by Scott McKay
This is, on the surface and even a little below it, a column about Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and the 2024 GOP primary. But it’s about more than that, and if you’ll leave the partisan preferences at the door for a bit, hopefully we can come to some sort of larger understanding that we’ll need as the next presidential race looms.
All we’re really talking about this week is the indictment of Trump down in Miami and its political ramifications — none of which are good. Is this a pristine example of weaponized government? Did Trump put himself in the position to get indicted? Is this actually a good thing for him? Does it force Republican voters to rally around Trump in a way they might otherwise not do, and is that the design of the Machine that controls our institutions of power? Is the Pump-and-Dump-Trump strategy real? Is it inevitable?
Those things are easy to get caught up in. We just had a historic, and very frightening, development in American politics. Lots of presidential figures have done things that could very well have put them in legal jeopardy; never before was it thought a good idea to prosecute them on a partisan basis. Then when it does finally happen, it’s over … documents in boxes and a dispute over whether Trump has the right to keep them.
It’s all very bizarre, and because of that, it’s titillating. We’re not likely to get past it anytime soon, and because we aren’t, Trump is sucking all the oxygen out of the nascent 2024 campaign. One wonders whether Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who just threw his hat into the ring for some reason, has any clue what he’s doing, or whether those advising him aren’t just trying to grift their way into a few months of paychecks.And all of it is wrong.
I already said this week that I don’t see any real legitimacy in Trump’s indictment. It’s clearly political, and it’s clearly an abuse of power. You cannot let Hillary Clinton destroy government documents that she mishandled on a private email server with no consequences, then send Main Justice down to Florida with guns blazing at Trump for his recalcitrance with the bureaucrats at the National Archives. It doesn’t matter whether Trump was less cooperative than the law requires; the whole thing stinks of a banana republic, and it’s not good enough for the United States of America.
But we need to understand that this is not about Trump, and just because they’re after him doesn’t mean he’s America’s political Jesus.
Because our politicians in this country — especially not in this current era — are not divine. They’re people. Most of them aren’t even particularly good people.
At this point, I honestly don’t care if Trump is the nominee — which is what the polls say is pretty darned likely — or if it’s DeSantis. What I care about is that (1) we’ve got to have a Republican nominee who is capable and willing to do the things necessary to win in November 2024 — whether that means harvesting ballots, hiring every lawyer in America to engage in lawfare against local Democrat vote-fraud machines, kissing all the babies, lying to the rubes, whatever — and (2) that nominee, once he wins, had better be willing to take action.
Don’t take this as an endorsement of DeSantis, but Phil Wegmann at RealClearPolitics had a fascinating piece about the governor’s plans to tear the DOJ and the FBI down to the studs and rebuild them into something that looks and works very, very differently than what we have now. A quick excerpt:
[DeSantis] has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”
But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters, RealClearPolitics is first to report.
“We’re not going to let all this power accumulate in Washington, we’re going to break up these agencies,” DeSantis said during a private strategy session over the weekend, excerpts of which were obtained exclusively by RCP. He vowed in that call to order “some of the problematic components of the DOJ” be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly “shipped to other parts of the country.”
This fits with one of the central themes of the DeSantis campaign, namely that he’d be “an energetic executive,” a president with the focus and attention to detail necessary to make the most of his Article II powers. On the stump, the governor regularly wins applause from primary voters for promising not just to wage war on the so-called deep state, but to end it.
The goal, according to senior outside advisors, ought to be returning the DOJ and FBI to a more limited “pre-9/11” mission. Republicans were outraged last Friday when former President Trump was indicted for mishandling classified documents. DeSantis has condemned that move, and his campaign scheduled the Saturday conference call “not knowing,” he told advisors, that there would be “news last night.” But the governor is also intimately familiar with conservative gripes about political bias inside President Biden’s Department of Justice. They have been central to his campaign.
“We’ve seen throughout this country that the DOJ and the FBI are controlled by one faction of our society,” DeSantis said on the call, pointing to how those agencies were “going after pro-life activists,” wrongfully investigating parents at school board meetings “who are concerned about things like critical race theory, and forcing kids to wear masks,” and “colluding with tech companies to censor information such as what they did with the 2020 election.”
This is the kind of thing we’ve got to have. If it’s DeSantis in charge of it, great. If it’s Trump, that’s fine too. The point is, it has to be done.
And not just with the DOJ. The Department of Energy needs an enema. The EPA, or a lot of what it does now, ought to be DOA. The Departments of Education and Homeland Security, the IRS, and practically all the rest of them need major, strategic, and structural reorganizations.
We can’t just elect some guy who talks about draining the Swamp. We need to see the pumps and the hoses. Because what we’ve found is that the Swamp will fight back with a ferocity most normal people aren’t going to have the fortitude to stand up to.
Joy Pullman had a great piece at the Federalist this week making the painfully true statement that nominating DeSantis instead of Trump won’t make the current unpleasantness and politicized chaos in our culture and government go away. Pullman noted that it’s incredibly likely DeSantis would go through all the same tribulations Trump has, because, at the end of the day, those aren’t about Trump or his actions. They’re about a corrupt Machine drunk with power and psychotic in defense of its control over us. And DeSantis and Trump, and most of the others running for president on the GOP side (with some pretty obvious exceptions), threaten that control.
So they must be destroyed.
The best contribution Trump made in his first term was to illuminate just how destructive and dangerous the Machine is. One gets the impression that Trump was as surprised as anyone to see the true depth of the abyss, and that he wasn’t quite prepared for the magnitude of the task he took on. That’s the source of a critique, obviously; in this space, I’ve talked about the major mistake it was not to fire Anthony Fauci as soon as COVID reared its head, but the hiring of Christopher Wray as the FBI director and tolerating of Mark Milley as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were other good examples of how he was in over his head at times.
Trump can make a pretty good argument for how he can put that hard-won education to work in killing the Deep State in a second term. DeSantis can argue that he’s made the kinds of transformative changes in Florida that need to be made in D.C. Both of those arguments are valid, and we can go either way.
But what matters is not the arguments. What matters is that whoever ends up bearing the standard carries the damn thing all the way to the enemy’s camp and then plants it right in the middle.
We’ve got to have action. We’ve got to have accomplishment. We have to win in 2024, and then whoever we put into the White House has to use every lever of power he’s got to co-opt and then break down the Machine. It’s our only chance at survival as a constitutional republic, and we cannot accept anything less.
Actions. Not personalities. Demand a plan to reorganize the federal government from every single one of these candidates. Hell, if all the plans coalesce into one, that’s even better. Then we’ll know what to hold the nominee to.
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Additionally, he’s the author of the new book The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, available at Amazon.com. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his three Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition and Retribution at Amazon. Scott’s other project is The Speakeasy, a free-speech social and news app with benefits.
Photo “Ron DeSantis” by Federal Government of the United States. Background Photo “U.S. Department of Justice” by Coolcaesar. CC BY-SA 3.0.
