In President Trump’s remarkable interview on Fox & Friends yesterday [Check the interview out here], there was an interesting moment. When President Trump complained about the FBI, host Steve Doocy told him, “But Mr. President — it’s your Justice Department.” For a brief moment, Donald Trump conceded the point.
It got me to thinking: There really is a Deep State, isn’t there? You don’t have to be a believer in conspiracy theories to subscribe to it. The “Deep State” merely refers to the Obama (and likely Bush) holdovers who don’t want President Trump to change anything we do — not with Iran and North Korea, not with spending on food stamps, not with taxes, not with EPA regulations, and certainly not holding crooks like Hillary Clinton responsible for at least one of the countless laws they’ve broken. Even Trump’s own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, seems impotent to do anything.
So where does that leave us? If the Democratic Party effectively controls the federal government even when a Republican like Donald Trump is in control of the entire Executive Branch, then of what use is the federal government for the half of the country that elected him? If the federal government and Congress represent only Democratic Party interests no matter who’s in charge, what will the millions do with their anger and frustration?
It’s a sobering question. It goes beyond Donald Trump’s presidency. Because if you think about it, the last time half the country saw no reason to support the federal government’s legitimacy was at the time of the Civil War.
I don’t want to see it happen. But I don’t know the solution. Well, I know the solution — restoring our original Constitutional framework of limited government, but I don’t think a majority yet want to do so. What I do know is we can’t go on like this. “Draining the swamp” might not be possible without a radical change in the philosophy of government most of us still have. So the real question might not be whether or not President Trump can make it politically over the coming 6-7 years. It might be whether the country can ever come together on the role we really want the federal government to play in our lives.
To me, the question is simple: Does government exist to protect individual rights — the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and so forth — or does the federal government exist to expand the interests of constituency groups who seek something for nothing? As of this moment, the federal government still does the latter. Check out the latest budget for details.
If President Trump fails at draining the swamp, we will have a much bigger crisis on our hands than what we see today.
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