There was much debate over how President Donald Trump would govern once he became President. His conservative and libertarian supporters thought he would use his knowledge of the system to tame it while his conservative and libertarian detractors believe he would be a bully with no concern for the Constitution and govern like a New York City liberal.
Almost a year into his young presidency, his conservative and libertarian supporters are being vindicated bigly. Trump is attacking the federal bureaucracy in a way that we have not seen in generations. He has even set his sights on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a covert deep state agency previously believed to be sacrosanct.
“We’re going to rebuild the FBI,” Trump said last week, expressing frustration with special investigator Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation and how the lack of focus on Hillary Clinton’s actual crimes is “really disgraceful.”
“There is extreme bias against this president with high-up members of the team there at the FBI who were investigating Hillary Clinton at the time,” White House Deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said on the same day as Trump’s speech.
Despite Trump maintaining his support for the rank-and-file of the FBI and local police, he sharply criticized the shameful behavior of the agency and its deep-rooted institutional corruption.
Trump is not just targeting the FBI for its corrupt dealings. He is blasting the entire federal bureaucracy and shaking it to its core. He recently announced that much of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, designated by former President Barack Hussein Obama, will be leased off for private development. He recently did a photo-op where he boasted about how he was cutting the red tape in Washington D.C.
“Within our first 11 months, we cancelled or delayed over 1,500 planned regulatory actions — more than any previous President by far…. And instead of eliminating two old regulations, for everyone new regulation we have eliminated 22 — 22. That’s a big difference. We aimed for two-for-one and, in 2017, we hit twenty-two-for one,” Trump said.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Trump changing the guard inside the beltway. It remains to be seen if he or the deep state will ultimately be successful in this titanic power struggle.
