Why is Trump letting Musk put the American state through the wood chipper?
Trump has been rearranging America’s institutions since his first hour of his second term. On the surface there is chaos. His chosen hatchet man makes Javier Milei’s chainsaw look puny in comparison to Musk’s woodchipper. There was talk of institutional reform on the campaign trail, but as always with Trump there were few specifics and most of it seemed to focus on the legal system. With America’s international development agency USAID having gone through the woodchipper the focus is now on the Treasury, though as Benjamin Wittes has been writing about on Lawfare, there is plenty happening at the Department of Justice. The question is what Trump aims to achieve with his restructuring of the American state. And more importantly what he will achieve.
The reason people are horrified with Trump’s attack on the administrative state is that the state’s capacity is determined by the people and system it is able to marshal. Through the adoption of meritocracy instead of other systems for distributing government jobs like patronage networks, strict class discrimination meant to make the state the preserve of the aristocracy, and religious or ethnic restrictions on who can work for the state Western states became more effective. By insulating vital government functions like the judiciary from political pressures the law became fairer. By taking power away from individuals and imbuing it into impersonal and transferable roles Western political philosophy seeks to make the state less arbitrary. The fear is that dismantling rules and norms meant to protect career civil servants and apolitical institutions is destroying the state’s capacity without getting anything in return; it is a strictly negative reform.
Trump is no philosopher-king who has ruminated on the political and social ramifications of cutting down the administrative state. Rather he is a creature of instinct, and while the American left is unable or unwilling to see it, I believe there is a goal for Trump’s reforms. Trump is an almost uniquely effective communicator in person. Few politicians are as enrapturing as he can be in front of a crowd. But Trump is also almost uniquely poor at the more impersonal communication that text represents. Trump is clearly not comfortable with the staid and sterile politics of process and much more comfortable with the dynamic and dramatic politics of interpersonal relations.
By tearing down the rules and norms meant to protect the civil service from having to deal with politics, and by destroying impersonal roles Trump is reshaping the American state to work like he does. As I mentioned in a blog post from November 2024, Trump’s administration is structured more like a court than a cabinet, and a court would struggle to affect change through a modern administrative state. Trump wants to avoid being stymied by bureaucrats the way he was in his first term. Instead of changing himself to suit the system, and in the process become one of the Swamp creatures he loathes, he has decided to try to change the system to be more like him.
It remains to be seen whether he will be successful or if American society will stop him. I tend to think that reforming the state in this way would be a mistake, but let us be honest here, it would not be all bad. Trump’s election victory does in fact give him a mandate to radically change the status quo, and given some of the ways in which American society has calcified along class lines a big shake up could spur the country to redouble its efforts to live up to the ideals it was founded on. Of course, everything that doesn’t kill a state doesn’t necessarily make it stronger.
One area in which a more fluid and interpersonal system could benefit America is in diplomacy with fellow great powers. China and Russia too have systems governed more according to hierarchies and interpersonal relations than according to rules and merit. While I have no hard evidence for this, my gut tells me that states with similar governance structures and ideologies have an easier time getting along as they are better able to understand each other. The flip side of course, is that this will also mean that relations with the EU, Australia, and Canada will deteriorate as governance structures drift apart.
The drawbacks outweigh those benefits however, and it will be a lot more challenging to go from an interpersonal system to an impersonal system than vice versa. Trump’s attack on America’s civil service and administrative state is an indirect attack on the Enlightenment values on which the country was founded. I’m reminded of a speech from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance when the evil senator Armstrong waxed poetic about a new American which sounds a lot like what Trump seems to strive for:
“I have a dream. That one day every person in this nation will control their own destiny. A nation of the truly free, damn it. A nation of action, not words, ruled by strength, not committee! Where the law changes to suit the individual, not the other way around.”
A system without the impartial and impersonal rule through systems, processes, and policy becomes one where the law changes to suit the individual, not the other way around. But that only suits those at the top of the system, who have the social and political capital and connections to get the law changed. As much as Trump wants to tear down the old unfair and corrupting Swamp, what he looks to be erecting in its place is even worse. When the rules are impartial and things are decided according to processes everyone has, at least theoretically, access to justice and political change. If the state regresses to an interpersonal mode of politics and administration it both empowers insiders like Trump, Vance, and Musk and simultaneously disempowers the outsiders who supported them.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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Cover photo by Vitor Aranda from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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