Trump and the US Complete System Overhaul

D. Trump has created a special team to help him to strengthen the power of the US president in case of his election to the post in 2024. Namely, he is going to:
- move independent federal agencies (such as the US Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission) into full direct subordination to the President of the US. Now they are relatively independent and report to the US Congress as well.
- to restore the practice of “impounding” funds which the Congress directs to its programs;
- to take away employment protection from career civil servants so that they can be easily fired (now they work for a certain period of time under the contracts).

Besides, Mr. Trump wants «the State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the Deep Staters...”

All in all, it looks like Mr. Trump is going to seriously overhaul the existing US administrative system and is already preparing for a real war with the "Deep State" that has been annoying him for a while.

The New York Times states, that “… early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.»

Now Mr. Trump is explicitly declaring that he is going to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”

So, what is the “Deep State” which Mr. Trump is going “to obliterate”?

“Deep State” is the term used to refer to the idea that there's a cadre of career employees inside a government which work together to secretly manipulate government policy and undermine elected leaders or political appointees. These people can have positions in the military or intelligence fields, as well as other areas of government like bureaucratic agencies.

The theory reached mainstream recognition under the presidency of D. Trump, who referenced an alleged "deep state" working against him and his administration's agenda. ABC News/Washington Post poll of 2017 showed that nearly half of Americans believed there was a Deep State operating within the federal government then. The originator of the term is thought to be Mr. Trump's former chief political strategist S. Bennon, who coined it in order to «to delegitimize the opposition to Trump ... and pass the blame to others.»


In my opinion, every state has its own "deep state" and the name itself is coined very well here. It's the whole state apparatus or bureaucracy of the state, that does all the work of running the country, and a set of overt (laws) and unspoken rules (established morality) that guide government officials in their day-to-day work.

Deep State works in the mechanism of the state like the flywheel in a car engine - it has a lot of weight and therefore inertia which is constantly accumulated and given back into the process, ensuring a smooth transfer of torque from engine to gearbox. This is very important because the plungers turn the crankshaft unevenly and without the flywheel, the engine would rattle, shake and could even be seized up.
When the engine is running, the flywheel сonstantly rotates, holding or accelerating the movement of the plungers by inertia of its rotation and its weight prevents the engine from stopping. So the Deep State supports smooth (timely) transfer of laws or presidential decrees to the executive bodies, and it always requires a certain amount of time to pass: it is impossible to start (as well as to stop) the execution instantly, because there is a certain procedure, which includes, for example, checking the legality of a law or decree.

Since Mr. Trump doesn't really bother with little things like some law or the Constitution, he (the president!) has apparently often gotten polite rebuffs from his clerks over the illegality of his instructions. Mr. Trump broke a lot of political taboos while being the president so it's not surprising that «he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.»

Mr. Trump makes great play with «unelected bureaucracy».

Mr. Trump makes no secret of his intentions.
Moreover, he has made the fight against the Deep State his presidential campaign program which he openly promoted on his rally, on the campaign website and used it to recruit new supporters. He says he wants «to restore control of our government to the American people». Many Americans probably like that as well as Mr. Trump's proposal to end the «unelected bureaucracy.” This, by the way, means that citizens are dissatisfied with the way the current government is functioning, but unfortunately, they don't see that it functions poorly under both Democratic and Republican administrations. This misunderstanding is being manipulated by Mr. Trump, and his voters naively believe that the country will flourish under his next administration.

Mr. Trump's followers also ignore another little garbling: it is unnecessary and even impossible to elect all officials in the executive branch. They are appointed by the elected senior officials of the state and Mr. Trump has also appointed and removed them in due time.

