To a large extent, President-elect Donald Trump’s winning coalition came together around one absolute truth.
In sum, Americans do not have a self-governing constitutional republic if we also have a clandestine deep state operating against the republic’s will.
Shortly after the president-elect’s landslide victory in the 2024 presidential election, a 2023 campaign video of Trump laying out his ten-step plan to “shatter the deep state” began going viral on the social media platform X — and for obvious reason.
Should he succeed in implementing his plan, Trump will go down in history as the president who restored constitutional self-government.
Indeed, never before has a prominent American statesman crammed so many revolutionary promises into a short video. Taken together, those promises amount to nothing less than a declaration of war on the corrupt federal bureaucracy.
Moreover, Trump characterized that war not as a unilateral assault but as a multi-pronged attack on entrenched corruption.
For instance, he began by assuring voters that he would wield the power of the presidency against the deep state.
First, he pledged to “immediately reissue” a 2020 executive order “restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats.” He then promised to “wield that power very aggressively.”
Second, he swore to “clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”
De you believe Donald Trump will keep his promises to the American people?
“The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible,” he said.
Third, he vowed to “totally reform FISA courts.” Here, in fact, he suggested that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judges, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), do not even care if the warrant applications they receive from federal agents contain lies, as they often do.
These first three promises involved actions that the president-elect may take on his own. Through executive order, for instance, he pledged not only systemic reform but a reckoning for “rogue bureaucrats” and “corrupt actors.”
As for FISC, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court assigns 11 federal district judges, all of whom the president nominated and the Senate confirmed. Thus, while the president-elect cannot choose FISC judges, he certainly will have a chance to make fresh nominations.
Fourth, Trump took aim at the “hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart.” This, he added, would involve a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
Fifth, he pledged a “major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the fake news to deliberately weave false narratives and to subvert our government and our democracy.”
These fourth and fifth items constituted a second prong in the president-elect’s anticipated assault on the federal bureaucracy.
For instance, his “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” would involve not unilateral action on the president’s part but rather a collaborative effort to “declassify and publish all documents on deep state spying, censorship and corruption.”
Meanwhile, targeting dishonest government leakers would break the unholy alliance between the deep state and the equally corrupt establishment media.
Sixth, he promised to “make every inspector general’s office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee.”
Seventh, he will seek from Congress an “independent auditing system to continually monitor our intelligence agencies.”
With these sixth and seventh items, the president-elect enlisted inspector general’s offices and Congress in the monumental task of bringing real oversight to whatever agents and agencies survive this revolution in self-government.
Eighth, he committed to relocating “parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy” out of Washington, D.C.
In the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison led the effort to establish the nation’s capital on the Potomac River. They did this not because of their Virginia roots, but because they wanted an unappealing location — a literal swamp. That way, elected officials would not get too comfortable, and the government would not grow beyond its constitutional bounds.
Today, of course, “The Swamp” has taken on a different meaning. Thousands of officials, elected or otherwise, have found Washington, D.C., aggressively comfortable and made careers out of politics and government.
That must end.
Moreover, imagine the decline in Northern Virginia’s housing prices once Trump announces that thousands of bureaucrats must relocate. That alone will feel like retribution for the deep state’s decades of plundering the wealth of the hinterlands.
Ninth, Trump vowed that he would “work to ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they deal with and that they regulate.”
Surely this ninth promise sounded like sweet music to the ears of former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an inveterate enemy of corrupt regulatory agencies and someone who, after endorsing Trump in August, has since emerged as one of the president-elect’s most popular allies.
Finally, Trump swore to “push a constitutional amendment” that would “impose term limits on members of Congress.”
In other words, no longer will elected officials serve decades in Congress and thereby become indistinguishable from the deep state.
President Trump released his plan to DISMANTLE the Deep State. Now that he’s President-elect, this is the most important three minutes of video on the internet right now.
HUGE 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/lhXwDPsv1q
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 8, 2024
In short, considering the power of the deep state, as well as its totalitarian inclinations, if the president-elect achieves even the majority of these objectives he will have effected perhaps the greatest peaceful revolution on behalf of constitutional self-government in all of world history.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.