When Donald Trump became president the first time, he took over Washington like … Jimmy Carter.
Like Carter, Trump came to Washington almost by surprise. Like Carter, he knew almost no one in Washington. The big shots he did know were in the business, sports and entertainment worlds and not well matched to the petty skulduggery of Washington, and the people who were well-versed in the ways of Washington were unknown to him and contemptuous of him.
Like Carter, he attempted to paper over this problem by hiring people on the recommendation of others and by retaining a lot of people from the previous administration. Instead of providing a steadying hand to a fledgling administration, many in this phalanx took advantage of their positions to destabilize and undermine the administration.
We're now seeing proof through the documents Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released that people working in the Trump I White House betrayed him and the country by concocting "crimes" to try to slow down or end his presidency.
Trump learned from this. In his second administration, he has gotten rid of the dissenters. Prosecutors at the Department of Justice. Top people at the FBI, CIA, EPA, DHS and other alphabet agencies. Military leaders. Almost the entirety of the public health establishment.
Gone because they were in positions of executing administration policy but did not support carrying out those policies.
And what a difference it has made to have everyone pulling in the same direction. We finally have the full-throated, closed-border immigration policy conservative voters have supported but not received since before the time of Reagan.
We have murder rates and drug interdiction rates tumbling to levels not seen in a century or more. We didn't just talk about all the wasteful foreign aid spending, we named it, shamed it and eliminated it. Same with NPR and PBS -- named, shamed, eliminated.
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The regulatory agencies are buzzing with activity and purpose in a way they didn't in the first Trump term. Take FERC for example.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates pipelines and other energy delivery mechanisms. For much of Trump I, it was led by Neil Chatterjee, who was not on board with Trump's Drill-Baby-Drill agenda. As Trump was trying to expand natural gas and coal exploration in the US to ease energy prices, Chatterjee was backing the electric vehicle mandate, rooftop solar incentives and pro-green policies.
Chatterjee said he was fired because low-ranking White House officials saw a chance to take him down. But low-level people wouldn't have been able to take him down if he had not been opposing Trump on policy matters.
Indeed, reporting confirmed that his demotion stemmed in part from his refusal to comply with the administration's governmentwide directives against diversity training programs -- a defiance Chatterjee himself confirmed with two words: "Guilty as charged."
Chatterjee has since shown his true colors, cashing in as chief government affairs officer at solar company Palmetto and as an adviser to KKR's global infrastructure team, which has deployed over $15 billion into unreliable renewable energy projects. Seems like for Chatterjee, the Trump FERC chairmanship was a credential to be monetized, not a mandate to be carried out.
Now the agency, under the energetic Laura Swett, is streamlining environmental reviews, approving and pushing for more in the way of pipelines, pushing for new generation of all kinds, addressing the enormous power needs of AI data centers in a way that doesn't increase rates of households and improving load forecasting.
A whirlwind of activity all geared toward making America's bountiful energy resources available to its fast-growing economy at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers.
The Biden administration did the same thing -- reached a point where its person in charge at FERC was not on the same page as the rest of the administration. Biden first appointed Richard Glick, a hard-liner on environmental policy who came close to shutting down pipeline activity into New England at one point.
Later, as it became apparent energy policy had become a weak spot for Biden, he fired Glick and replaced him with Willie L. Phillips Jr., who changed the agenda from one centered on global warming to a focus on grid modernization, transmission planning and natural gas/LNG.
FERC is just one agency -- there are many more -- that demonstrate it's a completely different ballgame when everyone is pulling in the same direction. On the same team as the man elected by the people to carry out an agenda the voters themselves supported.
He tried it the Jimmy Carter way, and he ended up with a sclerotic administration that spent most of its time fighting off faux scandals. He admitted he was wrong and changed course, and the energy emanating from his agencies shows it. Neither Trump nor any other president owes it to anyone to hire people who don't support his policies.
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