President Ronald Reagan’s influence on the U.S. conservative movement greatly decreased in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president and ushered in a different type of right-wing politics that owed a lot to Patrick Buchanan and combined social conservatism with an emphasis on protectionism, isolationism and hyper-nationalism. The Atlantic’s George Packer, three years into Trump’s presidency, examines the ways in which Trump has reshaped the federal government and the White House — and not for the better.
Packer explains that when Trump was sworn into office in January 2017, many people in Washington, D.C. believed that he would be “outmatched by the vast government he had just inherited.” But it didn’t work out that way; instead, Trump refashioned government institutions in his own crude image, from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to the State Department.
“The new president was impetuous, bottomlessly ignorant, almost chemically inattentive, while the bureaucrats were seasoned, shrewd, protective of themselves and their institutions,” Packer recalls. “They knew where the levers of power lay and how to use them or prevent the president from doing so. Trump’s White House was chaotic and vicious, unlike anything in American history, but it didn’t really matter as long as ‘the adults’ were there to wait out the president’s impulses and deflect his worst ideas and discreetly pocket destructive orders lying around on his desk. After three years, the adults have all left the room.” Continue reading.