The Swamp Is Yours Now, MAGA. Drain It

By Jack Butler

Sunday, January 19, 2025

 

When Donald Trump swears at his second inauguration tomorrow to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” it will be more than a return to the presidency for a man who left office four years ago. It will also be a rebuke to his skeptics. Consider one such skeptic, who early in 2023 called Trump “an obstacle to the achievement” of progress on “the important issues he brought to or revived in the conservative mainstream,” and declared that “the future of conservatism — even (especially) a conservatism influenced by Trump’s presidency — now depends on rejecting Trump.”

 

Who could have been so blinkered, even at a time when Ron DeSantis and others were considering or had already announced presidential primary challenges to Trump, about the possibility of his political resurgence? That would be me. As Trump returns triumphantly to Washington, he can further vindicate his supporters and defy doubters by ensuring that he, those in his administration, and others around him make good on his promise to drain the swamp by dismantling the Beltway-centered governing apparatus of which he will soon assume control.

 

It is a test past Republicans have failed. George H. W. Bush won the presidency as the third term of Ronald Reagan, for whom he was vice president. Bush nonetheless turned his back on the Reagan swamp-draining legacy. He purged his administration of Reagan holdovers, and helped to set conservatism adrift from its principles. Republicans in Washington during George W. Bush’s presidency made their peace not only with big government, but also with the corruption that goes hand in hand with it. Not for nothing did Rush Limbaugh warn the Republicans elected in the 1994 wave year not to be seduced by the trappings of power. “This is not the time to get moderate,” Rush exhorted them. “This is not the time to start trying to be liked.” Would that elected Republicans had better heeded his warnings.

 

The Trump administration appears well-positioned to take this advice. Trump’s political fortunes owe considerably to the feedback-like energy he derives from the opprobrium heaped upon him by the press, by his political opponents, and by elites in other spheres. In opposition to him, they abandon their principles (such as they were) and pervert their institutions. The result has been their abasement and Trump’s elevation, as well as a growing disinclination on the part of others on the right to pay much attention to elite opinion. Such an attitude could lend itself well to a full-scale assault on the bureaucracy that has distorted our representative government, siphoned power away from the people and the states and toward the federal head, and enriched D.C. and its environs.

 

But the possibility of failure always looms. It presents itself in a particularly seductive way for the incoming Trump administration. Beginning late in Trump’s first term, a notion has gained some currency on the right, especially inside Washington, that Republicans have been insufficiently enthusiastic about making themselves comfortable in the Beltway. The first Trump administration rightly boasted of its massive deregulatory success. Yet in summer 2020, one advocate of surrender to big government weakly conceded that “however much we may long for a return to constitutional government, the modern administrative-welfare state is here to stay,” and thus argued that the “right must be comfortable wielding the levers of state power.” Such arguments are typically vague on what “power” means. Governing obviously requires using just authority, and debates over what that entails. But the Constitution demarcates that authority. The “modern administrative-welfare state” is fundamentally incompatible with the government the Constitution ordains. A manful conservatism would turn to the Constitution both for the means to undo that incompatibility, and as a benchmark for restoration.

 

Yet even as Joe Biden’s failed presidency almost daily evidenced the mischief and malice of an engorged state, some on the right have made their peace with it. One speaker at a conference of national conservatives advocated that his fellow travelers “be a little less principled” so as to “build an interconnected web” of “client interests” that are “committed to our political success.” Another prominent votary of this faction put it bluntly: “We should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.”

 

That votary was JD Vance. Not yet an Ohio senator when he uttered those words, he will soon become vice president. His presence in the Trump administration is but one sign of the ideological pull his faction will attempt to exert upon Trump’s presidential aspirations. It is also a possible indication of the direction in which they will try to push conservatism during the next four years and beyond. Considering the likelihood of abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a monstrosity that has been unconstitutionally insulated from our political system, a former financial policy adviser to Vance urged conservatives to accept its place and “instead focus on weaponizing the bureau to charter an America First course.” Such thinking will masquerade as a muscular conservatism, distinct from its “effete” predecessors.

 

It is nothing of the sort. It is a pretext for some on the right to succumb to the temptations of the Beltway so thoroughly that they will ultimately be more or less indistinguishable from their leftist analogues, who have been cheering on and outright funding their efforts. It is a means to increase the likelihood that their time in power more resembles the failures of the Bushes than the successes of Reagan and Trump. Most important, it is a way to squander the trust that those who voted for Trump placed in him.

 

In 2021, I wished that Trump’s supporters could see how he had “failed them, how more tact, restraint, or decency on his part could have made him a standard-bearer truly worthy of their support — and possibly still president.” By returning him to office, they showed I was wrong, and that he remained worthy of their support. Trump and those who purport to act on his behalf and in his spirit should understand this moment as an opportunity to restore representative government and the Constitution that he will swear tomorrow to “preserve, protect, and defend.” That would honor and empower those to whom they owe their positions and their allegiance. If the Beltway insiders Trump has empowered instead use this moment to advance their own factional interests and to secure sinecures, leaving Washington’s status quo more or less intact but with different masters, it will be a missed opportunity, a vindication of skeptics — and, worst of all, a betrayal of Trump’s voters.