Authored by Christopher Roach via American Greatness,
Though it has only been two weeks, it feels like a long time since Trump won the election, not least because of his rapid-fire release of cabinet nominations. The cabinet is important and demonstrates presidential priorities, as well as his judgment.
Trump’s cabinet so far matches the themes he expressed during the campaign. He is prioritizing immigration, dismantling the Deep State, and uprooting the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)” racket. There is also a “national unity” aspect to his picks because of the inclusion of prominent former Democrat supporters like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
So far, things are also running noticeably smoother than they did in 2016. There was a lot of preliminary planning and organization, and it shows.
The Outsider Cabinet
The biggest sign of significant change is the presence of outsiders. His first cabinet included many Bush-administration retreads, military men whom Trump overestimated, and business associates who had no apparent convictions. There was a lot of disloyalty, which magnified the endemic disloyalty of career civil servants.
Looking over Trump’s picks to date, Pete Hegseth seems tasked with prosecuting Trump’s war on “wokeism” within the military, but I am concerned about his lack of experience in managing large organizations. Affirmative action is a major problem in the military, but so too is the bloated procurement system. It needs to be fixed.
Hegseth seems to be a pure gut pick: Trump thought he sounded sharp on Fox News and was impressed with his military record, so now he wants to put him in charge. I hope he’ll rise to the occasion.
Matt Gaetz at the DOJ and Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence head are there to wage war on the Deep State. Both have been personally affected. Gabbard will be good, as she’s obviously bright, has military experience, good foreign policy instincts, and is skeptical of the incumbent organizations.
As an intelligent critic of our interventionist foreign policy, the lying media naturally defames her as a Russian agent. But, after the false Russian collusion allegations against Trump, no one is really listening to this kind of nonsense anymore.
Gaetz has been a hardcore Trump supporter from the beginning, and he will be a major change agent if he can make it through the nomination process. Many at the DOJ are saying they’ll resign if he is appointed; this kind of internal “self-deportation” is a feature and not a bug of Trump’s election. It means Trump gets to hire more people, deal with fewer fifth columnists, and make more of a mark on these run-amok federal agencies.
RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services is the counterweight to the regulatory capture of the FDA and totalitarian instincts of the public health establishment. RFK Jr. has some peculiar and out-of-mainstream ideas. Alternative medicine is, in fact, full of false and dangerous fads, whether it is colloidal silver or using radio waves to diminish autism.
But these ideas are not much crazier than the mandatory masking, social distance rules, and experimental vaccine mandates during COVID. Most important, he appears to respect patient autonomy and recognizes the primary root of health lies not in medicine, but in a healthier lifestyle.
Even though South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has been nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security, long-time advisor Steven Miller and proposed immigration Tsar, Tom Homan, are the real capos for the deportation agenda. This seems to be a high priority for the administration.
These are tough, smart, and clear-eyed men who understand the issues well. They inspire confidence.
A Rejection of Managerialism
Each of these nominees is a living refutation of the dominant practices of managerial credentialism. For most of Washington, D.C., a very narrow sense of who is qualified for senior roles ends up doing a lot of work to affect substantive outcomes. This gatekeeping practice looks to credentials and conformity as keys to the realm. Who can forget chubby Alexander Vindman and his praise of the sacred “interagency process?”
Washington’s credentialism is more than a matter of having elite degrees. Critics have mocked Hegseth, even though he is a Princeton and Harvard graduate, reached the rank of major in the National Guard, and is a double Bronze Star winner and combat veteran. But he didn’t follow the usual path and is an unapologetic right-winger, so he is suspect.
Credentialism means one works through the ranks in the same way as everyone currently in authority so that the organization is always replicating itself. An aspirant must be part of the “blob,” wait his turn, learn the acceptable ways to think and talk, and quickly adopt new fads, such as listing pronouns in a LinkedIn bio.
This process yields conformist mediocrities and moral cowards. This includes everyone from the four-star generals who boldly retconned the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan into a success to the current heads of the State Department, CIA, FBI, and DOD. It would be very damaging to this system if outsiders figured out the jobs quickly and were able to achieve better results.
Above all, managerialism is an ideology that empowers credentialed technocrats. It has a strong aversion to anything natural, organic, or unregulated. This is at least one of the roots of the recent obsession with misinformation and disinformation. A raucous, sometimes-wrong, and completely unregulated “marketplace of ideas” is simply too threatening to the managerial class.
Such a freewheeling system risks exposing official lies, such as the outsider-led discovery that COVID was almost certainly a lab leak, which was covered up by lifelong bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci.
New Standards
If the legacy ruling class treated Trump’s first term as an aberration, they seem to understand that 2024 is different. While they seethe, they must also admit that the American people have rejected the left’s extreme social agenda. In response, some good election post-mortems have been written, and it looks like the more extreme manifestations of wokeism are already in retreat from corporate America and the universities.
Under Biden, the Democrats tried to mimic the right’s patriotism with their J6 narrative and defamatory lies about Russian collusion, but their love of country has always been ideological and conditional. This performative patriotism cannot be reconciled with their sustained criticism of America as “systemically racist.” This is why the mask slips so often, and they say things like Trump supporters are “garbage.”
The old system is exemplified by Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris: power-hungry people with only modest talents who worked their way up the ranks but proved incapable of improving anything of importance when given responsibility. They are a reminder that real talent doesn’t always climb through the ranks; it often skips over them or ignores them, sometimes creating whole new organizations.
Under Trump, instead of the “organization kid,” bold and revolutionary outsiders like Elon Musk are providing an alternate model for executive leadership.
Trump was supposed to hire a bunch of outsiders during his first term, and he even created a website to gather resumes from ordinary Americans out in flyover country. But the database and its thousands of resumes were lost, likely sabotaged. He ended up hiring insiders and opportunists provided to him by the RNC.
So far, it appears he has learned from this mistake.
Beauty, Standards, and Excellence
The Democratic Party is lately about ugliness and weirdness. It celebrates the deviant and normalizes it. This makes sense, as beauty, standards, and excellence are all related.
Trump’s team is healthy and attractive. Trump picked those whom he thinks are best for the job, often with diverse views and unorthodox paths to success. So far there is none of the “tokenism” that usually surrounds both Democratic and Republican administrations. He seems indifferent about whether his team “looks like America,” but—like his winning coalition—it will be more representative of the country as a whole than the multi-hued, ideological clones of the Biden administration.
Combined with Trump’s majority, the bold cabinet picks signal a real “vibe shift.” The moment has a revolutionary feel, much more than I expected. It is analogous to the French or, more recently, Reagan revolutions, where styles rapidly changed, along with policies and elites. Short hair and business suits were back in style during the 1980s, after a slacker, self-indulgent decade following the disorders of the 1960s.
If Trump’s support comes from those who are resentful of being ruled over by their inferiors, the left’s core consists of those who are absolutely loyal to this system that artificially elevates them to positions of power and prestige. They are loyal because they know, deep down, in any fair competition, they would lose. This is what is meant by the useful concept of “bioleninism.”
Thus, the Trump revolution is not merely a political one but a cultural and aesthetic one. Things are changing rapidly because the left has lost confidence. They can no longer claim to represent the majority or console themselves that the arc of history is bending toward their eventual triumph.
Long on nostalgia, the Make America Great Again concept is also forward-looking. This is because the greatness of America resides in its optimism, creativity, embrace of technological progress, and because the country has always welcomed and rewarded people of talent, regardless of their pedigree or background.
Even before he has taken the oath for a second time, Trump is exemplifying the MAGA spirit with his extraordinary cabinet of outsiders.
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