The Anti-institutionalists

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, November 24, 2024

 

Say what you will about Matt Gaetz, but at least he didn’t know anything about running the Department of Justice.

 

This is a snarky way of stating what was the implicit case for the former Florida congressman as attorney general.

 

For President-elect Trump, the appeal of his most controversial nominees, with Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr. now topping the list after Gaetz’s welcome exit, is that they are totally at odds with the institutions that they want to run — it’s not just that they have philosophies that reject conventional thinking, they are actively hostile to the institutions as such.

 

In other words, Trump wants them exactly because they are anti-institutionalists. (Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi are also examples, although less so than the others.)

 

No one has ever thought of cabinet nominees quite this starkly. Assuming these nominees get confirmed, the experiment is likely to end badly, and not just by conventional metrics, but in terms of the agendas that Trump hopes they’ll advance.

 

Let’s dwell on the late Matt Gaetz for a minute as the foremost example of this approach. The understandable question that supporters of his nomination asked was: Why, after all that Trump has suffered at the hands of a politicized justice department, wouldn’t the president-elect want a wrecking ball at the DOJ?

 

A wrecking ball is the wrong metaphor, though, for how to bring about meaningful change, or really any change at all. To use a different cliché, the better metaphor is a guided missile, which packs considerable firepower but is a precise and deliberate weapon that destroys a target with minimal collateral damage.

 

There are no examples of a cabinet secretary leaving a department a smoldering ruin — it’s just not how it works. Perhaps prodded by DOGE, Congress will engage in serious restructuring of government agencies, a prospect that is equal parts very welcome and very unlikely.

 

The best that can be hoped for is that a cabinet secretary changes the mindset at a department and harnesses it effectively for a president’s ends. This is no small thing; in fact, pulling it off is quite rare, and when it happens it can be quite consequential.

 

It’s possible for cabinet secretaries to be too accommodationist or too high-handed.

 

On the one hand, you have the example of Secretary of State Colin Powell who thought it was his job to serve the State Department bureaucracy and was ineffectual and, on the other, Secretary of State Alexander Haig who was terrible at building relationships within State — or anywhere else — and was ineffectual. (Crucially, both also lacked a close relationship with the presidents they served.)

 

The trick is to insist on change without being so heavy-handed as to provoke unnecessary resistance, and to know how a department works — and get buy-in from key players — without getting co-opted by the place.

 

In all of this, there’s no substitute for experience.

 

It is the difference between an Attorney General John Ashcroft who, as a serious-minded former senator, knew how Washington and the Justice Department worked and successfully reoriented its approach to counterterrorism, and an Attorney General Al Gonzales who, as a former Texas judge, was knowledgeable about the law but never knew what hit him once he got to Washington.

 

Experience is not necessarily a signifier of careerism, lack of imagination, or a meek acceptance of the status quo. It can be associated with all of those things, but it also can make someone a much more effective agent of change.

 

Yes, there’s a role for inspired amateurs. Elon Musk at DOGE, for instance, will be a fresh set of eyes and no doubt generate many new ideas, some of them potentially very fruitful, some of them outlandish. (It helps if the inspired amateur is a true genius like Musk.)

 

Running a department requires different attributes.

 

Perhaps the best example in recent memory of a transformative cabinet secretary is Reagan’s legendary attorney general, Ed Meese, who made the department into a bludgeon against soft-on-crime policies and judicial activism.

 

Notably, even before Meese began working for Reagan in the California governor’s office in the 1960’s, he had vastly more legal experience as a practicing lawyer and former prosecutor than Gaetz had.

 

By the time he showed up at the DOJ in Reagan’s second term, he had done years of work in California and Washington, bringing bureaucracies to heel to push forward Reagan’s agenda. He took a very hands-on approach to the various constituencies within the department and made it a vehicle for what has to be considered historic change — Meese and his DOJ were the leading edge of the push for originalism that decades later has transformed the judiciary.

 

His critics, invested in the Warren Court–imposed status quo, may have viewed him as a wrecking ball, but it was only because he was so philosophically grounded and administratively adept — with the fingerspitzengefühl that comes with great experience — that he was able to make such progress in dismantling their project.

 

And, by the way, he was as hated by the Left as any MAGA figure today; it took him a year to get confirmed.

 

Now, an Ed Meese is a very rare commodity. But to the extent he wants to effect his agenda, Trump should be looking for people with similar qualities. Novices and pure bomb-throwers may be alluring as shocks to the system, but the system will almost inevitably prevail over them in the end.