Opinion: Sometimes, Donald Trump tells the truth - Bai, WaPo
For 50 years, every “outsider” running for president has campaigned on a sweeping promise: to end the status quo in Washington and dislodge its entrenched powers. Once in office, they always become cautious incrementalists. Over and over again, they find out that federal agencies are vast and labyrinthine, and only a limited number of people in the world are even half-qualified to run them, let alone reform them. It turns out that most federal spending is immutable or popular, and no president is going to bang his head against that wall.
Until this week. Donald Trump’s opening moves after winning a second term all seem to indicate that when he talked about taking vengeance on what he calls the “deep state” (and what most other people call “government”), he wasn’t just play-acting. He started by establishing a commission to make government more efficient — a pretty standard move in Washington, except that this one will be a vehicle for two grandiose celebrities, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who truly appear to loathe government.
Trump followed that up with a series of stunning Cabinet picks: for defense secretary, a loudmouthed cable-TV critic of the military; for attorney general, a sleazy target of federal investigations; to oversee public health, a noted vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist; and for director of national intelligence, a patsy for dictators.
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Even with a slim Senate majority, Trump knows it’s unlikely that he can get 50 votes to confirm Matt Gaetz at the Justice Department or DNI Tulsi Gabbard (whom Russian state TV has referred to as its “girlfriend”). Instead, the president-elect seems willing to ask the Republican-led Senate to formally go into recess — something they haven’t done for about a decade — so that he can unilaterally fill the jobs through recess appointments.
And this is how autocratic rulers come to be. They don’t break the laws; they rewrite them. They manage to legitimize whatever non-democratic means they wish to use, either because the other institutions of government are fearful of saying no, or because they stand to benefit by saying yes. If Trump ends up trashing the “advice and consent” clause of the Constitution, he will have upended a significant pillar in our celebrated system of checks and balances.
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