Trump's election offered an opportunity unique in recent history, or at least unique in my 40 years of life. The Trump Presidency was the Ideas Presidency. Americans were sharing their ideas, expecting a disruptive POTUS to respond to them.
And then GreatAgain dot Gov happened.
What's GreatAgain dot Gov? Great question. It was a website that collected over 45,000 resumes from Trump's supporters.
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is now part of the government, at least online, in the form of a >GreatAgain.gov website.
The website, registered through the General Services Administration, is a traditional element of the federally funded >transition between administrations, carried out under the terms of the 2010 Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act.
Do you know how many people were hired from GreatAgain dot gov? Zero. The website "crashed," or the database was "lost," or something. The story varies based on whom you talk to in D.C.
Trump staffed the White House with the same people who told him to quit the race after Access Hollywood. He put Johnny DeStefano in charge of personnel and policy.
DeStefano's first act was to purge every government office of Trump loyalists who had been hired as Schedule C employees.
It was only after I obtained the full email list of every Schedule C employee, and reached out to all of them, that DeStefano laid off for a minute.
But he and others in deep state got to work slow walking Trump loyalists security clearances. Several White House staffers terminated or reassigned for security clearance issues.
Out with the bold thinkers, in with the old swamp monsters.
Peter Thiel doesn't seem to want anything to do with Trump's presidency, and it's not hard to see while. Thiel wrote in Zero to One: "In the 1950s, people welcomed big plans and asked whether they would work. Today a grand plan coming from a schoolteacher would be dismissed as crankery, and a long-range vision coming from anyone more powerful would be viewed as hubris."
Thiel, no doubt like many others, saw in Trump a change to change the nation's thinking, to bring back big ideas.
But when you look around online or talk to people in D.C., you see a lot of quibbling, but you don't see any big ideas.
"That's not the way it's done," is the reply to big ideas.
The White House is no place for visionaries, and thus Trump is surrounded by rent seekers and cronies rather than bold thinkers.
All of this was preventable, but Trump hired the swamp with orders to drain the swamp. They've been around much longer than he has been, and Trump's own people see him as a mere speed bump on their path to running Washington as usual.
