In his delirium of omnipotence Donald Trump He has always attributed the failure to achieve the objectives of his first presidency not to the wishful thinking of his electoral promises (for example, the mass deportation of around eleven million people). immigrants irregular and seal the confine southern by means of a 2.000-mile long dividing barrier, charging the cost to Mexico), but at a alleged boycott implemented by the federal administration executives, the so-called deep state an expression, in his opinion, of vested interests and corrupt powers that are in any case contrary to the needs of citizens.
Furthermore, after the conclusion of his first term, The Donald accused the Department of Justice of having lent itself to a conspiracy orchestrated by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, which, through indictments specious and politically motivated, should have prevented him from returning to the White House to complete the work interrupted on January 20, 2021, with the taking of office of his successor.
Sally Yates and the first alleged clash with the deep state
Trump claims to have experienced the resistance of the deep state since his debut as president. On January 27, 2017, just one week after taking office, he issued Executive Order 13769, which suspended the'entry into the United States in the case of citizens of seven Middle Eastern states with a majority MuslimThe measure was contested by some civil rights organizations that accused him of religious discrimination because citizens of those same countries were exempt from the blockade if they professed a faith other than Islam.
However, the acting Attorney General (the US equivalent of the European Justice Minister), sally yates – who had temporarily remained in office since the previous administration of Barack Obama while waiting for the Senate to ratify the nomination of Jeff Sessions to lead the Department of Justice – refused to defend Trump's measure, forcing The Donald – at least in the tycoon's reconstruction – to remove her and replace it with a prosecutor more receptive to the new government's crackdown on Muslim immigration, as promised to voters during the election campaign.
Political appointments and meritocracy
La controversy against a sclerotic administrative apparatus, which would oppose the implementation of the program of a president invested with the popular mandate and interpreter of the will of the nation, has long been the leitmotif of the populist approach to American politics. The first to use this argument was the Democrat Andrew Jackson, the occupant of the White House from 1829 to 1837 and, not for nothing, the predecessor most admired by Trump, who had a portrait hung in the Oval Office on the day of his inauguration.
In the name of the need to rid himself of any obstacles that federal bureaucrats who had entered service before his accession to the presidency might have posed to the implementation of his legislative agenda, Jackson arrogated to himself the power to dismiss them and replace them with officials loyal to him.
This fiduciary model of selection, especially of federal executives, did not only give the president greater security in obtaining the collaboration of the administrative executives, but also lent itself to exchange vote. Political loyalty, in fact, was rewarded with federal employment.
This criticality emerged in all its evidence in 1881, when a supporter of Republican President James A. Garfield, disappointed at not having been rewarded with the office to which he aspired, took revenge by mortally wounding him.
In order to further reduce the scope of vote-buying, starting with the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, approved after a controversial legislative process in the wake of the emotional aftermath of Garfield's assassination, the assignment of an increasing number of administrative offices has been removed from the arbitrary decisions of the president and from party affiliation, and has been subjected to the outcome of public competitions with comparative evaluations of the various candidates for a federal job.
This transformation was strengthened during the twentieth century and culminated with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Today all hiring in the federal administration is based on meritocratic criteria, with the exception of a few government positions directly related to policy making aspects.
These exemptions include the heads of departments and undersecretaries, heads of federal agencies and their closest associates, and some diplomatic personnel, primarily ambassadors. However, all such appointments, except those of the president's advisers, must be ratified by a majority of the Senate.
Back to the past
Trump has always been against the meritocratic system in the allocation of tasks within the federal administration. In his opinion, this principle immense would offer adequate guarantees of loyalty against the holder of executive power and would even interfere with the loyalty of the bureaucracy towards the president as it would allow the retention in service of officials with a different political orientation and, therefore, little inclined to implement the decisions of the White House.
Thus, at the end of his presidency, in October 2020, he issued a decree to create a new category of senior federal employees, called schedule F, whose members could have been dismissed even in the absence of a just cause, that is, they could have been removed for exclusively political reasons.
