People talk rather loosely about the president “running the country.” In recent years, the president hasn’t even “run” the White House, much less the whole of these United States. And I’m not just talking about the Biden years. The White House staff, like that of the executive branch generally, has grown to the point that it cannot be “run” by anyone. It shares that characteristic with virtually every other organization or institution that comprises more than a hundred people.

     Chief executives, whether in politics or in business, seldom “run” anything. It’s made impossible by the relentless, reliable operation of the SNAFU Principle.

     [A] man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.
     The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

     [Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus Trilogy]

     While the above is somewhat overstated, its central insight has an explanatory power akin to that of a law of physics. My recent observations on the distinction between knowledge and belief are also relevant here.

     Please keep the above in mind as you read what follows.

     Politics – broadly speaking, those mechanisms by which persons and organizations contest with one another for coercive power – creates an appearance, a veneer, over the State and its actions. That veneer has two functions:

1. To put a face to the power structure, thus personalizing it;
2. To deflect public attention from what’s really going on.

     This was never before quite so important as it was during the Usurpation (a.k.a. the Biden Administration). Indeed, the whole function of the presidency during those years was to put a kindly-old-grandfather veneer over the operations of a viciously anti-American regime, one of the worst this country has ever suffered. In that connection, the Democrats’ strategists chose their figurehead cleverly. It was hard to look at Joe Biden and attribute the kind and degree of villainy to him that was going on behind the curtains. It was America’s great good fortune that the reality became too blatant to be concealed behind that avuncular face.

     The disjunction between politics and policy had never been more dramatic. However, it wasn’t a sudden change; that gap has grown ever wider since the election of Abraham Lincoln. If the Trump Restoration is to correct the Usurpers’ depredations, the gap must shrink near to zero.

     Happily, that seems to be the case.

     “Hire people smarter than yourself; then don’t sell yourself, sell your company.” — Mark McCormack

     President Trump has admitted that during his first term, he listened to a lot off bad advice from persons he trusted, but who were not in alignment with his goals. In other words, the politics that put him in office did not result in policy of the sort his supporters had hoped for. Behind the political veneer were many thousands of people working at purposes opposed to the MAGA philosophy. In recognition of that failure, Trump has empowered one of the most successful men of our time to take a wrecking ball to the Establishment that strove so successfully to mislead him.

     It has developed that not only is Elon Musk brilliant, he’s in accord with Trump’s sentiments and the policies they imply. Bureaudrones who think they can “put one over on him” are almost guaranteed to be wrong. In consequence, the politics / policy gap is dwindling. What Trump’s supporters voted for is what we’re getting, at least for now.

     Of course that could change; nothing in the world of statecraft is guaranteed. Much will depend on whether the political dynamic kicks in at sufficient intensity to move Trump to listen to disloyal voices, as happened in his first term. Though they appear to have been wisely chosen, the appointed heads of the various Cabinet departments may yet seek to preserve and enlarge their various baronies. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy and Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics have not been suspended or annulled.

     One of the requirements for keeping the politics / policy gap near zero is what’s been called transparency in recent years. Today, our visibility into federal developments is at a high for the century past. That too could change, but at present any interested American can see what’s going on in Musk’s DoGE, very nearly in real time. The drama of events is keeping a lot of us sufficiently interested, especially with the Democrats howling ever more loudly and entertainingly about their rice bowls being overturned.

     Strangely – and seemingly in contradiction to the above – the countermeasure for the leftward drift of a bureaucratic system is the ruthless exercise of power from above.

     The president, ex officio, has plenipotentiary power over the executive branch of the federal government. Should he choose to fire any one – or all – of its participants, whether appointed or employed – he can make it happen. No law on the books, including any of the Civil Service acts, can prevent it. That is the president’s trump card.

     Such a firing may not be called a firing. Appointees can be induced to resign. Bureaucrats can be suspended, laid off, or diverted to thumb-twiddling duties without being fired de jure. Other measures to prevent a widening of the politics / policy gap are also applicable, such as the withholding of operating funds or the imposition of audits and associated procedures. President Trump has already exercised some of those measures. I have little doubt that we’ll see more as time passes; Trump knows he only has four years to operate.

     As for Trump’s supporters and our aspirations for a renewal of freedom and Constitutionally limited government, our part remains what it has always been: vigilance. It’s what the maintenance of freedom has always required.