I have read some stuff on Mr. Trump's campaign website. It sounds good, short, clear and simple – Mr. Trump is pointing people to their main enemy, the Deep State. It becomes clear why many Americans follow him - people like what he says and how he says it. Ignorant people are easily manipulated and ignore the fact that the Deep State is necessary and exists in any state. In their minds, Mr. Trump says everything right, so the current attempts of the US Department of Justice to convict him really look like political persecution to them.
American citizen’s general distrust of US courts and the scandals with chief judges also are of much help for Mr. Trump here.

So, why does Mr. Trump want «to obliterate the Deep State» so badly?

The first thing to stress is that "obliterating the Deep State" is impossible, just as you can't throw away a part from a car engine. There is nothing unnecessary there and then the engine won’t work. Well, Mr. Trump will not fire all "unelected" employees from his administration when he becomes the next president, won’t he? So this is just another populist statement. Any government creates a state apparatus, otherwise who will do all the current work?

What Mr. Trump really wants to do is simply replace all the officials he doesn't personally like with those he does. To do this, he needs to directly subordinate the entire federal executive branch in the country to the future president, and he is taking care of that in advance. Mr. Putin did the same in Russia a long time ago, but in addition to his executive branch, he managed to actually subordinate the legislative and judicial branches of power, and shut the mouth of the free press. So technically Mr. Putin is "president" but in reality he is «king” (or “tsar” in Russian). Mr. Trump wants to be a king, too, but the name is quite unpopular now, so he doesn't say it out loud.

Mr. Trump can't do without the Deep State, but as it stands, it ties his hands. So, it is necessary to be able to fire "undesirable" people without any hindrance and put in their places the "desirable" ones. This is "unnatural selection" and a direct path to dictatorship. That's how Mr. Putin acted in his time. If Mr. Trump had been able to do this at least with the executive branch during his first term, he might be the US president now.

«Everything for friends and law to the rest”.

Deep State will resist Mr. Trump and he knows that. There are still a lot of decent people working in the Deep State right now, real patriots of America, bearers of the American political mentality. They have their own viewpoint on American values and sense of self-worth and are a big problem for Mr. Trump.

It was the Deep State - government officials on the ground and judges, including members of the Republican Party - that prevented Mr. Trump from staging a small coup in the country and staying in the presidency in 2020-2021. For example, Mr. Trump's efforts to overturn the election results in the courts have been rejected by at least 86 judges - among them 38 judges appointed by Republicans, and several appointed by Mr Trump himself.

It is the "Deep State" represented by the Department of Justice that is now following established procedure and has so far indicted Mr. Trump for his attempted coup d'état.

Mr. Trump needs morons who obey his will, not the US Constitution and laws. He is clearly going to apply the laws selectively, i.e. "pardon" himself, his friends and "punish" all undesirable people quickly and by other people's hands. For this, he absolutely needs a "tame" Department of Justice and then he will be able to quickly start or stop the action of different laws/Constitution, or turn them off completely, when he wants it. This practice has long been existing in Ukraine and Russia and is aptly called "everything for friends and law to the rest".

For example, Russia's main oppositionist A. Navalny is in prison just because he criticized Mr. Putin himself. He was charged with something completely different, but this is how the justice works in Russia, and Mr. Navalny will probably stay in jail as long as Mr. Putin is at the helm of the country. That is a “selective application of the law» which Mr. Trump wants to try in the US.

The “selective justice» is undemocratic, unfair and very harmful to the state itself, but Mr. Trump's desire is understandable. He is an authoritarian leader and therefore openly admires Mr. Putin who managed to completely subjugate the Russian Deep State. Now Mr. Trump wants to do the same in advance at least with the US federal executive branch of power.

So, Mr. Trump has learned something from his presidency. Now he has correctly chosen his next enemy, and it is not only Mr. Biden and the Democrats, but also the Deep State Republicans, who are the bearers of the American democratic mentality, too. By the way, "democracy" and "republic" are rather close concepts, and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in its brochure calls the US «a representative democracy”.

What will happen next?

