Trump vs. the Interagency

Joe Biden finished his vacation in California last week and began his next one in Rehoboth, Maryland, immediately. Newsmax’s James Rosen dared to put two and two together during a teleconference on Monday. “The President’s public comportment and the paucity of events on his public schedule, as on this very day, have fostered a public perception that Mr. Biden is increasingly disengaged from the presidency,” Rosen said on a teleconference with White House National Security Communication Adviser John Kirby. “Time and again, the question I am hearing from members of the general public, and which I put to you here, Admiral, is: Who is running the country?”

That is actually the key question in deciding for whom to vote this fall in the presidential race. For voting to matter, we have to have some sense that the people for whom we vote to make decisions are the people who make the decisions. If they aren’t, our vote really doesn’t matter. Harry Truman’s famous sign gracing the desk in the Oval Office said, “The buck stops here.” Whether voters agree with all of Donald Trump’s policies or not, the evidence points to the conclusion that voting for him alone results in a visible place where the buck will stop.   

In answer to James Rosen’s questions about whether Biden might simply be a “ceremonial figure,” Kirby pushed the party line, telling Rosen that Biden had spoken to India’s Prime Minister Modi today and Ukrainian President Zelensky last week. “He’s very much in command of making sure we can continue to protect our national security interests here at home and certainly overseas.”

That phrase “in command of making sure we can protect” has a bit too much wiggle room, doesn’t it? It’s not the same as a straight declaration that he is “in command” or “is acting as Commander in chief.” Perhaps Kirby’s verbal pirouettes are a sign of some compunction about such straightforward language. After all, Biden himself has been sending off signals that he’s not really even in command of himself for his entire Presidency. Even back in 2021, when he still stood in front of reporters and responded to questions, he would say things like, “I’m going to get in trouble with my staff” when he called on the “wrong” reporter. Or, “I’m not supposed to be answering all these questions.”

Who’s in charge of his staff? The safe bet is that Joe Biden has never really been in command even if he plays the role of Commander in chief on television. And many Americans know it. That’s what columnist David Marcus found when he went to the Carroll County 4-H fair in Maryland at the end of July and asked people if Joe were still in charge. “Nobody said yes,” wrote Marcus. “Not one single soul.” So, who was in charge? Most said Obama or some sort of “cabal” with Obama involved.

What about Kamala Harris, who had recently been anointed the new candidate? “Nobody I spoke to particularly liked Vice President Kamala Harris,” Marcus wrote, “but they also didn’t seem to hate her, it was more like she was irrelevant, just a figurehead who could almost be anyone.” Marcus’s revelation from his conversations was “that in some voters’ minds this has become a choice not between Trump and Harris but between Trump and the deep state.”

It’s not clear these voters are wrong. How does it work? Several of Marcus’s interviewees echoed the contention this writer has made that Biden’s first term was simply Obama’s third term. But whether Barack Obama is functioning as “President” or merely the “Chairman of the Party,” with the elected President functioning much like the similarly senescent late-Soviet Premiers and Susan Rice actually functioning as his chosen executive, it is clear that the org chart laid out in our Constitution does not reflect the way power actually flows.

What Democrats mean when they talk about “defending our democracy” is not democracy itself, and certainly not our constitutional arrangements. As legal scholar Jonathan Turley has written in reference to the most recent references to the Constitution as the “little piece of paper” written by the Founders, “a radical ‘reimagining’ of our constitutional system is a popular and growing call on the left,” one that seems to have more to do with “structure” than with “policy.” That’s not surprising that they want to officially change it, given that they have been trying to change it for almost a century by passing the power to make laws from the Legislative Branch to the administrative agencies that have continually expanded and slipped the leash of Executive control since Roosevelt’s New Deal.

That’s why there is so little concern on the hard left that the Harris-Walz sitcom swings from a lack of policy to the bizarre copying of Trump’s. It really doesn’t matter what she says or what she thinks. Her job is to get into the Oval Office and keep the system running.    

That’s also why, despite his lack of knowledge of the system, Trump was such a challenge in his term in office. He dared to think that the commander in chief actually commanded. That the chief executive actually executed. That administrative agencies and other unelected persons and groups shouldn’t exercise authority they don’t have under the Constitution. This daring to challenge what is known as the deep state or the interagency aroused the ire of those who belong to it.

Remember when Alexander Vindman, a former NSC official, testified about his role in the first impeachment hearings of Donald Trump. He said, “In the Spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency. This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy.” As former Special Forces officer Jim Hanson observed: “The interagency he mentions is a collection of staff from the major agencies like the State Department, Department of Defense, and intelligence agencies, who meet to coordinate and plan implementation of policy. They most certainly are not supposed to decide what policy the United States will follow. That is 100 percent the purview of the president.”

For Vindman and for many Democrats, the president and those acting for him were definitely outside influencers.

The reason why Democrats are so determined to keep Trump out of office is that he seems determined to actually do his job rather than to take orders from the interagency, Barack Obama, or any other unelected entity. Outraged recently by the Supreme Court’s recent ending of Chevron Deference, which had essentially given presumptive authority to interpret statutes to the agencies and not legislators or judges, Democrats are these days doubly outraged by Donald Trump’s determination to fire corrupt bureaucrats and reorganize the civil service so that they are actually responsive to the president who is chief executive.

Who is running the country? Right now, it’s hard to say. But with Trump, whatever policies you may agree or disagree with, you would know that they are not the product of a missive from the Obama house in Kalorama or the decision of a collection of people from agencies supposedly accountable to the president. A vote for Trump is a vote for being able to see where the buck actually stops.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.