In the wake of the numerous attempts to sabotage President Donald Trump’s agenda in recent weeks from all manner of actors, I write about the challenges of draining the swamp, and what can and must be done to achieve it in a new piece at Conservative Review.
Here’s a taste:
Consider what President Trump is up against: Intense jockeying for positioning at the highest levels of the bureaucracy among individuals seeking to accumulate power to advance their own agendas; holdovers from prior administrations who hate the president’s guts; bureaucrats who have made a decent living for themselves by and are ideologically committed to the state-expanding status quo; rogue judges acting on the basis of politics rather than the law; congressmen on the Left and Right who for their own reasons — primarily getting re-elected and perpetuating their power — wish to see the swamp continue to fester.
These individuals see a president infringing upon their turf, upending their plans, and threatening the power they have amassed over the course of their careers.
Juxtapose this reality with the goings-on of the president’s first few weeks in office: Stories of in-fighting among those at the highest levels of the bureaucracy — replete with a mass of leaks on all manner of sensitive issues; plants from the Obama administration sabotaging the president’s policies; unfriendly bureaucrats openly seeking to undermine the president via social media; litigation over executive orders that disregards the letter and spirit of the law; congressional backsliding on promised agenda items; and, of course, a media all-too-willing to publicize every last story it can spin as damaging in order to delegitimize and discredit the president. These efforts are all geared towards deterring the swamp draining.
President Trump has succeeded throughout his career in cutthroat businesses. To do so in politics will require a deep understanding of the manifold forces arrayed against him, and a strategy to engage them in no holds barred political warfare in all dimensions.
He will have to prioritize his policies, devise strategies to push them through replete with numerous contingency plans given overwhelming resistance, while at every turn protecting against people working to undermine him on the inside and outside.
To counter this will require a flurry of actions in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as a cohesive messaging plan geared towards both a hostile media and the general public.
He will have to avail himself of all possible means to aggressively strike at the administrative state, coax Congress to trade his big agenda items for its favored policies, and constrain a judicial branch corrupted by far too many progressive justices, while appointing as many rock-ribbed constitutionalists as he can to the federal bench. He will have to thwart a media that will seek to portray him as an authoritarian seeking to harm countless Americans at every turn, while making a clear, concise, and direct pitch to the public as to why his policies are intended to return power to them.
He will be attacked at every turn because such actions will threaten the livelihood of those whose whole careers have been dedicated to accruing power in politics.
If anyone could take the slings and arrows associated with these policies, it is President Trump, who never apologizes and always counterpunches.
He must pair his mettle with the personnel and the plan to achieve his agenda.
Read the whole thing at Conservative Review.