The intention was to make a grand return to the Jacksonian past of the subjection of the federal bureaucracy to wishes of the president. Although some had estimated their number at at least 50.000, it is not possible to know exactly how many senior officials would actually be transferred in this division because, before the relocation took shape, Trump lost the election and Biden revoked the measure, restoring the previous certainty of continuity of employment for all federal personnel.
The plan, however, was not abandoned. It was done by the Project 2025, a program put forward in 2022 by the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, as part of a broader proposal to redefine the relationship between institutions in order to strengthen the prerogatives of the president, who should be given the full and absolute control of the entire executive branch of the federal state.
This concentration of power in the hands of the tenant of the White House would also entail the right to carry out a replacement of all managers. However, according to some anonymous members of Trump's entourage, such a drastic turnover would not be necessary since a relatively small number of dismissals would be enough as a more than persuasive signal to induce the rest of the officials to adapt to the tycoon's political will so as not to risk being fired too. Although The Donald distanced himself from Project 2025 during the electoral campaign so as not to alarm some voters, it was to these exemplary dismissals that Trump was implicitly referring to when he stated that, once he was installed in the Oval Office for the second time, he would behave like a dictator, but only for one day.
A team of yes-men and yes-women
While waiting to implement this significant change in the management of the federal bureaucracy, Trump has set up a government team that does not interfere with his political agenda, so as to prevent what happened during his first term. His previous presidency, in fact, was characterized by frequent and repeated changes in the cabinet, caused by disagreements between The Donald and the members of his government, contrasts accentuated by the tycoon's intolerance for anyone who contradicts him or expresses an opinion different from his.
For example, in just four years, Trump had two secretaries of state, two defense officials and well four national security advisors. Some officials remained in office for very short periods of time. The record in this field belongs to Anthony Scaramucci, who served as White House communications director for just 10 days, from July 21 to 31, 2017, before being removed.
The government that will be established next January will be, instead, a predominantlyyes-men and yes-women, that is, composed largely of mere executors rather than collaborators. In their choice, in fact, unconditional adherence to Trumpism was privileged over competence and experience.
A paradigmatic example is represented by Brooke Rollins, nominated as Secretary of the Department of Agriculture. She is a lawyer, whose knowledge of agricultural issues is yet to be demonstrated, but she has under her belt the presidency of the America First Policy Institute, another conservative think tank, founded in 2021, immediately after the end of Trump's first term, as a sort of shadow government, full of former officials of the outgoing administration, to prepare for The Donald's great return to the White House.
Another representative of the America First Policy Institute is Linda McMahon. It is said that as a girl she wanted to be a teacher. Then she evidently changed her mind because what is certain is a past as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, a company for the promotion of wrestling, as a financier of Trump's electoral campaign with 7 million dollars in 2016 and as head of the federal agency for small businesses during his first presidency. Now The Donald has promoted her to head the Department of Education.
Trump also re-proposed the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the White House office that deals with the federal budget, Russell Vought, who had already held the position between 2019 and 2021, one of the creators of Project 2025.
In religious field It is said that converts are more fanatical than those born into the faith. The tycoon seems to have applied this saying to politics. Thus he chose as vice president JD Vance, who before embracing Trumpism had declared that he feared that The Donald could become the "Hitler of America", and as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had called him “absolutely unprepared” for the presidency and a “con artist” in the 2016 Republican primaries, but ended up supporting him against Hillary Clinton.
Trump's Avengers
Other members of the incoming Trump administration seem cut out for the role of avengers on behalf of the tycoon in the battle waged against the deep state. Pam Bondi, designated as attorney general, at the time of the federal indictments of The Donald for the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021 and for the top secret documents taken to the Mar-a-Lago mansion – both recently dropped thanks to his re-election to the presidency – had repeatedly declared that the investigating magistrates should also be indicted.
She will have the opportunity to do so when she takes office at the top of the Department of Justice. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump has chosen as director of National Intelligence, will find herself in a similar position, that is, to coordinate the very secret services that had flagged her as a possible propagandist for a foreign power, Russia, for her open support for Vladimir Putin.
Operational Advisors
In addition to appointing the heads of the departments, Trump is appointing numerous advisers. Some of them will fill long-existing roles in the organizational chart of the federal administration such as Michael Waltz for Homeland Security, Alex Wong his deputy, Bill McGinley for the White House Counsel, Sebastian Gorka for counterterrorism.
