“There must be absolute loyalty,” said President Nixon during a meeting with his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Special Assistant Fred Malek, two months after his landslide victory over George McGovern. The White House’s repeated clashes with executive branch officials convinced Nixon that he needed to wrangle the federal bureaucracy during his second term. At one point, he even asked for the resignation of every cabinet member, a mostly symbolic gesture that was meant to send a message across the administration. Nixon demanded that the bureaucracy would be at his disposal, particularly when it came to using the levers of government against his enemies. “There must be the ability that we speak out to this government; the damn government will start to pack,” exclaimed the president.[1]
While parallels between Nixon and Trump have received much attention, it is arguably more important to confront the fact that Trump has expanded on the process that Nixon was trying to build that winter. The White House has successfully carried out what Trump’s s former advisor Steve Bannon referred to as the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” instilling a culture of loyalty to the president that Nixon sought during his time in office.
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