1. Project 2029
One of our recurring questions is how some theoretical future administration dedicated to liberal democracy would handle the legacy effects of Donald Trump’s authoritarian attempt.
To wit: Emil Bove currently sits on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. It is a lifetime appointment and he was born in 1981. His level of corruption as an employee of the Department of Justice was striking. For instance, Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian report that he participated in dismissing criminal investigations against both Eric Adams and Tom Homan.
Should a future administration and Congress committed to the rule of law attempt to impeach and remove Bove from the bench?
Spoiler: Whatever you think the answer is to that should question, the will question is easy. No future administration will attempt to remove Bove.
They will understand that such an attempt would fail.
It would be deemed a distraction from the president’s agenda.
Bove is safe. For forever.
But it is possible that some authoritarian elements put in place by Trump would be removed by a President Clark Kent.
For example, maybe President Kent would fire FBI Director Kash Patel in 2029, even though Patel would have six years remaining in his term, Republicans would scream, the New York Times would spend a week clucking about the norm-breaking, and Fox would give the story three hours of airtime every day until the rapture. It is possible that this theoretical president might also fire FCC chief Brendan Carr, even if his term was not over.
But what happens to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, which will be the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, a group of people recruited specifically for the task of masked thuggery?
Spoiler: They won’t be abolished, even though they should be.
How about Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health?
We are at a moment where the federal government has ceased to be a reliable vector for scientific information and become an active popularizer of folkways and misinformation.
In response to this degeneration, some large-scale changes are going to happen over the next thirty-nine months:
Private groups and NGOs will cease to be government partners and instead develop an adversarial relationship with the government’s scientific establishment.
For legal and liability reasons, the insurance industry is likely to side with the government while the vast majority of health care providers side with the private groups and NGOs. This schism will fundamentally pervert health care in America.
Some very large percentage of the population will side with their providers, and hence the private groups and NGOs. They will come to view the government’s “scientific consensus” as corrupt, conspiratorial nonsense.
So what happens when President Clark Kent takes over in 2029, or 2033, or . . . whenever? Does he gut the federal scientific agencies? Does he undertake a massive purge of every crank, quack, and hack who was hired/installed during the Trump/Kennedy regime?
How would that work? Who would he replace them with? Where would he find reputable scientists and administrators willing to go into a government bureaucracy that is now distrusted by most of the country?