The Deep State Prepares for a Trump Victory

By Jeffrey Tucker, EPOCH TIMES    9 April 2024

Commentary

We’ve all wondered if the fix is already in. Given the irregularities of the last election, and the manner in which the whole of the U.S. establishment rallied around one side, maybe a Biden victory in November is a foregone conclusion.

I’m guilty of believing this. I’ve doubted every prediction that Donald Trump or RFK, Jr. can win. This is not because they won’t get votes. It’s because those votes might not matter enough.

The power of haters is awesome and ubiquitous. The whole of legacy media, government, corporate tech, pharma, and both the administrative state and the deep state are dedicated to keeping them and their supporters from power.

We don’t even know if elections really work anymore. It’s entirely possible, in this view, that millions will slog to the polls in November and do their duty in what will only end up as theater. The regime controls the ballots, surely, and nothing can overcome that. A second Biden term, the most unpopular president in my lifetime, is inevitable, in this view. The system is too broken to generate any other outcome.

Admit it: you have been tempted by this outlook too.

Well, I’m here to bring you some good news. The deep state has blinked. I will present evidence to you that the bad guys are actually preparing for a full-blown assault on administrative state hegemony. They are working to protect themselves against a victory by someone other than Joe Biden.

Will it work? I don’t know but what’s super critical is that they are preparing. If it were not possible to win, they wouldn’t bother. In other words, this is very good news!

The evidence comes from a largely unnoticed press release from the Office of Personnel Management. The legacy media did not report on this at all.

It reads as follows:

“The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today announced a final rule that clarifies and reinforces long-standing protections and merit system principles for career civil servants,” says the press release.

It goes on to explain that this rule change makes it much more difficult or even impossible for any new president to reclassify “civil servants” as being under the control of the president. Instead, their jobs are permanent and thus protected against any efforts by a future president to reclassify anyone working for the federal government. None can be fired.

In particular, the press release explains, this is designed to thwart another attempt to change their employment status, as happened in November 2020.

“In the first week of the Biden-Harris Administration, President Biden revoked an Executive Order issued by the previous Administration that risked altering our country’s long-standing merit-based civil service system, by creating a new excepted service schedule, known as ‘Schedule F,’ and directing agencies to move potentially large swathes of career employees into this new excepted service status. This attempt would have stripped career civil servants of their civil service protections that ensure that decisions to hire and fire are based on merit, not political considerations.”

The “previous administration” means of course the Trump White House, which issued the greatest executive order in a hundred years.

After four years of being subverted and thwarted by the civil service bureaucracy, the White House finally figured out the core problem. There are more than 2 million permanent bureaucrats, ensconced in 430 agencies, who imagine themselves to live outside the democratic system and the U.S. Constitution itself. They believe they are the state and the elected leaders are mere decoration.

Trump’s executive order insisted that every agency do an internal audit and ferret out any employee who has something to do with making or interpreting policy; that is, anyone whose work impacts on whether the president actually has control of the executive department. All those employees would be reclassified as Schedule F, meaning that they could be replaced if need be.

That’s it. That’s the whole order. Maybe it doesn’t seem like much but it was actually brilliant. The Trump administration is the first to discover the great secret of American public life, which is that the administrative state has taken on a life of its own. After years of trying, the Trump White House finally happened upon a key lever to gain back control for the people. It’s as simple as that.

The Washington, D.C. political press freaked out. It was as if a president had found the engine room and the one switch that controls the whole thing. That was never supposed to happen. This produced mayhem inside the bureaucracy, and a doubling and tripling down on the conviction that he could never win a second term, lest this order be carried out.

That’s why one of the very first actions of the Biden administration was to repeal this executive order. That action made it very clear that Biden’s loyalties were with the deep state first and foremost. He would protect their jobs and power above all else. In fact, the OPM press release brags about this.

At issue here is a phrase from the initial Trump order. Any employee would be reclassified who deals with “confidential, policy determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating.” Notice this word confidential. This would apply to the whole of the intelligence community, perhaps. So wait, are we saying that the president should be in charge of the CIA, FBI, NSA, NSC, and the entire security apparatus, even to the point that he could fire anyone? Maybe so!

Such a situation would be intolerable to the bad guys. From their point of view, this would fundamentally upend the functioning of government in America.

Let’s face it. If the OPM and the whole of the bureaucracy believed there was no threat from Donald Trump or RFK, Jr., such a rule change would not be necessary. They believe it is necessary, which implies that the civil service thinks that the rising populist movement is a genuine threat that could succeed in taking back the country. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.

What is the OPM? It was founded out of the Pendleton Act of 1883, which started the permanent bureaucracy in the United States. With it came the Civil Service Commission, the first name of what later was called the OPM.

Until that time, and under the Constitution, the U.S. president had full control of the bureaucracy. The new president would typically replace a vast number of bureaucrats with loyalists. This was denounced as the “spoils system” but it could also be called simple democracy in which the people rule themselves through their elected representatives.

The permanent class of rules grew through wars and crises over a hundred years to become the government that cares not a whit for who is technically elected or otherwise appointed as agency heads. As a matter of habit, they have come to ignore all the comings and goings of the people elected by the population. Elections are just a distraction to them.

The essential point: Donald Trump and RFK, Jr. represent a genuine threat to the gang that has subverted and nearly wrecked this country. Now we know that this threat is real, else we would not see these efforts to entrench the bad guys and protect them against all conceivable threats.

As this proves again, the main struggle alive in this country and all over the world is the one between the people and the deep state consisting of a vast network of elites in government, media, the corporate world, banking and finance, private foundations, and global bureaucracies, all working for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

It’s a battle for control, and it is the underlying dynamic that shapes our lives right now.

The bad guys are scared. Now we know this for sure, or they would not be trying to pre-rig the system against fundamental change. The elites believe based on long experience that they can always outwit the rest of the population. We shall see.

It’s going to be brutal before and after the election. There will be one or several October surprises. If Donald Trump wins, the onset of Winter will kick off propaganda like you have never seen. As the inauguration approaches, absolute hysteria will dawn. The COVID racket will seem like child’s play. Every day and every hour after will consist of wild attempts to stop the administration from functioning. What a time to be alive.