It has become ever clearer that President-elect Donald Trump was voicing a key attribute of his next administration when, on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, he got up from the ground after being shot, punched his fist in the air, and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight!”
Pundits looking for what unites his nominees for senior positions note, among other things, their loyalty to their boss and their history and promise of being disruptors. These are true. But another crucial characteristic is that they appear to recognize the need, and accept the challenge, to fight, fight, fight.
Fight against what? Fight against the usual way of doing things in Washington. Fight against acceptance of America’s managed decline. Fight against corrosive groupthink and left-liberal assumptions. Most of all, fight against determined and deadly obstruction from what is variously referred to as “the swamp,” the “administrative state,” and the “deep state.”
Whatever you call this malign object, which has been immovable for decades, it is not a uniquely American menace. It afflicts most nations in the developed Western world. These are, at least notionally, functioning democracies, but in them, government is largely and improperly devolved from constitutional institutions to unelected oligarchs.
In Britain, power is in the hands of what under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was referred to as the “permanent civil service,” which she fought, for the most part successfully. It is now known in evocative English demotic as “the Blob.” This is a good name for the shapeless, ever-expanding, and all-consuming collection of agencies, opinion formers, and manipulative bureaucrats who are, according to former Prime Minister Liz Truss, “a lot less sackable” than the head of the government.
Whichever party wins the election, the leftward drift of the country continues. The speed may change, but the direction does not.
Truss’s record-short 44-day premiership is the subject of a gripping short documentary that debuted Dec. 10 on the Wall Street Journal website. It was made by Michael Pack, who has bitter personal experience of the deep state’s bloody opposition to conservative administrations. He was notoriously defamed and obstructed from confirmation for three years after Trump picked him in March 2017 to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
In extensive interviews, including with Truss, Pack documents how she was brought down largely by the Bank of England, which was made “independent” of politics during the premiership of Tony Blair, and the Office for Budget Responsibility, which was set up by reliably Blob-like Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010. The bank created a cliff-edge financial deadline for Truss to abandon her Thatcherite economic policies. The OBR leaked financial numbers suggesting her plans would produce a 72 billion-pound budget deficit.
The latter projection turned out to be false, but the deliberate OBR leak was an effective shot below the waterline of HMS Truss. As Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former member of Truss’s government, noted, “We’d spent 400 billion pounds bailing people out of COVID, and nobody batted an eyelid. Suddenly at 72 billion pounds … that’s the end of the world.”
Some spending, most spending, is approved of by the Blob. What it won’t abide, however, is spending that reduces pressure to reverse conservative economic policy. So Truss capitulated, abandoned her entire growth agenda, and soon resigned.
The relevance of this story to the incoming Trump administration is pointed. Kwasi Kwarteng, former U.K. chancellor of the exchequer and author of Truss’s economic agenda, whom the PM offered as a sacrifice to the Blob by sacking him, said of her resignation, “She felt very uncomfortable in that situation. But somebody more bloody-minded, perhaps Boris Johnson or somebody else, would have lasted longer because they would have refused for longer to resign.”
The point is that conservatives who wish to govern, whether it is on the other side of the Atlantic or this side, must be bloody-minded. They must be prepared to brush off discomfort if they are to survive and succeed. That is why Trump needs nominees who will fight, fight, fight.
Some, like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, were very poor choices, and his quick demise may have put blood in the water, encouraging more attacks by the Blob, the deep state.
I asked Truss how, on a scale of 1 to 10, she rated the strength of the Blob she faced compared to what Thatcher faced back in the 1980s. The difference is huge. Back then it was a 4, but now it is a 9.
“We need to change the system,” she laments in Pack’s documentary, “not just in the United Kingdom, but right across the West, because I see similar tendencies in the United States.”
American voters also saw it on Nov. 5. For their opinion to matter, for democracy to prevail, the next administration, subsequent administrations, and the people of the nation will have to fight, fight, fight.
