Former President Donald Trump has designs on converting the entire American system of government into something “in the style of Mar-a-Lago — grand and imperial, not republican and democratic,” warnedWashington Post columnist and Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen on Tuesday.
This comes amid numerous experts sounding the alarm on Trump’s plans to reshape the civil service into a loyalty cult and deploy the military internally, and Trump himself vowing to be a dictator “on day one.”
“When we teach kids about the structure of our government, we typically emphasize the legislative, executive and judicial branches. But our government also has a fourth locus of power in numerous agencies that make rules that shape our lives,” wrote Allen. “Think of the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission. These agencies are created by our legislature and operate under the supervision of the executive branch, but with varying degrees of formal independence. Trump proposes to assimilate those rulemaking agencies fully within the executive branch as units responsible for carrying out the agenda of the president. He also proposes to change the rules for civil service appointments so that appointees can be fired for not carrying out the presidential agenda.”
This would have been unthinkable to the founding fathers, wrote Allen, as they didn’t even envision presidents having the powers they currently do, let alone the ones Trump wants to create out of whole cloth — they envisioned Congress as being the most important decisionmaker in the republic.
“You don’t want the person who makes the rules also to be the person who gets to enforce the rules. When one person gets to do both things, freedom ends,” wrote Allen, offering sports as an analogy: “On the soccer field, refereeing works because the rules have already been made by someone else. If the ref could also change the rules as the game proceeded, the game would become unplayable.”
At the end of the day, Allen concluded, “We do need democracy renovation to address emaciated legislative power and bloated executive power. But all the Trump campaign can offer is the imperial ethos of Mar-a-Lago. This will not be good for us.”
