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Very belated followup to a maybe-too-dismissive response and promise for followup here. I feel bad about leaving that branch rudely untaken and not following through.
Bluntly, criticism as from SlowBoy and KMC was correct, 'corruption' in the sense of using power to drive personal gain was the wrong word, and I should have spent more time finding a better way to express the tangle of traits in Trump that I dislike and that drive me away from favoring him for 2024 President.
I would endorse maybe half of the class/aesthetic criticisms laid against him by the total commentariat (crude, boorish, unrefined), the cultural-conservative portion of moral criticisms (venal, dishonest, weather-vane, pandering), all of the epistemic ones, few to none about intelligence and raw perception (stupid, senile, psychotic). I like Ezra Klein's podcast ep "What's Wrong With Donald Trump" as laying out the raw impressions that drive me away, and support his induction of the base disorders being basically narcissism and total disinhibition. These two factors couple to a lack of intellectual humility ("my gut tells me more sometimes than most experts ever have" or something similar in the podcast was a line that struck me) that verges on disconnection from consensus inference and prediction, but not perception, that I think also drives a disgust reaction for me. Practically, his anxiety to be liked drives people-pleasing in historical US competition and opposition that is excessive to the goals of diplomacy, and his refusal or inability to engage with the existing machinery of state and its tribal knowledgebase is a crippling defect, even accounting for parachuting in friendly top leadership like Project 2025 wants to.
I look forward to reading Bob Woodward's trilogy on the topic and believing a third to half of it, and whatever Milley has produced about his experiences and believing two-thirds of it.
I least am not supporting Trump because he's a paragon of morality , the most qualified, or effective at his job, but that he is the best option out there. Trump being unable to ingratiate himself with DC power dynamics lessens the likelihood of a major blunder, like another Iraq War or something of the scale. Tax cuts and stimulus are what we can expect, and judicial appointments that will outlast his term. The worst fears of every pundit from 2015-2017 of Trump came nowhere close to manifesting, so this makes me disinclined to take them seriously at anything.
Klein tries to counter this argument from history by pointing out that 4 years of learning and prep by the Trump reelection team makes one of their high-priority goals be vetting top-level staff for compliance with Trump's desires and personal loyalty. Separately, his attempt at moving federal workers to Schedule F to remove protections against firing them and rehiring for loyalty and obedience late in his prior presidency tried and failed to do the same thing in medium- and low-level roles. Klein claims that this would remove the moderating factors that prevented pundits' fears from manifesting.
I don't know how the tension will resolve over time, between the need to maintain continuity in low-level staffing to enable daily operations versus the need to overwrite existing loyalty and power structures, but separately I worry about the damage the attempt will do to tacit institutional knowledge rather than procedural knowledge; cf the various worries about the shallower bench of talent on the right.
Klein made a compelling case but I still disagree with him. The first Trump admin was a mess, but I don't think it was a mess because of a lack of personal loyalty, it was a lack of ideological loyalty that led to that lack of personal loyalty. Add on to that that personal loyalty is basically impossible to vet (I mean, are you only going to hire ride or die Trump supporters that were willing to storm the capitol?), and that leaves you with a much more ideologically lockstep second Trump term, but I still think will hold back the super crazy Trump tendencies when their personal loyalty to follow him no matter what is tested..
The only way I can see something like that working is if congress repealed the Administrative Procedure Act, putting Trump and his immediate appointees in direct control of federal regulations.
Curtis Yarvin talks a lot about how no president has been truly in charge of the government since FDR. The reason for this is the Administrative Procedure Act.
Which is silly, because the APA is a way of regularising the use of the broad powers delegated by Congress to the executive during the New Deal era. Pre-FDR Presidents had less control over the government, not more - both because the federal government had less control over "the government" viz-a-viz the states, and because the executive had less control over the federal government viz-a-viz Congress.
That the federal government was small enough for one man to control in 1890 and not in 1930 seems entirely plausible. But Yarvin defines the government as "that which is sovereign" - which in 1890 still meant the system of shared sovereignty between the feds and the states.
I’m afraid the ship had sailed by 1881 at the absolute latest.
I agree with you that the Pendleton Act is the point at which the US Executive Branch stops being a one-man show.
But the bigger change over the 20th century is the shift in power from Congress to the Executive.
Even now, the US government is more of a one-man show than it was when an effective House Speaker could have more power over domestic policy than the President did.
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