Democracy is dead. Long live the Technocrats!
Around lunchtime on Monday 20th January 2025 in Washington DC, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the Republic of the United States of America.
While there will be plenty of pomp and ceremony, gala dinners, parades, even Trump doing his ‘dad dance’ to gay icons The Village People – the business of government will happen too.
There is a lot of uncertainty about what his policy moves will be – Wall Street and the bond markets are watching nervously – but how Trump 2.0 governs is perhaps going to be even more of a surprise.
Traditionally, the new President is welcomed onto Capitol Hill by lawmakers who receive his signed proposals for his nominees for the top jobs in the administration.
Typically, Congress has already received and reviewed the paperwork and the transfer of papers is purely procedural. But this time not all the paperwork has been shared, the resumes and back stories of the nominees haven’t been explored, and some of the incoming President’s selections are not popular amongst elected officials.
Under normal circumstances the nominees are well known to Senators and Congressmen and women, either coming from their ranks or having been around Washington for decades already. This time though a new slate of names from beyond the Beltway are being touted by Trump.
Some of his picks are unusual. His choice for Defence Secretary is a TV newscaster who has some questionable tattoos, faces allegations of sexual misconduct, binge drinking and mismanagement of veterans’ charities in which he held leadership roles.
His choices for Secretary of State and National Intelligence Director will have to explain their previous stances on the leadership of Russia, Syria and the war in Ukraine. And the choice for Health and Human Services is an anti-vaxxer with no medical pedigree.
Senate hearings are still on-going into the character of the nominees, and as the upper house has the power of ‘Advice and Consent’ – they could, with as few as three GOP senators withholding support – decline the nominees.
Trump will not like that.
He didn’t get to be President for a second time to be told by some bunch of elected officials that he can’t do whatever he wants, whenever.
And that is why Trump will also have a second portfolio of papers he will be signing as soon as he is sworn in – Executive Orders.
These are the policy positions and priorities a President can issue that bypass having to go through Congress. Trump has signalled he may be bringing as many as 100 of these orders to address 60 campaign pledges on day one.
These are expected to include commitments to complete the Border Wall, to deport a million illegal immigrants, announcements on school gender policies, the removal of workplace protections for government employees, and possibly trade tariffs. The forecast is these orders could have a total cost of $100billion which Congress will have to find and approve.
Clearly this isn’t business as usual.
The new President wants his own people in the big departments, he wants to govern by diktat, and he is listening to a Mar-a-Largo ‘poolside cabinet ‘of tech bros, bankers and media moguls rather than the professional politicians and civil servants.
Buying into the global trend in ‘anti-politics’ – a movement Trump himself started in 2016 with his ‘Drain the Swamp’ campaign rhetoric – Trump is doubling down on his disdain for politics and the institutions which govern the nation.
He isn’t the first to believe the private sector is better at doing things than the state. Thatcher and Reagan stripped the powers away from elected officials in their blind belief that the market is right – always.
But Trump’s version of a technocracy has an additional flavour.
Not only does he prefer to have people who are first and foremost loyal to him, untroubled by obsequious acts and comfortable with servile adoration, he also enjoys the chaos caused by not following the rules.
The appointment of Elon Musk to lead a non-governmental organisation called Department of Government Efficiency, which has no power, authority or budget, has left law-makers unsure how to respond.
Trump and Musk have waded into global geo-political issues, involved themselves in other nation’s affairs lambasting world leaders through late night all-caps-rants on their social media properties – Truth Social and X – leaving ambassadors, government relations and business leaders scrambling.
Trump revels in this uncertainty.
His career has been based on him making snap decisions or doing the unusual – whether that was appointing Rapper Lil Jon to the C-suite on his TV show or switching his view of his National Security Advisor from ‘the great John Bolton’ to ‘a wacko’ in a matter of months.
Trump likes to be a headline. Doing the unexpected gets attention. ‘Man Bites Dog’ works.
If you are a fan of ‘The Traitor’ you will know that chaos is a great distractor. It draws the eye away from the real issues or challenges and in our social media amplified world quickly causes false storms.
Chaos has its place. In football and war it is good. The element of surprise is a positive.
In national government and macro-economic policy, not so much.
So, we await the Trump Inauguration.
We are holding our breath in anticipation for his acceptance speech.
We are peering from behind the sofa to see what his scores of executive orders will deliver.
It will be a wild ride. It will be chaotic. But it won’t be boring!