Others will take on newly created roles. Our thoughts first turn to the duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will head the Department of Government Efficiency, not a real department, but an advisory body. To them we must add Tom Homan, who has been assigned the role of “border and immigration czar.”
The use of informal advisors is a consolidated practice in the history of the White House. The first to make use of it was, once again, Andrew Jackson who, as his adversaries reproached him, had set up a kitchen cabinet, that is, an unofficial executive that met in the kitchen, outside the designated institutional offices.
However, the members of this body had no executive functions. The same can be said of Edward M. House, whom the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, president from 1913 to 1921, made use of for a long time, both in domestic politics and in international affairs, without him holding any official office until his appointment as one of the five US commissioners at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 at the end of the First World War.
Another Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, relied on a Black cabinet, a group of representatives of the African-American community, also without any formality, with whom he discussed the racial issue.
The case of Trump's advisers, however, is shaping up to be different from past experiences. Musk, Ramaswamy and Homan, in fact, will end up carrying out operational functions: the first two to make budget cuts of the order of 2.000 billion dollars which, compared to an overall budget of 6.750, will also mean contracting the much-despised bureaucratic apparatus; the third to strengthen controls at the southern border and above all for the mass deportation of the approximately eleven million illegal immigrants that Trump, during the election campaign, reiterated he wanted to expel.
Musk has already begun work to reduce staff. Through X (formerly Twitter) he has pilloried some officials, until now often unknown to the general public, engaged in the fight against climate change, inducing some of them to resign. Presidential advisors are not subject to Senate ratification.
The Donald has just reiterated this in response to complaints from Texas Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who would like to submit Homan to Senate confirmation. Moreover, during his first administration, in November 2017, the tycoon had designated Homan to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for border control and immigration.
However, Hogan had resigned from the post in February, when he realized that there were no votes in the Senate to confirm him despite the Republican Party being in the majority. Today it is as if Trump were organizing a sort of parallel government. For example, Hogan's completely unofficial role will overlap with the formal and institutionally defined responsibilities of the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, with the substantial difference that the latter's actions will be subject to the scrutiny of the Senate, unlike those of the "border and immigration czar".
The Future of Trusk
Talking about Musk – the richest man on the planet and the generous sponsor of Trump's election campaign as well as the one who reconfigured X to make it the megaphone of The Donald's propaganda – some speak of a shadow president, if not even the establishment of a diarchy in the White House, The so-called trunk, attributing to the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and xIA an influence far beyond that of a mere consultant on government efficiency.
In reality, It doesn't seem like Trump is willing to give in to Musk's pressure and conditioning.
The Donald made little effort to support Musk’s candidate for Republican Senate leader, Rick Scott of Florida, only to lose to John Thune of South Dakota. He also demoted Howard Lutnick, Musk’s favorite to be secretary of the Treasury Department, from his position as Commerce Secretary, to which Musk instead appointed Scott Bessent.
In other words, Trump has already made it clear who's in charge at the White House. Musk has been warned and bettors in Washington have started taking bets on how long the alleged Trusk will last, that is, how long it will be before The Donald throw out the windows his certainly cumbersome financier.
On the other hand, Musk has much more to lose than to gain by competing with Trump for the title of the personality with the most hypertrophic ego. According to estimates by the online magazine Mediapart, last year alone his companies signed contracts worth more than three billion dollars with federal agencies and, according to the weekly The Economist, 10% of his personal fortune derives from business relationships with the government in Washington. If the tycoon were to show him the door, Musk's billion-dollar contracts would also be at risk.
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Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include La “indispensable nation”. History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020) US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022) e The black soul of the United States. African Americans and the difficult path towards equality, 1619-2023 (2023).
Books:
Stefano Luconi, The race for the 2024 White House. The Election of the President of the United States from the Primaries to Beyond the Vote of November 5, goWare, 2023, pp. 162, 14,25€ paperback edition, 6,99€ Kindle edition
Stefano Luconi, US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022, goWare, 2022, pp. 182, €12,35 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
