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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
It is time to study Caligula. That most notorious of Roman emperors killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself. Donald Trump does not need to make his horse a senator; it will be enough to keep appointing charlatans to America’s great offices of state. Rome was not destroyed by outsiders. Its demolition was the work of barbarians from within.
The question of whether Trump consciously wants to destroy the US federal government is irrelevant. You measure a leader by his actions not by his heart. To judge from what Trump has done within a fortnight of winning the presidency, his path is destruction. Other than a handful of moderate Republican senators, who may or may not have the guts to reject some of his nominees, there is little standing in his way.
Consider his plans for the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to run America’s sprawling military bureaucracy, was considered too much of a security risk in 2021 to protect Capitol Hill from protesters. Hegseth’s tattoos revealed him to be a far-right Christian nationalist. The Fox News anchor’s role will be to clean out generals deemed insufficiently loyal to the emperor.
Or take Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for US attorney-general, who was under investigation by the department he is meant to head on suspicion of underage sex trafficking (he denies all allegations). Gaetz, an attorney with little experience, reportedly won the Mar-a-Lago beauty contest by declaring, “Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cutting fucking heads.” His job will be to pursue Trump’s enemies.
Now consider Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic lawmaker and devotee of an obscure religious cult, who will oversee the 18 US intelligence agencies. Given Gabbard’s close affinity to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, she would be unlikely to get a low-level security clearance in normal times. Now she will be custodian to America’s most classified secrets. Should Gabbard be confirmed as director of national intelligence, America’s allies will surely re-evaluate the wisdom of sharing secrets. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard could be relied on to parrot Moscow’s talking points. She blamed Kamala Harris as the “main instigator” of Russia’s war. She has also claimed the US had a secret network of bioweapons labs on Ukrainian soil.
The pity is that the US government is in dire need of reform. One of the ironies of Joe Biden’s presidency is that he was stymied by the bureaucracy charged with implementing his legislation. Most of the fruits of his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump plans to abolish, have yet to materialise. The bill’s investment in renewable energy was no contest for a system that is riddled with veto points from the ground upwards. Washington power is by the lawyers, of the lawyers, and for the lawyers, not the people. This is chiefly the handiwork of Democrats.
Yet Trump’s oddly named department of government efficiency (Doge) is not a serious answer to that problem. That it will be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the world’s richest man and its most self-confident respectively, makes it an oxymoron from the start. Nor will it be a department of government. Doge will be the advisory equivalent of X, Musk’s social media platform, which is algorithmically rigged to churn out disinformation. Serious paring of US bureaucracy requires knowledge of what it is for. Both Musk and Ramaswamy routinely betray sweeping ignorance of their subject matter.
Americans might come to wish that Trump had nominated a horse to head the US department of health and human services. Instead, he has chosen Robert F Kennedy Jr, whose goal is to reverse the public science of the last couple of centuries. He is routinely described as a “vaccine sceptic”, which is much too kind. RFK Jr was a sweeping vaccine denier long before Covid-19 turned up. Millions of American lives have been saved by mandated inoculations for diphtheria, tetanus, rubella, small pox, mumps and so on. Kennedy thinks they are all a fraud. He is also a militant opponent of fluoride in water and “big pharma”, whose antidepressants he blames for mass shootings in schools.
Optimists point out that the US republic survived one Trump administration. Moreover, Trump’s economic plans will be likely to seed another anti-incumbency wave at the next presidential election in 2028. All of which could happen. But what would the next US president inherit? In 2017, Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said their goal was to “deconstruct the administrative state”. When Gaetz was nominated last week, Bannon proclaimed, “best day ever”. Rome was not built in a day, as the saying goes. But it squandered its spirit with remarkable speed.