Trump Is Leading a Historic Counterrevolution Against the Deep State

Something truly revolutionary is taking place in Washington.

President Donald Trump not only won an election; he’s fundamentally changing the way the federal government does business. Unlike the early days of his first term, Trump is directly targeting the nodes of real power in the nation’s capital. He’s launching a multifront assault on the Regime.

Even Politico, a curiously reliable regime-defending publication, lamented Trump’s ruthless effectiveness.

“Has any incoming administration been better prepared for power?” Politico asked rhetorically. “Never mind the first 100 days—Trump’s team had a battle plan for the first 100 hours, and they executed it with stunning efficacy. From the barrage of executive orders to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] all-out war on government, it has all been way bigger than anyone foresaw. Rudderless and bewildered, Democrats had no idea how to respond.”

The Left is truly rudderless right now. The Democratic National Committee is still competing in the diversity Olympics. The institutions it has transformed, controlled, and worn like a skin suit for so long have never been so impotent in the face of populist electoral energy.

Many of the most powerful Democrats have been reduced to sputtering and pathetically uncorking laughable arguments about how terrible it is that a “shadow government” controlled by entrepreneur Elon Musk is challenging the power of our vast, unelected bureaucracy.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was aghast in a speech on Tuesday.

“The American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant through the executive branch,” Schumer muttered, while blasting DOGE. “Being innovative is good, but Mr. Musk, this isn’t a tech startup. These are public institutions.”

The Babylon Bee parody website ran a perfect mockery of Schumer’s speech.

“Democrats Warn Trump’s Unelected Shadow Government Is Dismantling Their Unelected Shadow Government,” the headline reads.

Going all-in on defending federal bureaucrats and massive wasteful foreign aid is almost certainly a bad political bet as even some Democratic Party strategists have warned. But I actually think the panic is understandable.

The failure of the Left’s entire political machine that’s been woven into our government over the past several decades is being exposed, as conservative Christopher Rufo wrote on X.

Most Americans perhaps think that transitions in power take place during elections when one party achieves a majority over the other. But that hasn’t been the case for some time.

For generations, presidents have come and gone, but the country’s true ruling elite in the bureaucracy and the constellation of nongovernmental organizations that rely on federal largesse has hardly changed it all. The bureaucratic apparatus essentially rules, regardless of who is in the White House, and it’s hardly nonpartisan.

Former President Joe Biden really was just a figurehead. He never had to do anything but eat ice cream and pretend to be in charge from time to time. The machine ran itself on behalf of his party, the Democrats.

When a Republican takes office, the federal apparatus generally continues its prerogatives in opposition to what the president wants or what the people voted for. When the chief executive tries to cajole them to change direction, they go into #Resistance mode, as they did during Trump’s first term in office. Generally, that tactic has worked.

But something has changed this time. The new Trump administration was prepared to do battle with the real power that’s badly misruled the country. No, that wasn’t Biden or Congress; it was the administrative state.

Mike Solana at Pirate Wires had an excellent description of how the managerial deep state, always constitutionally dubious to begin with, became the bloated, useless, and often quite tyrannical malignancy that many Americans have come to loathe.

Solana explained that with the Cold War’s end, much of the deep state, which began quite energetically during the New Deal, lost its usefulness and its edge.

“With no external threat demanding competence, weak men flourished in the system,” Solana wrote. “These men hired even weaker men, who in turn hired … whatever it is we’re looking at today. Much as a beached whale carcass puffs up with gas, the size of our government bloated as it atrophied.”

He concluded that much of the federal bureaucracy has become nothing but a jobs program for mediocre people, and “at its very worst, it’s a staging ground for radicals hell-bent on paralyzing the nation.”

Now, the Trump administration is waging a “shock and awe” campaign to uproot the deep state and restore some semblance of popular control to our government. The chief weapon Trump has deployed for this task right now is Musk and his team of talented young virtuosos at the DOGE, who stand in such stark contrast to the typical bureaucrat.

What Musk is attempting to replicate in the federal bureaucracy is remarkably similar to what he did when he took over Twitter, now X. The first thing he did was fire more than two-thirds of its staff. This clearly included both simple deadweight and a significant number of people who were ideological DEI apparatchiks.

At the time, Musk’s critics screamed that would spell the end of the social media giant and that he was a fool. The reality is that X is doing just fine.

The platform remains as influential as it’s ever been, and now it doesn’t have the left-wing gatekeepers dragging it down and censoring people for saying commonsense things like “a man can’t become a woman.”

Musk’s takeover was significant, not just because it removed the world’s most powerful, political social media platform from the Left’s grasp—although that was clearly an enormous deal. It was significant because his mass firings were a shock to the way things were done in the tech industry. It turns out you don’t need a bloated, ideologically motivated staff to run a tech company.

Does anyone using X think getting rid of those people has hurt the platform? Well, maybe those who fled to Bluesky, but they mostly just wanted the left-wing censors and gatekeeping. Now, they can just out-woke each other in their small, highly censorious bubble.

That process is what DOGE is initiating in the federal bureaucracy now and what Democrats are spitting mad about. I’d argue that what’s happening is much bigger than Musk and DOGE, too. There has been a revolution in the way the Right approaches government.

What’s horrifying to the Left is that the public doesn’t buy that this is an existential threat to the country. Many are happy to see hordes of incompetent ideologues, grifters, and petty tyrants ejected from power.

The truth is, besides the acute interests of those currently staffing the bureaucratic regime, most average Americans aren’t too concerned that we may not be able to promote drag queen workshops in Ecuador or sponsor Pride Week in the country of Georgia. 

The gravy train is over. Their reign is coming to an end.

The Left may have been dead-set on transforming America through raw, top-down institutional power, but the counterrevolution has arrived. Democracy is finally sweeping out “our democracy” and will perhaps restore genuine self-government in this country.

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