In his first Cabinet meeting after winning reelection in a landslide, Ronald Reagan urged his team to be more aggressive in taking on government’s ever-increasing size and scope. “We came here to dam the river,” he said. “Let’s start throwing in the rocks.”
That was November 1984. Unfortunately, despite Reagan’s best effort, 40 years later that river is raging more than ever.
Today, a newly reelected President Donald Trump has a chance to succeed where his predecessor fell short. And his Cabinet appointments reflect the fact that he’s aware of this mandate for disruption.
What sort of leadership should we expect from Trump and this Cabinet of Washington outsiders? How can they combat a corrupt, inefficient and ever-expanding government that even Reagan couldn’t defeat?
The answer must be more than piecemeal policy reforms. “You’re fired,” a phrase Trump made famous, should be his second Cabinet’s motto.
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What does this look like in practice? It involves Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not only banning the food additives and chemicals that are poisoning our children but also canning everyone who pushed COVID-19 lockdowns in our schools while encouraging mass rioting in our streets. It means Pete Hegseth not only putting a stop to wokeness in our military academies but also taking on the top brass and getting rid of generals who lack the requisite leadership qualities that our troops deserve.
After Kennedy’s recent nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), almost immediately, the American Public Health Association—which published a 38-page report on improving the health of “K-12 LGBTQ+ Students” in September—said Kennedy “fails on all fronts” as a nominee. The association’s president, Georges Benjamin, suggested Kennedy was not “qualified” or “properly trained,” arguing that “the American people … need an HHS secretary under the Trump administration who will listen to science, not discredit it.”
But the American people are sick of the status quo and tired of listening to the so-called science. They want science to listen to them for a change. They want science that is untainted by Big Pharma. Industry-funded science that manipulates studies to profit off the American people is worse than useless. That Kennedy has not been credentialed by Washington’s traditional gatekeepers is precisely why conservatives like me are excited about his nomination.
Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, is a similar case. The liberal pundits and industry lobbyists mocking Hegseth as nothing more than a Fox News host who lacks an extensive background in Pentagon management are not only underestimating him, but also missing the point. Hegseth is a good pick precisely because he isn’t part of the defense establishment or the Pentagon that just failed its seventh straight audit.
Likewise, the fact that military bureaucrats in 2021 ridiculously barred Hegseth from a National Guard security detail for President Joe Biden’s inauguration and flagged him as an “insider threat”—all because of a tattoo on his arm that stated “God wills it” in Latin that they overreacted to and interpreted as a white-supremacist slogan—makes him a more solid choice than a conventional defense secretary.
Like Trump himself and several of the president’s picks, including Kennedy, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, Tom Homan, Brendan Carr and Tulsi Gabbard, Hegseth has been an antagonist of the Washington bureaucracy—in his case and many others, of the very institutions they are set to lead. This is a feature, not a bug. Disrupting and dismantling the deep state will be one of the central missions of Trump’s second term.
No doubt, Trump’s critics will fearmonger and claim that he and his team are burning government to the ground. Some on the right who think this sort of radical action is too incendiary—from the Wall Street Journal editorial board to the halls of the Senate—will side with them and try to limit Trump’s agenda.
They believe that Trump’s populism is fundamentally opposed to conserving America’s institutions.
They’re wrong. Populism has renewed conservatism periodically throughout American history, and it can do the same today. Trump’s mandate is for a long, controlled burn of the federal bureaucracy—to get rid of the deadwood without letting the fire spread out of control.
And if he is successful, it will be his legacy. The American people elected Trump again so that he could break what needs to be broken. So that he could get to the root of the problem and take on Washington’s bureaucracy directly. So that he could do what Reagan couldn’t.
Trump’s Cabinet picks reflect this fact. Conservatives should rally around them.
This piece originally appeared in The Washington Post on November 25, 2024
