Half a century after Watergate, Americans evince an appetite for strong presidential authority of the kind Trump is delivering. Credit: Getty
Few of President Trump’s actions early in his second term have provoked as much furor as the executive order freezing certain federal spending programmes. A federal trial judge in Rhode Island issued a nationwide injunction against the freeze, insisting that he intends to stop the administration from “any federal funding pause”. Five former Treasury secretaries published a protest op-ed in The New York Times, warning that “not since the Nixon administration has this type of executive action been contemplated”.
They’re right about that. Trump’s assertion of the president’s power to pause funding — the right of impoundment — reverses the standard practice of the past two generations. Team Trump aims to restore the traditional exercise of presidential authority to impound congressional spending, a power which was restricted by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In doing so, the Trumpians aim to put an end to what political analyst Kevin Phillips called the “Watergate warp” that weakened American presidents, Republican and Democratic, pulling them down from the Caesarist heights summited by pre-Watergate chief executives.
The principle behind impoundments is simple. Congress has the authority to set the ceiling on spending, the thinking runs, but not the floor. If the goal of a programme is achieved without spending the full amount authorised by the legislative branch, the president can decide not to spend the difference. So argued FDR, a frequent user of impoundments. Forcing the president to spend every last dime, he said, “would take from the chief executive every incentive for good management and the practice of commonsense economy”.
If the legal battles over Trump’s executive order freezing some spending lead to a Supreme Court decision clarifying the constitutionality of impoundments — and holding the 1974 act unconstitutional — it would be a huge win for the administration, and they are gearing up for it. But legal battles are downstream of political ones. In Trump’s first term, the president was frequently stymied by coordinated media, legal, and security-apparatus efforts to generate public outcry. After some bluster, Trump usually withdrew to a more conventional position. But he is pulling no punches this time around, and noticeably, he doesn’t need to. The American people appear much less susceptible to supposed threats to “our democracy” than they were in 2017, and Trump’s approval ratings have climbed since he re-entered the Oval Office.
The flashpoint over impoundments reveals a deeper shift in the American political imagination. The key to understanding what’s happening lies the mythical role played by the person to whom the five former Treasury secretaries compared Trump: Richard Nixon, whose downfall took away the vast presidential powers amassed by FDR.
Presidents before FDR had used impoundments. But from FDR to Nixon, impoundments were a major part of a bipartisan consensus. Americans wanted a strong president. In May 1932, FDR asserted that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation”. In his first Inaugural Address, FDR threatened to rule by decree if Congress failed to back him: “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.”
FDR capitalised on the Great Depression to launch an era in which Americans expected the president to act decisively and master all the resources of the federal government to resolve problems. This expectation remained strong throughout World War II and into the early Sixties. Trust in government, and the president, remained high through the New Deal order. But by the late Sixties, as the war in Vietnam worsened and the excesses of social liberalism disturbed the public, confidence in the executive began to wane.
It was this discontent that catapulted Nixon to the presidency. Campaigning on law and order and against the failed Democratic record, Nixon won the 1968 election as a moderate conservative. He set out to run the federal government along the lines that FDR had set down with the New Deal. Nixon was the last president to try and govern in Roosevelt’s Caesarist model. It would prove his undoing.
While he supported the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and civil rights for black Americans, Nixon thought that the decades-long trend had been for federal bureaucrats to carve off fiefdoms for themselves, in which they were accountable to no one. His aim was to reassert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy. In his first term, he would focus on the foreign-policy bureaucracy; in his second term, he planned to focus on the domestic bureaucracy. As he put it in his memoirs, his objective was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government”.
There was a partisan element to Nixon’s actions, revealed by his reference to an “Eastern stranglehold”. To wit, bureaucracies were largely run by East Coast liberals ideologically opposed to him. Yet the real divide wasn’t between liberals and conservatives, but over the role of the bureaucracy in a post-FDR America.
Within the government, Nixon’s most powerful opponents weren’t liberals, but conservatives in the military and security services. From FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these actors sought to defend their institutional prerogatives and autonomy from presidential oversight. To keep the Vietnam War going on their terms, the Joint Chiefs used media leaks to destabilise Nixon’s withdrawal plans and even spied on the president.
Hoover claimed that “political attempts to hamper and interfere with the federal and other police and prosecuting agents are the real menace”. He countered Nixon’s efforts at intelligence reforms that would have required the FBI to cooperate with other agencies under White House supervision. “Hoover has to be told who is president”, Nixon wrote to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to little apparent effect.
Nixon’s project wasn’t revolutionary. Like his predecessors, he made extensive use of impoundments. Like his predecessors, his solution to administrative problems was to try to centralise power in the White House, bypassing unreliable bureaucrats. Like his predecessors, he appointed outsiders who could bring a fresh perspective and, when necessary, clean house. And like his predecessors, Nixon also authorised quasi-political surveillance.
His practices were ambiguous. On the one hand, it looked like the elected president, the figure who in the American system most closely embodies popular sovereignty, was wresting control of the government from unelected bureaucrats — Caesarism in the positive sense, a popular, regal presidency akin to that of Charles de Gaulle in France. On the other hand, it looked like the troubling apex of the “imperial presidency” that FDR had created — Caesarism in the negative sense, an emperor in waiting.
When Hoover died in 1972, Nixon passed over the FBI’s top lieutenants and appointed government attorney L. Patrick Gray as his replacement. This infuriated FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. A Hoover loyalist, Felt thought that Nixon’s actions were compromising the institutional autonomy of the FBI that Hoover had set up. So when Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began examining the Watergate burglary, Felt saw an opportunity to undermine the new acting director of the FBI and embarrass the administration that had passed him over for the top job. As historian Beverly Gage has written, “Felt cooperated with Woodward not to preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover”.
Nixon’s attempt to reassert presidential power set off a political conflict against a partisan Congress and, more important, bureaucrats jealous of their own institutional expertise. Public opinion turned against Nixon, aided by media outlets united in their hostility; back then, there were only three national television stations, which all agreed to coordinate their programming so that at least one was always broadcasting the Senate hearings on Watergate.
Nixon became a scapegoat, taking the fall for decades of executive-branch and intelligence-agency abuses. As a matter of public opinion, his downfall was possibly inevitable. The American public was exhausted with the Vietnam War, with the dirty tricks of their politicians and spies, and with runaway inflation, especially at the gas pump. Somebody had to pay, and Nixon, who had been at the top of American politics since the 1950s, fit the bill.
When the Erwin Committee issued its report on Nixon’s wrongdoing in June 1974, it said less about Watergate than about a culture of executive abuse of power. “From the early days of the present administration”, the introduction went, “the power of the president was viewed by some in the White House as almost without limit”. Presidential power had become outré. One month after the report’s release, a critically weakened Nixon signed the Impoundment Control Act. It didn’t save him. In August 1974, he resigned to avoid impeachment. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him, hoping that this would bring an end to America’s “long national nightmare”.
By the early Eighties, the passions of Watergate subsided; many thought the country had moved on. Kevin Phillips, the political consultant-turned-writer and analyst, wasn’t so sure. Hence, his coinage of “the Watergate warp” to describe how Nixon’s disgrace might continue to reshape American politics.
The first way it did so was to help conservatives. Liberals hoped that Watergate would poison the GOP brand for a generation. Yet the scandal couldn’t be wielded along partisan lines. Across the board, the warp reinforced Americans’ suspicion of their government. The American electorate tilted toward the ideology that manifested that suspicion, giving conservative Republicans control of the White House until 1992, and control of Congress shortly after that.
But the Watergate warp didn’t bring about conservative small government. It merely led to a weaker president. This was the second way it distorted American politics. The Seventies saw the explosion of the powers of the administrative state. The New Deal’s “economic regulation” of the banking and commercial sectors transformed into “social regulation” affecting most of American life. Anxious to dodge the “imperial” accusation, presidents acquiesced to legislation that took decision-making out of the White House and handed it over to administrative agencies.
Watergate the break-in was a petty political burglary; Watergate the myth was an act of robbery. It stole power from the president and distributed it to faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats. The Watergate warp was the destruction of Rooseveltian presidential power by a mean and hungry legal and media elite. And therein lay its third, most tedious disfiguration. Watergate became the founding myth for journalists, judges, and lawyers who dreamed of orchestrating investigative reports and special prosecutions that would topple presidents. It turned political and media elites into aspiring regicides, each fancying himself a Cassius taking down Caesar.
The result has been that every few years, Americans are subjected to scandals narrated along Watergate lines: Iran-Contra, Whitewater, the Valerie Plame affair, and “Russian collusion” all followed a familiar path of public inquiry, a push for a special prosecutor, and then incessant questions about what the president knew and when he knew it. Their supporters, Left and Right, saw themselves vindicating the rule of law; to their critics, they looked like lawfare designed to undo the democratic will.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen signs that the Watergate warp is fading. For starters, the lawfare strategy hasn’t been all that successful since Nixon. The closest that America has come to a repeat of the Watergate saga was with #Russiagate during Trump’s first term. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was supposed to follow the Watergate script. Indeed, in 2018, it inspired a court petition to unseal grand-jury documents — normally sealed forever — from the Watergate Special Prosecution Task Force. The hope was that this might provide some readily applicable lessons. The judge granted the request, but it didn’t help. The Mueller probe missed its target, concluding that there had been no collusion between Team Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.
L’affaire collusion also failed to reshape public opinion. Scapegoating is a collective endeavor, and unlike in Watergate, Mueller couldn’t even convince half the country. Trump’s opponents tried again with the Jan. 6 Commission; like the Mueller investigation, it was a well-organised operation, a made-for-TV drama. Each such effort failed for precisely that reason. They were designed to replicate the homogeneous media environment of the Seventies, which no longer exists. To work, scapegoating demands that the collective doesn’t perceive a victim. As soon as they see one, the mechanism falls apart. Trump I’s failed scapegoating led to Trump II’s victory over Kamala Harris.
In retrospect, it is revealing how much of the Biden presidency and Harris campaign were devoted to warning that Trump was a dictator-in-waiting because he wanted to fire the bureaucrats. This strategy was only marginally effective: the only demographic that the Democrats gained ground with between 2020 and 2024 was voters over age 65. But younger voters admire Trump for precisely the reason that the Watergate generation fears him: his dynamism, his determination to achieve results.
Then, too, the Left’s glorification of the bureaucracy has often been revealed to be a fig leaf covering an inept federal workforce. Paeans to the unimpeachable authority of the civil service are amusing at the best of times, but become less funny when their failures are obvious to millions. Progressives quietly acknowledge the need to circumvent lethargic agencies; after all, the precedent for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency stems from Obama’s struggles with bureaucratic incompetence. In 2014, because of the failures around the rollout of ObamaCare and the website healthcare.gov, Obama set up the US Digital Service, with 300 staffers drawn mainly from Silicon Valley. Its head was a political appointee, not a civil servant.
What progressives admit in private, Trump bellowed across the land. In 2024, the desire to fix a dysfunctional state apparatus overcame older Americans’ anxieties about the imperial presidency. Victorious, Trump rechristened the US Digital Service as DOGE, giving him an entity that could operate throughout the whole federal government with personnel selected free of normal civil-service channels.
Nixon is having his revenge. The Supreme Court’s ruling last year asserting broad presidential immunity is a kind of posthumous vindication of Nixon’s presidential defense; had the ruling been issued in 1973, it would have shipwrecked the Watergate special prosecution. The high court read the law — and the national mood — correctly. Voters don’t want lawfare to harass former presidents, nor to paralyse presidents in office. They do want an effective and decisive executive. The model of personal power that presidents from FDR to Nixon embodied is back in style.
This changes the terms of American politics. Back in the Seventies, Nixon realised that the fundamental political conflict facing America was not that between liberals and conservatives, but between those who wanted the bureaucracies to exercise institutional autonomy and those who wanted them subordinated to the elected officials. That remains true today. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks (RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth) had liberal critics, but particularly vehement conservative ones. This was because they swore to take back control of entrenched scientific, intelligence, or military bureaucracies. Just like liberals, conservatives have their favourite bureaucracies.
This was why movement conservatism was never at peace with Nixon, and why it will likely never be at peace with Trump. The electoral appetite is for restoring competence and efficiency in government, as well as purging the state apparatus of ideological absurdities. It doesn’t exist to realise movement conservatism’s visions of a small, shrunken government.
Finally, if the resurgence of American Caesarism is “red” and Nixonian at the moment, another “blue” Caesar is certainly possible in a country that remains so narrowly divided. Caesarism isn’t the product of a stable constitutional system; it is always a volatile phenomenon, its trajectory is difficult to predict or control. The Roman emperors were great not because of their steady hand, but because they went further than anyone else in good or evil.
So far, Trump’s impact lies with demolition, not creation. Whatever the future holds, he has brought an end to a lingering national myth. The elite obsession with Nixon, as it appears in op-eds and lawfare, has never been less effective. For decades, the Watergate script was endlessly rerun and rebooted. But Trump has pulled the plug.
Nathan Pinkoski is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Technology, and Politics and a columnist for Compact.
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SubscribeHow very interesting.
I do recall the incessant propaganda that even permeated the UK about the evils of President Richard Nixon. At the time most of us thought it was sanctimonious nonsense.
However you have skilfully filled in the details of what appears to have been a rather sordid little conspiracy by a bunch of selfish inadequates to commit regicide.
When one looks at who and what followed Mr Nixon, one can only groan.
Nixon was the greatest US President of the last 100 years
Yes, rather late in the day, to my eternal shame I am beginning to realise that!
It was the way they absolutely had to bring him down
Same here. As so often happens, recent events can show events further past in different lights. A man who can admit he erred in his judgement is possessed of three virtues. Humility to admit his failings, Courage to admit them before his fellow man, and Wisdom to understand the value of doing so.
And, to my shame, I followed the Watergate novelette avidly and cheered at the kill, immature idiot as I was.
…same.
Indeed. Our initial perceptions of history can be colored by the specific situation at the time and it can take decades or centuries to recognize the failures. In light of the several decades since Nixon, it’s easier to see an alternative interpretation of the event. Given how the media and bureaucracy have been revealed since then as having their own agenda, it makes them suspect. The Internet with its democratization of information has undone the media’s ability to shape narratives to suit its interests or those of its allies in government. With the villain unmasked, it was only a matter of time before people wondered what else the villain had perpetrated before his unmasking. Nixon is perhaps the first of many historical figures to be reevaluated in light of the populist revolutions overturning the old global order. Just a couple of days ago I actually made mention of how Nixon took the US off the gold standard, in part because of foreign currency manipulation and rising trade deficits. His effort failed to achieve anything, but he at least recognized a problem. If populism continues to grow and Trump succeeds in reshaping American politics, future historians may look back at Nixon as this author does, as a scapegoat, used by unelected bureaucrats and media to insulate themselves from that pesky inconvenience of being accountable to the people through their chosen President.
You have to ask yourself why did Kennedy and Johnson get a free pass for their unlawful deeds, while Nixon was hounded and then crucified over a relatively trivial transgression.
For me this felt instinctively suspect for many year.
In hindsight, we should indeed be asking such questions.
Trump threatens the DC cabal’s way of doing business. I’d say thus far, Trump’s impact lies in exposing the corruption and misuse of taxpayer funds.
Pointing out the waste will be followed by pointing out the corruption and fraud.
Interesting account. Still, Nixon was paranoid, vindictive, crooked, and a very unpleasant character. He was also extremely capable, so there are good reasons why people might want to vote for him regardless. Clearly the Nixon example convinced the US that it was too dangerous to have a President with uncontrolled imperial powers when you might some day elect a crook.Trump is different from Nixon in several ways: he despises democracy, adores dictators – and is not extremely capable. One wonders why people would think that Trump is the right president to get uncontrolled imperial powers back.
Ironic that the people who reference “Democracy” every 5 words don’t believe in Free Speech because they apparently think Free Speech caused the Holocaust. Dictators don’t allow opposing viewpoints to be heard. They use all kinds of mechanisms to suppress Wrongthink because they can’t win a debate over ideas. You could walk right up to the White House Gate and call Trump every name in the book and nothing would happen. An American couldn’t do the same in your country.
How many times has Denmark hit the 2% defense spending target by the way? Great “Ally” you are.
You have been at the MSM Kool-Aid again.
When you look at the antics of Kennedy and Johnson (vote rigging, illegal wars, overthrow of foreign governments, assassinations) what Nixon did was relatively trivial. And how do you justify the charge “crooked”
As to unpleasant, no so much compared to Kennedy’s treatment of women (seems to be a Democrat tell) and Johnson was incredibly coarse and vulgar.
The reason isn’t complicated. Regardless of his many personal flaws, he’s the first one to come along who actually tried to take power back from the unelected bureaucrats and assert national sovereignty over issues like immigration and international trade. Who else has there been that offered a substantive alternative to more of the same establishment policy we’ve seen for decades? Sanders perhaps, but the powers that be successfully blocked his attempt, and so there’s Trump or more of the same. Those were the two choices in 2016, and 2024. Trump won by a greater margin the second time, and that’s something worthy of examining, analyzing, and trying to understand. Thus, why Trump isn’t the question we should be asking, at least not in the sense of why pick him. What we should be asking and should have been asking since 2015 is why the people are so angry and so determined to get substantive change that Trump seems like a preferable alternative to the majority of the American people. Had the political establishment been willing to ask that question, it might actually have led to some understanding of the people’s profound dissatisfaction and a more sensible, less extreme remedy to their frustration. If Trump is as incompetent as you say, and you may well be right, and if he brings disaster upon us, I will still lay the lion’s share of the blame at the feet of the ruling class who failed to understand the people’s mood so completely that they allowed him to come to power. With great power comes great responsibility, whether one acknowledges it or not. The people hold the ruling class accountable for the state of the nation because they held the power. They may not have known or intended the long term consequences of globalist policy, but leaders must be held accountable for the consequences of their choices, both the intended consequences, and the unintended as well.
It sounds like you are treating the voters like a bunch or irresponsible idiots – a bit like those insufferable progressives who talk about false consciousness and people not understanding their own interests.. Saying that ‘We are unhappy with things, of course we had to vote Trump, it is the other people’s fault for not giving us a better alternative. ” is no better than a teenage thug saying “The school was too cold, of course I set it on fire, it is the teacher’s fault for not heating it properly.” It was very clear what kind of man Trump was. If people voted for Trump it is because they wanted what he had to offer: Entertainment, trash-talking, kayfabe, making the Democrats hurt, putting himself above the law, smashing the federal government. People are plenty smart enough to understand that this is not how they are likely to improve their life, just like they are smart enough to understand that they are not going to solve their economic problems by buying a lottery ticket. The voters made a well-considered choice to prefer autocracy – under Trump. They cannot pass the blame to someone else.
Not sure what to tell you at this point. Personally, I can accept a democratic result even when I don’t agree. Democracy says that the power of government is derived from the people, not that the people are always right or always virtuous or always fair. If Trump had succeeded in his pathetic attempt to subvert the process in 2020 and keep power, then he would be a dangerous autocrat. That was the moment when he was most undemocratic and most dangerous, and I haven’t forgotten it. Still, he didn’t succeed, and then he proceeded to reapply himself to winning reelection legitimately, and did so. I accept the people’s judgement, because that is what democracy requires and I seek to understand the people and consider their wants, needs, and desires as they see them, not as I personally see them. I try to respect people’s viewpoints both directly and indirectly. It wasn’t my intent to invoke false consciousness narratives or anything like that. I was simply trying to explain how I see the situation and the people, because understanding the people’s motivations, wants, and needs is the way to defeat Trump or any other politician one opposes. The way to definitively defeat Trump is at the ballot box, and the Democrats failed to do that. In a democracy, it is the politicians who serve the people, and the burden is upon them to make a better appeal and a better argument than their opponents. They managed to fail to make a better argument than a television celebrity. That doesn’t speak very highly of their understanding of the people or what the people want. I’m just thinking that democratic principles require us to accept the people’s sovereignty right or wrong. If you’re more concerned about the results than the process, about the consequences of the people’s judgement rather than their right to rule themselves as they see fit, that’s something other than democracy. Again, I’ll go back to Jan 6th which was Trump’s worst and most undemocratic moment because he failed to respect the democratic process. That can’t stand, and it didn’t. The system worked. It worked again when he went back and ran again and won legitimately. In a democratic system, the people can put a man who demonstrated a lack of respect for democracy back into power. He isn’t truly an autocrat in my view until he succeeds in suspending the democratic process. As long as the man is not above the system, it’s still democracy. If the decisions and the results become more important than the process and rulers accountability to the people, then it’s no longer democracy. It’s something else. That’s what people don’t like about bureaucrats. They’re not elected. They’re not accountable to the people.
You equate Trump with autocracy, but that doesn’t make sense. He was elected. The people in the federal government he’s trying to fire and force to be accountable to him and his cabinet were not elected. How is the elected President exercising authority over unelected bureaucrats autocratic rather than democratic? I suppose we could get into the semantic weeds of how we define autocracy. If it’s simply rule by an individual, then democracy and autocracy are not mutually exclusive, provided the autocrat is elected and that said election is conducted according to established laws and free of fraud. There have been other Presidents that did things that were autocratic as well and most of them are well regarded by Americans today. Make of that whatever you will. I do realize you’re not an American, and have a different cultural perspective. That’s quite alright. This is why borders still matter. What’s acceptable to Americans doesn’t have to be acceptable to the British, and vice versa. That’s why each country has its own government and its own laws. A big part of the problem here is that the world is far too interconnected, and individual nations need space to be themselves and decide their own fates, and the globalist economic system stands in the way of that. To the extent Trump moves us towards something besides globalism, I can accept a lot of his silly nonsense.
We agree about several things. Certainly it is the job of politicians to come up with something that people will vote for, and certainly the voters have the democratic right to choose whatever they want, even installing a strongman. The trouble is that once they do that, there will be a lot less democracy left next time. After all, both Mussolini and Hitler came to power legally in a democratic system It was getting them to go again that was so hard.
There is more to democracy than elections producing a dictator. For one thing there is congress, the rule of law, the courts, and, yes, the apparatus of the state. All of these have their own legitimacy, all are supposed to be loyal to the nation (not to the person of el Jefe) and all are supposed to constrain the freedom of the Jefe to do whatever he wants. Trump does not tolerate any restraint, not even from the rule of law, but that is not how it works in a democracy. Then there is an entire system of normal functioning, how elections and campaigns are handled, how the various players use their powers etc. that serves to give both winners and losers a stake in the system and some guarantees that they will have some protections and still be around with a fair chance for the rematch. Otherwise we end up with what he Europeans call ‘African democracy’ ‘One man, one vote, one election only’.
Trying to be realistic. I do not think that Trump will install a dictatorship over the next four years. As someone put it, the next Presidential elections are likely to be free, but unfair. And if the Republicans (and their billonaire backers) get a few more terms in power it might well become effectively impossible for anyone else to win. Of course, even if they lose all power in four years they will still have had time to smash the federal government, destroy the system of international alliances that the US has relied on, and stuff what is left of the government with so many toadies and placement that it will take a decade or so to root them all out.
Some of your arguments really sound like rationalisations. So Trump tried to steal the 2020 election but that is OK because he did not succeed, and there is no reason to punish him or try to prevent him from doing it again? Really? To me is sounds like a cop gunning down his girlfriend, and his lawyer arguing that since she did not actually die, nothing happened and he should be acquitted of wrongdoing and keep his police job. Would you really let him get off scot free just because he was a bad shot and had not got close enough to make sure he would hit?
Her you are being honest. You do not like the current economic system, you are willing to vote for anyone who will promise to get rid of it, and you do not think democracy or decency are worth preserving if it means you cannot get what you want. To each his priorities, I guess. Trouble is that I think you are quite unlikely to get what you want, no matter what you sacrifice for it. The world is messy and unlikeable nowadays, and that is not going to go away. As my sister put it, it is so hard to get a good outcome now that the only people who can promise one are the liars. That is not a good reason to vote for one.
This is a masterpiece.
By the way for all the pearl-clutching about Musk, why did “Special Climate Envoy” John Kerry not need a Senate Confirmation hearing?
Kerry flew all over the world committing the US to global climate pacts to fund “sustainability” throughout the planet. There was special focus on redistributing funds from the “Oppressive Global North” to the “Marginalized Global South” as part of the “Just Transition.”
So it seems that it’s totally fine to have unappointed bureacrats working to give taxpayer money away but wholly unacceptable if they’re working to preserve taxpayer money.
I forget where I came across this and ask fellow commenters if it is accurate.
Shortly before he was ‘watergated’ Nixon halted (or reinforced the prohibition on) chemical and biological warfare research.
If he did make such a prohibition it was thoroughly unmade shortly after 9/11 and the still murky affair of the anthrax envelopes.
Excellent article. It explains what I instinctively thought but have never been able to coherently articulate.
‘Watergate the break-in was a petty political burglary; Watergate the myth was an act of robbery. It stole power from the president and distributed it to faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats. The Watergate warp was the destruction of Rooseveltian presidential power by a mean and hungry legal and media elite. And therein lay its third, most tedious disfiguration. Watergate became the founding myth for journalists, judges, and lawyers who dreamed of orchestrating investigative reports and special prosecutions that would topple presidents. It turned political and media elites into aspiring regicides, each fancying himself a Cassius taking down Caesar”
Says all that you need to know in 6 short sentences
“Back in the Seventies, Nixon realised that the fundamental political conflict facing America was not that between liberals and conservatives, but between those who wanted the bureaucracies to exercise institutional autonomy and those who wanted them subordinated to the elected officials. That remains true today. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks (RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth) had liberal critics, but particularly vehement conservative ones. This was because they swore to take back control of entrenched scientific, intelligence, or military bureaucracies. Just like liberals, conservatives have their favourite bureaucracies.
This was why movement conservatism was never at peace with Nixon, and why it will likely never be at peace with Trump.”
Again spot on
Americans are actually fairly comfortable with autocratic power. Before the American revolution, leaders like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Paine made a point to protest the actions of the British parliament, which they viewed as an aristocratic institution, not the king. In fact, they made several appeals directly to George III as subjects of the crown to overrule his parliament, including a proposal that looked a lot like the commonwealth system that ended up being adopted for Canada, Australia, etc. They viewed the King as their legitimate sovereign, but rejected the authority of the parliament because they had no representation in the parliament. It’s a common misconception that George III was the target of rebellious sentiment in the colonies. There eventually was, but that was after appealing to him failed and he sent in the troops. There were some who actually advocated for Washington behaving like a King and setting up a hereditary dynasty. He probably could have if he had wanted to and the people would probably have accepted that. Since then, there have been many American Presidents who had shades of being a popular dictator in the mold of Julius Caesar. Washington, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts all had varying degrees of willingness to push the boundaries of constitutional authority in order to achieve popular policy victories and all either have been or were regarded as great Presidents and American heroes.
Thus, regardless of what the rest of the world may think, Trump is not an aberration, or an anomaly. He is a return to an American tradition of using powerful executives to check the power of elites, aristocrats, and bureaucrats. When the elites use their money, social standing, and personal connections to establish control of government institutions, the people’s remedy is to elect a new Caesar to put the fear of God, or rather the fear of the people, back into those who would claim to act on the people’s behalf using the people’s government. Elites, aristocrats, bureaucrats, and politicians need an occasional reminder that what the people giveth, the people may taketh away. Trump is accomplishing that simply by virtue of winning two elections. That rediscovered fear of an angry population is the reason Biden’s economic policy looks a lot more like a moderated version of Trump’s than that of Obama or his predecessors in either party. As distasteful as Europeans and others may find the optics of a man like Trump, and there is much to dislike, the American system is working as it has in the past, and mostly as the founders intended. The internal conflict is a feature, and not a bug. This conflict is the alternative to the more common, more violent kind of civil conflict that happens in other places. I don’t like Trump particularly, but I like violent revolution even less than that.
Further, the author is right. There’s no rule that says a Democrat outsider can’t be another Caesar, particularly if Trump fails. There’s been a recent kerfuffle about a sportscaster, Stephen A. Smith, being among the betting favorites to win the Democratic nomination in 2028. You could probably put any random celebrity’s name and get a similar result because at bottom, Americans are fundamentally dissatisfied with the direction the country is headed, and until that changes, establishment politicians trying to get things back to ‘normal’ are rowing against the tide. The elites had best make their peace with the fact that change is coming one way or the other. Even if they hate Trump, they must realize that thwarting him is a gamble, because they may like the next prospective Caesar even less.
