The departure of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen prompted an orgy of pompous bloviating from the Trump-hating Democrats and their establishment media allies. There was endless, hysterical talk of a “purge,” “chaos” and “dysfunction.”
But there’s a serious point underlying all of this. It’s about the fundamental purpose of government, which is to get things done that help the American people. In that context, take a look to this idiotic remark from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein: “The purge of senior leadership at the Department of Homeland Security is unprecedented and a threat to our national security.”
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No, senator. That is precisely wrong. It’s not President Trump’s removal of ineffective people from the government that’s the threat to our national security. It’s that there were so many useless people there in the first place.
And this is a central point for positive populism. It’s not enough to have a leader at the top. You need people who believe in the populist revolution at every level of government — in Congress and especially in the bureaucracy. Because it is the bureaucracy, the administrative state, where, contrary to the Constitution, power really lies.
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In the long term, President Trump is changing that by appointing judges who will apply the Constitution and rein in administrative power. But right now, the president is trying to deliver his promises while he has a Congress, judges and a bureaucratic machine that is actively fighting his agenda. That’s why he’s talking about sending illegal immigrant detainees to sanctuary cities, another opportunity for the establishment idiots to lose their minds, as they unerringly do, over style instead of substance.
This is President Trump at his absolute best, disrupting the failed establishment because all he cares about is doing his job and delivering his promises. Of course the president can – and should – get rid of people in the administration who are ineffective, or worse, effective at blocking what he was elected to do. These changes are not chaos, but progress.
“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” Trump tweeted. “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy — so this should make them very happy!”
“How dare he say that? How dare Trump overrule his own officials in a tweet,” the establishment harrumphed.
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But all the president is doing is confronting Democrats — and the politicized liberal judges who have backed them — with the consequences of their own sanctuary city posturing. It is simply the immigration policy version of the abolition of the state and local tax deduction in the Trump tax reform, which finally confronted high-spending, high-taxing blue states like California with the consequences of their own fiscal incontinence.
As far as I’m concerned, all this is President Trump at his absolute best, disrupting the failed establishment because all he cares about is doing his job and delivering his promises. Of course the president can — and should — get rid of people in the administration who are ineffective, or worse, effective at blocking what he was elected to do. These changes are not chaos, but progress — and we need more of it, not less.
Purge the bureaucracy. Purge the courts. And let’s purge Congress, too, by electing a new army of populists in 2020. Mr. President, keep purging on!
Adapted from Steve Hilton’s monologue from “The Next Revolution” on April 14, 2019.
