From: https://shorturl.at/nahtJ (dailysignal.com)

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Trump Is Bringing About a Regime Change Not Seen Since 1933

Mike Gonzalez | March 11, 2025

The second Trump administration is engaged in the first real transfer of
power since 1933. What is taking place is an attempt at national
transformation, and that is never quiet. "Buckle up, there's more to
come," I tell friends-not only here but especially those overseas-who
express anxiety with what they see as turmoil.

Transfers of power produce winners and especially losers. The losers don't
accept their new status quietly, especially when they're used to winning.
A pliant media amplifies the noise, creating cacophony.

So we are at peak moaning. Go to any gathering inside Washington's
Beltway, and you'll likely encounter the men and women who used to run the
"permanent bureaucracy"-and thus expected to do so permanently-crying in
their Chardonnay and spitting spitefully at Elon Musk.

President Donald Trump's many fans in politics across Europe and Latin
America intuit, however, that the rumble they hear means real change might
be underway. They are elated because they, too, crave a transformation
that will save national identity and end the drive to remake society along
woke lines.

But the largest center-right parties-the Christian Democratic Union in
Germany, the Tories in the U.K., the Partido Popular in Spain, to cite but
three examples-have wanted to continue pretending that for the past few
years, what we have been experiencing is politics as usual. They likely
fear that what is happening here is but a harbinger of what's to come to
their countries.

In the U.S., we had been in an age of regime politics for many years,
giving us polarizing politics and societal division. As the writer
Christopher Caldwell explained in his 2020 breakaway book "The Age of
Entitlement," we have for a couple of decades engaged in an increasingly
raw debate not over normal matters-say, top marginal tax rates-but over
how the country was to be constituted.

It was as though we had not just two competing visions, but two competing
constitutions. One was hammered out in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787,
and based on the Declaration's idea that God had endowed individuals with
"unalienable rights." The other saw identity groups, based on such
immutable characteristics as race and sex, as society's main protagonists.

"Much of what we have called `polarization' or `incivility' in recent
years is something more grave," Caldwell wrote. "It is the disagreement
over which of these two constitutions will prevail."

Ruling institutions such as the U.S. Agency for International
Development-or USAID-the Smithsonian, public broadcasting, etc., catered
to the identity groups and the new constitution.

We were threatened, therefore, by the real possibility of regime change in
America. Understanding that meant knowing "what time it is," a phrase that
soon caught on.

What Trump is now attempting is a restoration of the status quo ante with
regards to some things (such as the reality that we have two sexes, for
example, or the meritocratic ideal), combined with the shattering of some
institutions and practices, and a deep redrawing of the two political
parties.

That is not a mere change in administration. These have taken place at
least every four years, and sometimes eight (though Franklin D.
Roosevelt's lasted a dozen years from 1933 to 1945, precipitating passage
in 1951 of the 22nd amendment, limiting presidents to Washington's two
terms in office).

These changes in administrations have not, however, amounted to real
transfers of power, though we have called them that. The bureaucracy that
FDR enshrined to carry out his increase in government control has either
kept the power that it has accrued over time, or has expanded it.

Even under such conservatives as Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, and Donald
Trump in his first term, the bureaucracy that the media has taken to
calling the "Fourth Branch of government" (spoiler alert, it's nowhere to
be seen in the 1787 Constitution) successfully fought off all attempts to
pare it to size.

Reagan won the Cold War by defeating the Soviet Union, but he did not put
a dent on the bureaucracy. In the case of Trump's first term, it was, in
fact, the bureaucracy which, in the person of National Security Council
official Eugene Vindman, provoked Trump's first impeachment. It was
America's first attempted coup d'etat.

Under liberal administrations such as those of Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy
Carter and Barack Obama, FDR's bureaucracy grew by leaps and bounds. FDR
created the alphabet soup of agencies and programs-the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the FBI, the
Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the
Securities and Exchange Commission, and many, many others-to administer
his New Deal in the 1930s.

LBJ expanded it with the Great Society, which created the public
broadcasters, for example. Carter gave us the Department of Education, and
Obama the eponymous Obamacare.

"The way to think about Trump 2.0 is as the New Deal reversed. If FDR
began the vast expansion of federal agencies that continued in the 1960s
and 1970s, DJT is attempting to turn back the clock: to shrink the federal
bureaucracy with a barrage of presidential decrees," sagely writes the
historian Niall Ferguson.

Barrages produce cacophony. But if you despaired about 5,288 to 6,294
"gender-affirming" double mastectomies for girls who could be as young as
12, with diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, with teaching the
idiocy that America began in 1619, with viewing all human activity through
the "oppressor v oppressed" lens-to the point that you open the
borders-then this cacophony is the "orchestral tutti" at the start of a
symphony.
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-- Sean

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