Donald Trump's chief White House adviser Steve Bannon crawled out of his cave Thursday to make a stunning statement:
Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.
“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said.
In some ways, we all knew this quite literally. Education secretary Betsy DeVos is the enemy of public education, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt (not technically Cabinet level) is the enemy of the environment, and Health secretary Tom Price is the enemy of equitable health coverage for all Americans.
But what's equally important is noting where Trump and Bannon are letting critical governmental functions atrophy while they simultaneously pump others full of testosterone.
Our nation's top diplomat, for instance, the one responsible for maintaining international relationships and keeping world peace, has both entirely hobbled the agency and been entirely hobbled himself. Before Rex Tillerson even assumed his role of Secretary of State, a round of firings had purged the agency of seasoned diplomats and the chief keepers of institutional memory. After taking over the post, the bloodbath continued, zapping the agency's nerve center for regional expertise followed by a major reorganization.
But Tillerson's stature as Secretary of State has also been diminished. He's been frozen out of key meetings with world leaders and deprived of his top pick for a No. 2, Elliott Abrams, because Abrams had dared to challenge Trump's competency during the election. Whether Abrams was the best person for the job is beside the point—diplomacy no longer matters in the quickly evolving U.S. government. To Bannon and Trump, the State Department and everything it stands for is just an old-world relic that stands in the way of the new world order they are creating. That world order will be run out of the White House, which doesn't want even a hint of competition.
The most visible change at the State Department is the month-long lack of daily press briefings, a fixture since John Foster Dulles was secretary of state in the 1950s. The televised question-and-answer session is watched closely around the world, and past administrations have pointed proudly to the accountability of having a government spokesman available to domestic and foreign press almost every day without fail.
The fortunes of Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin aren’t quite as clear but he appears to be on a similar trajectory, with the reins being held at the White House. Mnuchin doesn't have a No. 2, 3, or 4, and yet he's hard at work on what Trump has called a "phenomenal" tax plan that we’re all eagerly anticipating in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Mnuchin is busy cleaning up Trump's messes, like when he labeled China the "grand champions" of currency manipulation this week. The same day, Mnuchin assured China that the administration "isn't making any judgments" about its currency yet.
Yet as the White House under-resources certain areas of the federal government and centralizes power, it is beefing up the areas headed by a triad of current and former generals: the bodies in charge of defense, homeland security, and national security.
In stark contrast to Tillerson's wasting away State Department, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly's Homeland Security is set to get an infusion of 15,000 new federal agents to help with border patrol and immigration enforcement. The hiring is easier said than done, but the White House commitment is clearly there and we are already starting to see Trump's more robust police state in action.
Recent ICE raids have netted hundreds of undocumented immigrants (many with no criminal records). And although we had all been bracing for deportation sweeps under Trump, stranger things are beginning to unfold, such as Customs and Border Patrol agents demanding to see the IDs of every passenger exiting a domestic flight Wednesday from San Francisco to JFK. This highly unusual invasion of privacy got more press than federal agents likely anticipated and they subsequently delivered a round of CYA explanations for the next 24 hours.
Trump also recommitted himself Friday to bulking up the military at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
"And, hopefully, we’ll never have to use it, but nobody is going to mess with us. Nobody. It will be one of the greatest military buildups in American history," Trump promised.
Nothing should surprise us here either after Trump bragged on the campaign trail that as president he would "bomb the sh*t out of" ISIS. But it bears repeating that the Pentagon's top civilian post is now occupied by a former Marine general, James Mattis, who retired less than three years ago.
The third major power center—the National Security Council—is also headed by top military brass, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. The NSC clearly matters to the White House. After all, Steve Bannon got himself installed on the council and its “principals committee,” an unprecedented politicization of the body that some former members of the council have roundly criticized. NSC chief is also the position that yielded the first high-profile exit from the Trump White House—that of Michael Flynn.
In his new NSC role, McMaster is moving swiftly to steady an organization that has been reeling ever since Trump set foot in the Oval Office and began his foreign policy by impulse shock-and-awe campaign. What remains to be seen is if McMaster can manage to wrest control of the council from the clutches of Bannon. McMaster has already broken with Trump on the use of “radical Islamic terrorism,” telling the NSC staff that the term isn’t helpful and that engaging in terrorism isn’t consistent with Islam.
To be sure, this is a brief overview of a vast federal bureaucracy but it starts to give us a picture and where the energy lies and where the White House is quite purposely starving the beast to consolidate its own power. And what jumps out is the fact that the generals—Mattis, Kelly, and McMaster—appear to hold positions that will potentially be most empowered to do their jobs.
It also means that they could provide one of very few internal lines of defense against a White House that has already trained its sights on every external check that poses an obvious threat—namely the judiciary and the press.
This could leave liberals in the unlikely position of rooting for military figures to save us from our civilian leaders. It holds pitfalls, of course. Though Mattis and McMaster are seemingly students of history who also know firsthand the costs of war, they will almost certainly bring a more muscular posture to our foreign policy in regard to ISIS, Syria and (perhaps) Russia. Additionally, Sec. Kelly is already failing to impress, promising there would be “no mass deportations” during his Mexico visit this week even as, hours earlier, Trump called his deportation efforts a “military operation.”
Nonetheless, these current and former officers along with the intelligence community may be the only thing standing between us and authoritarian rule. Congressional Republicans and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are already abdicating their oversight responsibilities and, in some cases, even signaling their complicity with the Trump regime.
Now, we can only hope that these men share the read of another retired military officer, four-star admiral and former Navy SEAL William H. McRaven. McRaven, who presided over the planning and execution of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, sounded the alarm bells this week over Trump's demonization of the press.
“We must challenge this statement and this sentiment that the news media is the enemy of the American people,” he told students at the University of Texas' Moody College of Communication. “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”