A Tale of Two Trump AdministrationsWhat I learned working in the first Trump Administration, and what it might mean for this one
I hope everyone had a great New Year and is staying safe in the snow if you are buried in it like we are! As this year begins and the new administration comes in, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what I think about this or that nominee or what’s going to happen. Rather than give my thoughts on individual nominees, which anyone can do, I thought I would give you some broader things to look at based on a unique experience I have: as a Marine, I spent nearly four years working at the Pentagon under the first Trump administration. For the first three years I was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s representative to the “interagency” (a word they use when multiple governmental agencies work together on an issue) for conventional arms control. Which means that I spent a lot of time traveling from the Pentagon to the White House to represent the military at National Security Council conventional arms control meetings. I also spent a lot of time overseas on arms control delegations and in negotiations.
Representing the USA (The views expressed in this Substack are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. Use of military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform do not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.) At the end of the third year I was scheduled to resign my commission in order to transition to the Marine Reserve so I could do anti-monopoly work, but instead I extended on active duty for a year so that I could work on procurement in an office under the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Which meant I spent a decent amount of time over at Congress and again at the White House– this time with the administration’s innovation people. What I learned during those four years is that there’s a reason why the first Trump administration accomplished so little of what it set out to do, and why the two big campaign promises that actually turned into reality were basically (1) a massive tax cut for the richest people and corporations and (2) getting a heavy corporate-leaning supreme court majority that overturned Roe (the promise), but also did a lot of other bad things for everyday people. The reason that that administration’s accomplishments were so limited is because governing is actually pretty hard and takes a lot of work. Turning campaign promises into policy and then that policy into action takes a lot of people with the same goals working to make it happen and people who know what levers to pull and buttons to press. The common theme between those two promises that were kept? They were both organized by Mitch McConnell and the corporate wing of the Republican Party. Say what you will about them, those guys know how to enact policy, which is how the top 1% has managed to take $50 trillion in wealth from the bottom 90% over the past few decades. The first Trump team, however? Not so much. Only, what I learned on the Joint Staff and at the Undersecretary of Defense’s office is that this resistance or inability to nominate people for those positions meant that, instead of his people driving the government toward his vision, the so-called deep state– a consistent target of his and Stephen Bannon’s ire– actually ended up running the country. I experienced that personally. During his campaign, Trump talked a lot about our allies not carrying their load and how he was going to fix it. Believe it or not, I discovered that this was true and actually a real problem during my arms control work. Over and over again I met with military leaders of our western European allies to remind them of and share intelligence on the Russian military modernization and preparations for military expansion. Whenever I asked them to take hard positions on Russia at these meetings, they would hem and haw and say that yes, their military was very worried about it, but that their government just wouldn’t let them be aggressive about it. Why? Because their countries were meeting their energy needs with cheap Russian natural gas. A deep irony considering that by buying that gas, these countries were funding Russia’s very military modernization that their militaries were so worried about! And rather than take a hard position on Russia and stop funding Putin’s ambitions, do you know what their governments did instead? They asked the US to send over more troops and equipment to protect them from the very Russian military threat that they were funding. And, of course, we did, because that’s what we do no matter who the President is, including Trump. The administrations of both Presidents Obama and Trump (and later Biden) through the European Deterrence Initiative, provided European security to the tune of billions of dollars every year for the very countries that were funding the threat. So while Trump’s political campaign vision on allies, at least in the niche circumstance of conventional arms control, would have been both helpful and welcome at the meetings and negotiations I was a part of took at NATO HQ, in Brussels, Belgium, and at something called the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (the OSCE), in Vienna, Austria, it never made it down to us because they didn’t know how to turn politics into policy and action. In this case, the Trump administration did not have an Ambassador to the OSCE for the entire time I was there. He came in just as I was leaving, more than two and a half years into Trump’s four year term. Other countries didn’t think that the US took the negotiations seriously, since we never had an ambassador, so they had incentive to take hard positions on Russia no matter what we said in our lopsided delegations. And believe me, they were lopsided.
Representing the United States as a Marine Major across from Russian General Zolotarev on the degrading security situation in Europe. Without an ambassador, the delegation to the OSCE was led by career state department personnel – and much of the official policy and guidance they had to operate under was still from the Obama presidency. That’s what happens when you don’t know how or don’t choose to govern. There’s a reason for that. Things might be said in a tweet or in the media for another purpose. To mislead, to create negotiating space, or who knows what other reason. So we can only take positions that are officially communicated to us because we don’t know why and aren’t in a position to guess at the reason for saying something through an unofficial channel. But official guidance and presence was much less frequent because there were few people in position to push it. When positions are vacant, or those positions are filled by people who are more interested in glamor than in governing, politics aren’t turned into policy and your policies aren’t turned into action because the levers of government aren’t properly operated. The first Trump Administration actually had a few people at the beginning of the first term who knew how to govern, but as they were fired, quit, or just moved on, that number dwindled to almost nothing, and many of those who were left behind were only doing it for their own career advancement and notoriety, not to actually accomplish anything. So, ultimately, after having significant power through most of the Trump administration, by the end, the government bureaucracy that the administration hated so much essentially had complete control. For example, almost forty percent of Pentagon positions– and basically all of the higher ones– were vacant near the end, essentially leaving the Joint Staff to run the US military without real civilian oversight. Which is not how it’s supposed to be. Now, here we are on round two, and the Trump team seems to have discovered that they really failed to enact their policies last time because they didn’t appoint anyone. So they are making nominations at light speed this time. But their nominations are… well… curious, to say the least. And if this is who they have available for the highest positions in our country, can you imagine who it’s going to be at the middle level appointed positions where most of the work actually happens? My guess is there will be very few people who actually know how to turn campaign promises into policy and then action. For those who do, they could very well get caught up fighting the DOGE bros, who are going to want to have their fingers in absolutely everything as they try to diminish the government’s power to do anything at all. Time will tell who ultimately is nominated and approved and how fast, but these are some of the things to think about as the administration comes in and tries to move forward. The more the DOGE bros mix it up and the more show horse vs workhorse appointments there are, the fewer campaign promises will be turned into action. Because it’s not usually the flashy folks who are effective, it’s the ones you’ve never heard of, like his Department of the Interior team from the first administration. They successfully flaunted Congressional hearings, sent pages of wingdings in response to Congressional requests for information, and managed to make it much easier for private enterprise to convert public land into private profit. Because, again, say what you will about the corporate wing of the Republican Party (sellouts, cowards, crooks, whatever), but there’s a reason they have all lined up behind Trump: they know how to govern, and when they get their people in, or they choose the legislative agenda, they deliver for themselves. In that case, if it’s mostly flash at the top and a few corporatists in the most extractive but overlooked positions, it’s likely to be few campaign promises turned to action, a lot of noise at the top, and a lot of tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and corporate America. And not much else. As always, let me know what you are seeing and think in the comments and please share with anyone you think might be interested! Until next time. Lucas You're currently a free subscriber to Lucas’s Substack. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Monday, January 6, 2025
A Tale of Two Trump Administrations
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