A Very Different Transition

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in 2016 went like every other presidential transition in modern history. The old administration had extended meetings with the new, and old agency heads and their staff trained the new ones. It was managed by Chris Christie and then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

It was funded by the General Services Administration and the incoming team received emergency drills, confidential documents, security briefings, and training sessions on emergency protocols. The FBI was brought on board to vet all new hires.

That’s because the incoming administration believed that the system worked. It had won and therefore would be in charge. That’s how it is supposed to work in the United States.

The idea of this process is to ensure continuity in government from one administration to the other.

In normal times, all of this would be a good idea. The Founders set up a structural system of government with minimal functions, stable law, checks and balances, and established elections for president every four years to ensure that the chief executive served with the people’s consent. Most functions of government were handled by the states, in any case.

There was never supposed to be a need for a fundamental regime change. We merely changed administrators and members of Congress. The rest was supposed to take care of itself, which is why it would seem to make sense that the old administration trains the new one, and a permanent staff of experts and civil service employees helps the new kids learn the ropes from those with experience.

And yet here we are. The Trump administration’s mandate from voters is not just for a change in personnel. The mandate is in fact for fundamental regime change within the framework of democracy. The administrative state, which is nowhere found in the Constitution, has over time developed far more power than elected leaders.

That absolutely must change, as voters made clear in November 2024. It was yet another case, just like in 2016, of the candidate winning whom nearly the whole of mainstream media believed would not win, and of the whole of what anyone would call the establishment disfavoring the result. The victory was so overwhelming as to amount to a primal scream against government as usual.

In this case, it makes no sense for the machinery that the incoming administration wants to overthrow to be in charge of the transition.

Remember that this is not Team Trump’s first rodeo. Last time, it went along with all the protocols, funding, systems, and sessions. The White House staff members went through day after day of lectures from government experts on how Washington works. They sat through intelligence briefings. They were schooled in protocols for the management of nuclear war, biological warfare, natural disasters, and pandemics.

They put up with all the PowerPoint presentations, exhortations, manuals, lists, and introductions to people who really run the government. They assumed that once the president was sworn in, he would in fact be the president and those whom he appointed would be in charge.

Almost immediately, however, it became clear that the permanent government was waging some kind of an information war against the elected one. The media worked closely with deeply embedded staff in intelligence and agencies to put out the word that Trump was illegitimately elected due to supposed Russian interference. This began immediately with a bang and put those in the new administration in a tight spot, forever defending themselves against absurd charges that they all knew to be untrue.

When that finally ended, new forms of trolling began, each more severe than the last. The Trump administration always had a loose hold on power due to all of this, but it was finally and fatally upended with the onset of respiratory pandemic. The proposed solution to this, according to all the experts deeply embedded in government, was to wreck the whole of the Trump economy while waiting for a shot to inoculate the public.

Along with that came record unemployment, new permissions and mandates for mail-in ballots, school and business closures, and wild uses of power that the new Trump administration never authorized. The bureaucracies were ruling the country on their own and following the edicts of interests and powers behind the World Health Organization (WHO). Most of the Trump administration’s last year in office was spent trying to claw back power from the WHO.

Finally, in July of 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was pulling itself out of the WHO completely. But that made no difference at all. YouTube had already announced in April that it would delete any content that contradicted the WHO, and it continued to enforce that policy for years. So far as I know, it still does.

After leaving office in January 2021, the Trump team went to work trying to figure out what the heck had happened in the first term to cause everything to go so wrong, or, more specifically, what enabled the administration’s authority to be so thoroughly subverted from within.

It concluded that the real problem began with the transition itself. That was when the permanent bureaucracy first asserted its power over the incoming administration. That’s when the deep state got its hooks in.

This time, the team has a very different plan. It is being managed by trusted members of Trump’s inner circle. They have not allowed the General Services Administration to manage any aspect of the transition. They have done this by refusing to accept any money from any government source. Instead, the transition has been entirely privately funded, with methods deployed to make sure that the funding sources are not tainted by deep state contacts. The explicit purpose has been to avoid subversion.

It’s been the same with FBI vetting. The incoming Trump administration simply does not trust the process and for good reason. It was the FBI that had spied on the campaign and even raided Trump’s own home. Furthermore, it worked with other agencies to deploy myriad forms of lawfare for years.

This transition is without precedent. The permanent staff of government itself only became the U.S. norm starting in 1883, and it has grown every decade since. At some point in the past, the elected leaders became more like decorations than real rulers of government. The Trump administration cannot achieve its objectives with this status quo.

This is the reason for this very different transition. It is a good sign and symbol of what might be coming. We might in fact experience a much-needed change of regime in Washington through exactly the system and process that the Founding Fathers set up. The second term of Trump seems determined to avoid repeating the obvious errors of the last time around.

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Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.