IF ANY TWO beliefs are shared by both critics and admirers of former President Donald Trump, they are these: His whims were frequently hamstrung by the people who surrounded him during his first term in office, and that won’t be allowed to happen again.
Trump’s victory in 2016 appeared to surprise his campaign as much as anyone. He boasted during the campaign that he hires “only the best people,” but that was easier said than done. Bereft of institutional backing, with no serious plans for a postelection transition, the 45th president had no choice but to turn to the “Beltway establishment” to staff his administration. “When I first got to Washington,” he lamented in April to Time, “I knew very few people.”
Trump was supposed to be a repudiation of “Conservatism, Inc.”—not just in tenor but in substance. Out were the commitments to limited government and free trade, the insistence on fiscal belt tightening and entitlement reform, and the largely sunny orientation toward immigrants associated with previous Republican leaders such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan. In were hardball politics that pulled no punches, minced no words, and had no qualms about a “muscular” state that interferes at will in people’s lives.
But Trump had trouble getting the rest of the governing apparatus to line up behind him. Unfavorable court rulings bookended his presidency, overturning his Muslim travel ban in 2017 and rejecting his election fraud claims in 2021, with other losses along the way. After he left office, the conservative America First Policy Institute released a report complaining that “career bureaucrats resist[ed] Trump Administration policies” by withholding information, slow-walking priorities, and otherwise refusing to carry out work that didn’t align with their ideological preferences.
Worse, Trump’s own advisers and appointees often seemed to be working at cross-purposes. “His White House was hastily staffed by a mix of underqualified true believers, opportunistic hacks and experienced but disloyal swamp creatures who colluded with journalists and permanent bureaucrats to undermine the president’s populist agenda,” Sam Adler-Bell in in January, summarizing the MAGA view. “The solution, then, should be simple: