Trump’s ‘Hostile Takeover’
Terry H. Schwadron
Nov. 25, 2024
A Washington Post article last week included a useful quote from a Donald Trump political ally to explain what we’re seeing unfold in Washington — a lens for understanding rather than a justification.
Trump and team are undertaking “a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people,” argued Mike Davis, an outspoken Trump promoter and president of the Article III Project that has defended Trump against criminal charges. “He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time.”
It’s a capsule statement that explains a crude strategy of choosing loyalists who seem to detest the agencies they are being named to run, that seeks to grab power from Congress, and apparently that is keeping Trump and his circle from signing the required transition statements against conflicts of interest and protection of classified document that are meant to kick off the transfer of power.
It even explains a pushback from an aggrieved Senate that did not want Matt Gaetz stuffed down its otherwise malleable throat as a Trump pick for attorney general. That single act of defiance may trigger other advice-and-consent stands about Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services or Tulsi Gabbard as national security adviser simply to guarantee that the chamber exists for a purpose.
In an amassing of pre-inaugural presidential power, Trump is showing the back of his hand for rules, procedures and even the normal vetting of nominees as Cabinet advisers. In turn, we’re hearing a lot now that Team Trump’s disdainful style is roiling even his own Republican senators and may spell some trouble for getting his nominees through or lining up the kind of congressional support that he will need to gut government agencies, enact global tariffs, or embrace arcane legal justifications to deploy U.S. military troops to round up migrants as promised.
The only issue is why Trump then tries to follow up with statements that suggest it is reasonable to accept outlandish appointees or policy changes without full discussion.
Ignoring the Rules
Let’s be clear: You don’t have to like Trump’s policies. But effective opposition cannot be sustained if you don’t know what you’re aiming to block. Trump’s all-out assault on all of governing is hitting at a lot of fronts at once.
The “hostile takeover” approach that we’ve seen from Trump adviser Elon Musk is to fire first and set goals later, to shore up who’s in total charge right from the get-go. That’s exactly the message that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are sending about their citizens’ panel to find two trillion dollars to cut from federal spending: It almost doesn’t matter what services or employees are cut, so long as people understand that there is a new sheriff in town. Ramaswamy last week promoted using random Social Security identification numbers as the basis for firings. Of course, Musk’s burn-the-place-down takeover of Twitter mostly was considered financially ruinous and a rejection of much of what had made the enterprise popular in the first place.
Since his victory, Trump has ignored many of the rules and practices intended to guide transfer of power and handover of the oversight of 2.2 million federal employees. Instead, he has all but cut out the General Services Administration and the FBI. Both agencies have roles in transition, the GSA to help guide new hands on the controls of agencies ad to assure compliance with ethics rules, and the FBI to do the work of vetting nominees.
Trump has taken these tasks on himself, or simply ignored them. As a result, none of his appointees have connected with Joe Biden appointees whom they are replacing, Trump is communicating with foreign leaders outside of State Department procedures or translators, and his team has been surprised by unwanted scandals popping up among several nominees.
And while most focus has been on the perceived lack of “qualifications” for several nominees chosen more for personal and campaign loyalty to Trump and TV-readiness than for knowledge and experience in the areas they will oversee, what’s largely been set aside are the vast areas of outright conflict of interest that many, including Musk, have with regulators who might affect their personal holdings. Indeed, Trump himself, now fortified with Supreme Court-granted immunity for anything he does in office, is not separating himself from his own business interests, as he at least claimed he was doing last time.
The combination of lack of experience and antipathy for established American interests is being seen as particularly acute in the areas governed by national security and defense and in the Justice Department, where Trump has promised to prosecute political opponents and to act against critics. Trump’s transition team apparently is considering giving his appointees blanket security clearances without background reviews. You might remember that security clearances were held up even for his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the first Trump presidency.
NYU Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose specialty is authoritarian governments, posted this week that “Trump’s cabinet picks are a declaration of war on expertise and facts (that’s why there are several Fox hosts in the mix). The con artists, fraudsters, and professional propagandists that populate authoritarian governments see facts and laws as impediments to their goals.”
One sign of the difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, Mike Allen of Axios, noted, was the for most of his first term Trump’s health guru was Alex Azar, who notedly had been a pharmaceuticals executive. This time it is RFK and Dr. Oz, who want to overturn health establishments.
Distrust on Steroids
Only after Trump had gone public with his nominees has he learned that perhaps the Senate thinks that it should decide on confirmation and not just him. How many times are we going to see this sequence play out with Congress, courts or, eventually, mid-term elections that say there was no landslide, no “mandate” to make Trump an unquestioned monarch.
Consider it all a reflection of Trump distrust and resentment of federal agencies, his “deep state” opponents who dared to question him because of law or morality, and for participation in inquiries that led to two impeachments and multiple criminal indictments. None of it has anything to do with lower prices at the market, more oil, a solution to housing, health access or better education.
The hostility is reflected in the agenda to wipe out whole agencies, to strip Civil Service employees of merit-based job protection, in ignoring experience in choosing nominees who simply repeat the slogans without plans for what happens after the administrative bombs go off.
Since Team Trump has not signed required conflict of interest documents, it, of course, remains an open question as to whether Trump or members of his administration could stand to profit personally if government services in, say, Medicaid or Education or NASA are outsourced to private companies, including those affiliated with Elon Musk or Vivek Ramaswamy.
Science, medical expertise, commitments to public education are giving way to culture warriors who want “elites” to put in a new place, to allow popularized solutions to govern, whether they make sense or not. Alliances and treaties should bend to personal, transactional deal relationships with our own Dear Leader. We’re plowing towards economic decisions that will take decades to dig out from, and even Wall Street and the New York Post are telling Trump to reconsider global tariffs.
At this rate, we might reconsider whether Trump even needs to be sworn in with an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law. Perhaps we can replace it with a non-disclosure agreement not to criticize any utterance Trump makes.
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