'Monarchists at heart' forget about democratic politics

20 July 2023

The criminal former president looks like he’s going to be indicted for a third time, perhaps tomorrow, this time in connection to his leadership of an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government in 2021.

At the same time, Donald Trump looks like he’s going to campaign less like a candidate once again seeking the consent of the American people and more like a deposed monarch denied his birthright. He’s acting as if he’s already been enthroned and that the election is merely an affirmation of that fact.

According to the Times, if he’s elected for a second time, Trump plans to launch the greatest expansion of presidential power in our lifetimes.

It would be a “maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory” – a “decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.”

But, in light of Trump’s (likely) three indictments, it’d be more than that.

In a sense, Trump is seeking power akin to that of the kings of old, who claimed to be the right hand of God, and, like God, infallible. Trump wants to be subject of law, but never its object – law-giver, not law-receiver. And yet he seems to believe most Americans will find this appealing. It’s as if his campaign slogan were: “As your rightful king, I have a right to your vote.”

With this (likely) third indictment and with this new reporting by the Times, we now understand better than before that Trump is attempting to deliver to his “conservative” followers what they have long coveted in a president, according to Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, in 1987.

“Many conservatives are monarchists at heart. They love the presidency. They think that if you own the presidency, that is all that really counts.”

Obviously, that’s not all really counts.

“The biggest problem with Trump’s plan for an all-powerful, unconstrained presidency, using in part proposals from his conservative allies at the Heritage Foundation, is that it’s a formula for authoritarian government,” wroteBloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein. “One-person rule — even elected one-person rule — is simply not compatible with republican ideals.”

But Trump’s real problem is democratic politics.

Here’s what Trump wants to do, according to the Times.

Bring independent agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission and perhaps even the Federal Reserve Bank “under direct presidential control.”
Revive the Nixon era “practice of ‘impounding’ funds,” meaning the defunding of things that the Congress has already paid for.
Make it easier to fire civil servants if “deemed obstacles to his agenda.” This is the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Remove bureaucrats at the Departments of State and Defense whom Trump has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

And so on.

The Times goes on to explain that independent and technically complex agencies like the Federal Communications Commission were intended by Congress to carry out the will of Congress and “makes rules for society.” Congress put “commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end.” It also used “its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well.”

Congress established these independent agencies “on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings.”

Trump wants that kingly power, but we know it won’t work. He already tried. He tried and failed, because there were too many people in the government, armed with a combination of self-interest and republican ideals, who resisted. He wants a rematch. He might get it. But even if he does, his second term would look similar to his first, only more chaotic.

“It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts,” John Kelly, Trump’s second White House chief of staff, told the Times.

The chaos shouldn’t be seen as just chaos, though. It should be seen as a consequence of democratic politics. “Monarchists at heart,” on account of being “monarchists at heart,” and not small-d democrats, forget that.

The Heritage Foundation intellectuals who are advising Trump say that their ideas are “paradigm-shifting.” They aren’t. If anything, they call for doing the same thing, over and over, while expecting different results.

They also expect that controlling the “administrative state” is merely a matter of controlling the presidency. Once you control that – once you control, in the parlance of conservative legal theory, a maximized unitary executive – the administrative state will simply get in line. Control of the presidency is, to these monarchists at heart, all that really counts.

It isn’t all that really counts.

Monarchists at heart might know that.

If they weren’t monarchists at heart.

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