…nice one Steve.
The intelligent people true to the Unherd ethos of thinking for one’s self and not identical to the herd are in the comments.
The article writers make a f*****g mockery of the concept of Unherd. This is just just another mainstream consensus cesspool filled with deeply odious writers that all write from the same place: Woke globalist ideology and the status quo automatically correct, anyone that challenges that is Hitler, Mussolini, and now Ceaser. They never real of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, or countless Left-Wing dictators, as that would not brainwash people in quite the same way. Cognitive dissonance would thwart the unconcious acceptance of their lies and character assassinations they rely on.
And they are motivate by louthing. We should not have a society ran on base hatred and intolerance and the belief in their own supremacy over their opposites like we do. And they certainly should not be writing 95% of the content on a place called Unherd. Which is just a gimmick now anyway tbh, not a well needed source of info and education that goes against the insane mainstream ideology.
“Five former Treasury secretaries published a protest op-ed in The New York Times, warning that “not since the Nixon administration has this type of executive action been contemplated”.
“They’re right about that. ”
Yes, but… this is a case of what the censorship complex calls “malinformation,” which is true but lacking context. They would have you believe that Nixon committed some drastic, unprecedented over-reach (he was NIXON, after all!), rather than it was a common practice until it was stopped, under Nixon.
They all lie, all the time–even when telling the truth, they lie.
Good article.
Trump vs The Bureaucracy.
The Will of the People (popular vote and EC) vs the unelected, entitled, “enbubbled” , and faceless blob that are paid for by the taxes of the citizenry and work to maintain and advance their fiefdoms or worse, bad actors externally or domestically. And to advance their ideologies.
Hm…
How can it be that we find ourselves in the situation where we have to choose?
When did the notion that he People are Sovereign die?
Given that Trump can be erratic, I hope that the people he has chosen to do the job eviscerate the blob and rebuild it from the bottom up. It will be the beginning of a process which will take a long time.
The blob will not go quietly.
We shall see.
Fasczinatingement article.
A very complex analysis of political history which I was not familiar with before.
Zank you.
We have the same dynamic within the YK civil service and related NGOs – collectively referred to as ‘The Blob’.
The huge and rapid infusion of Woke ideology and DEI programmes into every nook and cranny of these public bureaucracies (as in USA, aided and abetted by a fully indoctrinated media (especially the malignant BBC), legal profession and an army of activist organisations (e.g. Stonewall). The result has been a massive curtailment and warping of our civil liberties (jail for 3 years if you post ‘unacceptable Far-Right memes on social media; 10-week suspended sentence if you are a Labour MP who has committed an horrendous assault). The Blob’s awareness of the scope almost unlimited power came about during the Covid lock-downs, and remains intact today.
Perhaps one of the most egregious aspects of this dynamic has been the usurpation of legislative powers by an unaccountable and activist judiciary which has undermined the democratic process and the sovereignty of Parliament as the law-making institution of the land. Judges have increasingly made law by precent, particularly using and inverting human rights legislation to rule in favour of minority interests (protecting The Oppressed), and ceding ultimate legal authority to the European Court of Human Rights, which is external to British governance and interests.
There is sub-zero chance of this terrible state of affairs being improved, let alone defeated, while Sir Keir ‘Smarmer’ Starmer remains our hallowed leader. A grey, grim, gloomy lawyer with no charisma, he is in thrall to international law and the process of law generally. Devoid of passion, committed to champagne socialism and labelling anyone not left-of-centre as ‘Far Right’, he is a procedural automaton who has demonstrated his capacity for hypocritical volte face and a liking of freebies from wealthy acquaintances.
In his meeting with Trump yesterday, his fawning toady character was on full display! It was a vomit-inducing performance.
This is one of the better essays I’ve read in UnHerd lately. The author is correct that Watergate is small potatoes compared to what has gone on since. He is also correct that a majority of voters wanted a strong president to make significant progress against the blob.
Americans have been “accused” of being pragmatists. Perhaps the last election was corroborating evidence.
Excellent.
My faith in UnHerd has been, at least temporarily, restored. Good show.