Washington D.C. rot is not that new

The rot in the nation’s capitol as exposed by President Trump and DOGE chairman Elon Musk is not new.

It has been growing like a cancer for almost a century. President Ronald Reagan, the president who won the Cold War by defeating the Soviet Union, recognized the problem but put it aside while concentrating on what he considered the nation’s pressing need for a prepared military – “peace through strength,” his Soviet strategy – and a restored prosperity at home. Along with his core beliefs of lower taxes and less government.

Reagan pulled the United States back from the treachery of leftist manipulators, who were on hand when he became president and opposed him as he put the nation back on track as a land of opportunity and freedom.

President Trump has retraced Reagan’s footsteps in framing conservatism as an optimistic, forward-looking vision for the country.

Mike Gonzales, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation,

had some thoughts about the regime change brought about by the election of Trump to a second term.

He wrote a column for the Daily Signal, the thorough and accurate publication of The Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank headlined “Trump is bringing about a regime change not seen since 1933.”

He wrote the following: “I tell friends—not only here but especially those overseas— who express anxiety with what they see as turmoil.

“Transfers of power produce winners and especially losers. The losers don’t accept their new status quietly, especially when they’re used to winning. A pliant media amplifies the noise, creating cacophony.

“So we are at peak moaning. Go to any gathering inside Washington’s Beltway, and you’ll likely encounter the men and women who used to run the “permanent bureaucracy”— and thus expected to do so permanently — crying in their Chardonnay and spitting spitefully at Elon Musk.'

A little later, he adds: “In the U.S., we had been in an age of regime politics for many years, giving us polarizing politics and societal division. As the writer Christopher Caldwell explained in his 2020 breakaway book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’ ‘we have for a couple of decades engaged in an increasingly raw debate not over normal matters—say, top marginal tax rates—but over how the country was to be constituted.’

“It was as though we had not just two competing visions, but two competing constitutions. One was hammered out in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, and based on the Declaration’s idea that God had endowed individuals with ‘unalienable rights.’ The other saw identity groups, based on such immutable characteristics as race and sex, as society’s main protagonists.

“‘Much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something more grave,’” Caldwell wrote. “‘It is the disagreement over which of these two constitutions will prevail.’” He adds: “That is not a mere change in administration. These have taken place at least every four years, and sometimes eight (though Franklin D. Roosevelt’s lasted a dozen years from 1933 to 1945, precipitating passage in 1951 of the 22nd amendment, limiting presidents to Washington’s two terms in office).

“These changes in administrations have not, however, amounted to real transfers of power, though we have called them that. The bureaucracy that FDR enshrined to carry out his increase in government control has either kept the power that it has accrued over time, or has expanded it.

“Even under such conservatives as Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, and Donald Trump in his first term, the bureaucracy that the media has taken to calling the “Fourth Branch of government” (spoiler alert, it’s nowhere to be seen in the 1787 Constitution) successfully fought off all attempts to pare it to size.”

He quotes historian Niall Ferguson this way: “The way to think about Trump 2.0 is as the New Deal reversed. If FDR began the vast expansion of federal agencies that continued in the 1960s and 1970s, DJT is attempting to turn back the clock: to shrink the federal bureaucracy with a barrage of presidential decrees.”

Gonzalez added: “Under liberal administrations such as those of Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, FDR’s bureaucracy grew by leaps and bounds. FDR created the alphabet soup of agencies and programs—the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the FBI, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and many, many others—to administer his New Deal in the 1930s.

“LBJ expanded it with the Great Society, which created the public broadcasters, for example. Carter gave us the Department of Education, and Obama the eponymous Obamacare.”

Gonzales concluded: “Barrages produce cacophony. But if you despaired about 5,288 to 6,294 “gender-affirming” double mas- tectomies for girls who could be as young as 12, with diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, with teaching the idiocy that America began in 1619, with viewing all human activity through the “oppressor v oppressed” lens—to the point that you open the borders—then this cacophony is the ‘orchestral tutti’ at the start of a symphony.”