I think Mr. Trump came into this world with the main purpose of breaking up the US and he will most likely succeed the second time around. He is doing this not because he is an enemy of America, but because he is a silly emotional person, to put it mildly, who just naturally follows his inflated ego, unfulfilled ambitions and creates a Trump's personality cult in every possible way. Interestingly enough, a by-product of this self-realization may be the political and economic destruction of the US, because it can be done much more effectively from the office of the US president than from his current position. The Deep State has not yet succeeded in removing Mr. Trump from power by democratic methods and may lose the war declared by him.

So, what will happen next?
Mr. Trump will definitely keep intensifying the confrontation with the Deep State which is very slowly trying to indict him now in several cases. It is a matter of life or death for Mr. Trump. By confronting, he will exacerbate the internal problems and the contradictions of the US. Deep State (the Democrats and a part of the Republicans) will resist this, which, in fact, has been happening since 2016. At some point of confrontation Mr. Trump will call his followers to the barricades, they will take up arms (as “a well regulated Militia”, mentioned in the 2nd Amendment to the Сonstitution) and the real civil war starts in the US since there is too much political strife in the country and too many people have guns. This war will split the country into separate states and it's a very good thing that each state has its own infrastructure - executive, legislative and judicial branches of power.
In that case Mr. Trump will become the president of a non-existent country, just like M. Gorbachev once did in the USSR. God willing, Mr. Trump will not receive then a presidential pension from the federal budget.

If Mr. Trump and his fans win the civil war, America will face a political purge of Deep State and a Putin-type dictatorship.


To be fair, it is not the destroyer Mr. Trump is so good here as the creators - Republicans and Democrats together - are really bad. They don't provide anymore «Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness» for their citizens. Both major American parties have brought the country almost to a state of political paralysis, where right (e.g., convicting Mr. Trump for attempted coup d'etat) or wrong (e.g., raising the national debt ceiling) decision is impossible or hard to implement.

Historical examples and conclusions.

- М. Gorbachev also started a major reconstruction (“perestroika” in Russian) of the USSR in 1985 because he saw that the country had headed to a dead end and was stagnating. He tried to move the Soviet authoritarian and one-party system to more democratic one, and to make the "command socialist" economy a little more "market-oriented" one by allowing some elements of capitalism like free entrepreneurship.
In 1991, the USSR has ceased to exist, and Mr. Gorbachev forever remained its first and last president.

- A similar, but successful, major state reconstruction has been done by Deng Xiaoping in China in the 1980s. He became a paramount leader then and managed to completely overhaul the state system in just 20 years. This is very fast for a state, but it seems such things cannot be done slowly - the economic miracles of Singapore and South Korea also took about 20 years of focused work of the entire nation.

- Interestingly enough, Mr. Trump is going to do the opposite: to turn a conventionally "democratic” politics into authoritarian one, and to move conventionally "capitalistic" economy (which should rather be called a «crony-capitalistic” one) to make it more "command," i.e., socialistic. As soon as the capitalist and democratic USA goes towards socialism and authoritarianism, the unrest is inevitable and the collapse of the federals will come, especially under the leadership of an "impulsive" and "mentally unstable person with an inferiority complex” (as Mr. Trump was characterized by Russian intelligence agencies).


Economics and politics are two basic composing parts of any country. Both types of economy (capitalism and socialism) and politic structure (democracy and authoritarianism) basically work, but they shouldn’t be mixed too much. As soon as socialist and authoritarian country turns sharply towards capitalism and democracy - there is the possibility for unrest and collapse like the USSR fell apart in 1991. China avoided its collapse under the leadership of wise Deng Xiao-ping, but he had to crush several hundred students by tanks on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 for that.

The same may happen with capitalistic and democratic states because it is not about the state structure.
A big reconstruction of any established system is always fraught with the collapse of this system. Therefore, you need to know exactly why, what and how to reconstruct. Mr. Trump says he does know.

And I know that the description which Russian intelligence agencies have given to him is absolutely correct.