Government's Evil Twin

You knew I was going to have to use this image.

I have a new piece up at The UnPopulist, looking at Donald Trump’s disastrous selections for top offices.

I promised to expand my comments from a few days ago, and boy, did I ever. I initially described this as Trump’s “anti-government,” as in a negation of each of government’s functions. But Shikha Dalmia suggested that being “anti-government,” in the sense of being for small government, can have a positive connotation. So I came up with a better way of putting it: Trump is creating government’s “evil twin”—all the same powers, but he’s not even pretending to use them for good.

If Trump gets his way, we will have a defender of war criminals as Secretary of Defense, a Russian lackey as Director of National Intelligence, a criminal running the Department of Justice, and a crank promoter of quack remedies in charge of Health and Human Services.

This is a negation of government, an act of nihilism directed at the central function of each of our government’s agencies.

I go over the facts about the nominees relatively briefly so I can go on to other points, but see a more thorough run-down by Cathy Young at Persuasion.

As a guy who is generally in favor of wrecking regulatory agencies, I guess I can understand the tension in wanting to tear down an overly large government—yet not wanting to see it done this way. It’s not just that Trump has reserved his worst nominees for the things I regard as legitimate and necessary functions of government—defense, intelligence, law-enforcement, even disease control. It’s that he doesn’t seem to be trying to reduce the power of government, but rather to abuse it in the way he prefers.

There is also a point to preserving the orderly structure of government. This is something I have grown to appreciate more in recent years by way of the Joni Mitchell Effect: You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Here is how I put it.

It is a mistake to think that authoritarian leaders want to strengthen government. To the contrary, they want to weaken government’s institutions. They want an unstructured government, one without rules and procedures, so as to leave fewer impediments to their whims. That is the point of Trump’s anti-government: to provide more scope for the exercise of arbitrary and capricious power.

But the real heart of this piece, the thing we’re seeing with literary clarity right now, as if it were written in a particularly incisive novel, is the nature of power-lust.

How do you experience the gratification of power, if you are afflicted with the neurotic need to do so? How do you experience it emotionally? Precisely by making demands that are arbitrary and unreasonable. If you order people to do something that they want to do, something that is reasonable and consistent with their goals, then you are not really exercising power. They are only acting in accordance with their own judgment and interests. Real power, raw power, is demonstrated by making people do something they hate, something they think is wrong and destructive, just because you told them to do it. The gratification of power is experienced through humiliation.

As I’m pulling out that excerpt, this photo came across my social media feed: RFK, Jr., who has railed against “unhealthy” foods, forced to sit at a table and smile while he eats a greasy MacDonald’s burger, fries, and a Coke brimming with high-fructose corn syrup, because this is Donald Trump’s favorite food.

No, this is not like something from a novel. No fiction writer could get away with it.

Read the whole thing.

The Trump Administration Will Be the Government’s Evil Twin

The Joni Mitchell Effect

The thing I’m starting to appreciate about Trump is that he does understand power—not in an intellectual way, but in a raw, visceral way, as only a hardcore lifelong powerluster can do. He is coming out of the gates with a very effective method for asserting that power and cementing obedience.

Few people, even staunch defenders of our system, are quite ready for it. It requires the ability to see things from a completely cynical perspective, in which there is nothing but raw power, in which that is the only consideration.

Consider, for example, Elon Musk’s Department of Redundancy Department, in which he and his redundant co-chair will perform duties redundant with an existing agency, on the promise of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. George Will has a column ably laying out why these cuts are a pipe dream.

Debt service (13.1 percent of fiscal 2024 spending) is not optional and is larger than defense (12.9 percent), which Trump wants to increase. Entitlements (principally Social Security and Medicare) are 34.6 percent and by Trumpian fiat are sacrosanct. So, Musk’s promise is to cut about 30 percent of the total budget from a roughly 40 percent portion of the budget, politics be damned.

But this is insufficiently cynical, because it assumes that the goal of Musk’s commission is actually to cut the budget, when the real goal is to wield power. Musk’s borrowed power as a weird sort of shadow president—some people are calling this new type a “broligarch”—will require everyone to bend the knee to him and offer special favors and privileges, or their programs will end up on his chopping block.

I mentioned the Joni Mitchell Effect above, and it’s one of the things I’m going to be counting on in the next few years. Maybe voters will have to face the prospect of living in fear of the whims of erratic oligarchs before they take their responsibilities as guardians of our republic more seriously.