widespread acceptance among conservatives that the federal government and other major institutions have been captured by “cultural Marxists,” “globalists,” and “wokeists,” Republicans are now pre-programmed to accept more authoritarian leadership. This is especially the case among a younger coterie of Republicans who have come to prominence in the post-Trump era. Unlike some of their older Republican colleagues, these young Trumpians are more open to employing post-Constitutional or “extra-Constitutional” means to achieve their reactionary goals. 

Consider Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, a Trump supporter who echoed Anton’s analysis of contemporary America on a far-right podcast in late 2021, noting that “we don’t have a real constitutional republic anymore” but rather an unaccountable “administrative state.” With America currently in its “late republican period,” Vance suggested that resisting woke tyranny will require Republicans to get “pretty wild” and go in “directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” While sympathetic to the cause of “deconstructing” the administrative state, Vance offered a more Caesarist alternative: “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left…and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.” If Trump is wins this fall Vance suggested that he immediately fire “every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “civil servant in the administrative state” and replace them with “our people.” 

Ultimately, the point of the planned purge is not to replace every civil servant who is forced out but to derail the federal government before stripping it down and selling it for parts, like private equity vultures fresh after a hostile takeover. In the words of the authors at Project 2025, the “only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible…” The Trumpian innovation comes in the effort to weaponize the agencies and departments that remain after the right-wing assault on regulatory agencies like the EPA and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Republican frontrunner has already promised to weaponize the justice department and is reportedly mulling over deploying troops against domestic protests on day one. Trump would return to Washington with more experience and an entire team of “loyalty cops” working to enforce fealty across the executive branch. And as recent hearings at the Supreme Court have shown, he would also return with increasingly politicized courts that are sympathetic to both his assault on the “administrative state” as well as his quest for more “unitary power” over the executive branch. 

The growing belief in the necessity of “authoritarian one-man rule” on the right stems from the fact that their ideological project is broadly unpopular with the American people. The majority of Americans do not support dismantling environmental protections or criminalizing abortion or eliminating child labor laws or registering teachers and librarians as sex offenders for espousing so-called “transgender ideology.” Neither do they support the modern right’s crusade to “dismantle” or “deconstruct” the “administrative state.” 

While it is true that public trust in the government is currently close to an all-time low, conservative critics tend to greatly exaggerate how much of this stems from disapproval for career civil servants and government agencies. In reality, low ratings for the “federal government” tend to reflect the population’s disdain for Congress and national politicians from both parties. Conversely, most individual departments and federal agencies receive favorable ratings from Americans, whether it’s the National Park Service (+74%), the U.S. Postal Service (+57%), NASA (+65%), the Social Security Administration (+33%), the EPA (+24%), or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, +25%). The same is generally true for federal employees. A 2022 survey by the Partnership for Public Service found that while only 30 percent of people view members of Congress favorably, more than 6-in-10 have a favorable view of civil servants. 

Dismantling the “administrative state,” then, is not a goal that most Americans or even most Republican voters would knowingly support. For Trump, destroying the nebulous “deep state” is part of a personal crusade. In all likelihood, he would be satisfied if he could simply weaponize the justice and defense departments to go after his enemies. But for the ideologues who have hitched themselves to his star, the mission is far more ambitious. In the event of a Trump victory in 2024, one can expect the worst of both worlds: an assault on essential agencies that would recall the worst neoliberal policies of the Reagan years, and the weaponization of those “deep state” agencies that would recall the worst abuses of the Nixon and Bush years.