Fair Observer Founder, CEO & Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh and retired CIA Officer Glenn Carle discuss US President Donald Trump’s moves against the federal government. While media commentary and partisan opposition often frame Trump’s actions in simplistic terms, the deeper ideological roots and radical ambitions of his administration remain poorly understood.
For Glenn, this is not a matter of routine political conflict. He describes it as “hugely significant,” even “appalling and terrifying,” because it represents a deliberate revolution in the structure of the American state — one with consequences that reach far beyond the United States.
The ideological roots
Glenn traces this movement back decades, noting that figures like political activist Grover Norquist laid the groundwork. Norquist, who graduated from the University of Texas in 1975, was once Glenn’s classmate. Peers dismissed him and viewed him as a gadfly — “a good-natured irritant and not someone to be taken particularly seriously.”
For over 50 years, Norquist convened Washington’s influential Wednesday Morning Group. Here, Republican strategists refined a vision of government so small he could, in his famous words, “drag it into the bathroom and then drown it in the bathtub.”
At the time, Glenn dismissed this rhetoric as absurd. With hindsight, however, he acknowledges that Norquist’s ideological project was both coherent and relentless, making him “one of the significant figures in the last 50 years.” What once sounded like hyperbole has now become the intellectual backbone of a movement reshaping the federal government itself.
The Trump administration’s embrace
According to Glenn, Trump personally has little interest in ideology. Yet his administration — particularly the intellectuals around him — has embraced this agenda with fervor. “The thinking people in his administration do [care],” Glenn remarks.
Atul recalls conversations with younger staffers from Heritage Foundation backgrounds who approach governance with a “crusading zeal.” They are convinced that regulation suffocates competitiveness, that bureaucrats are “leeches who live off taxes” and that only a government stripped to its bare essentials can unleash true freedom. Their reverence for US President Ronald Reagan, who famously declared that government was the problem rather than the solution, borders on worship.
Glenn places this in the larger context of American conservative thought, pointing to institutions like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. These groups helped cement the idea that “small government is good, and government is the ill.” Glenn satirically likens this belief system to “adolescents who have suffered arrested development and remain obsessed by Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead.”
For many in this circle, this Russian-American writer and philosopher is the philosophical goddess: Government is by definition oppressive, the strong must be free to compete and take care of themselves, and those who cannot survive on their own should, in Glenn’s words, “fail and die.” Atul adds that Rand herself, despite her libertarian philosophy, ran her intellectual circle as an authoritarian cult. She even made her husband wear bells on his shoes so she and her younger lover would hear him coming.
The goal that emerges from this tradition, Glenn explains, is stark: shrink the federal government by half. Its only legitimate purposes should be national defense and border security. Glenn asks if this philosophy “rings and bells?” The approach is to aim high and achieve at least part.
A radical transformation in practice
In its first seven months, Trump’s second administration has begun to put this vision into practice. The pace and scope, Glenn argues, amount to nothing less than a “broad attack” on the structure of government.
It has made sweeping personnel cuts. About 150,000 federal employees, roughly 6% of the workforce, have already been dismissed. Within the intelligence community, the CIA has discussed eliminating a quarter of its staff. Entire agencies have been gutted: The US Agency for International Development is effectively dead, the State Department has suffered steep reductions and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is in decline.
Other vital institutions are in turmoil. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds to natural and manmade disasters, is “being decimated.” The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control face similar gutting. NASA’s budget has been slashed by half, and federally funded research and development in universities is collapsing.
Glenn points out that starving research & development serves a double purpose: It reduces spending and simultaneously cripples the “woke liberal elite intellectuals” in universities, whom the administration views as enemies.
The administration’s 2026 budget proposal is even more radical, targeting an overall 22.6% reduction in the federal government. For Glenn, this marks an ideological project dressed in fiscal language — a deliberate reengineering of the American state.
Unitary executive theory
Behind these actions lies a constitutional philosophy: the unitary executive theory. Glenn calls attention to its origins in the work of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who argued that sovereignty must be concentrated entirely in the executive. In this model, “anything that challenges the authority and the agency of the chief executive must be eliminated or destroyed.” Glenn bluntly calls this structure “a dictatorship.”
This doctrine is central to Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term. Its prescription is explicit: “The entire executive branch must be brought under direct presidential control.” This represents a profound break from the American tradition of government by laws, in which agencies operate with independence grounded in congressional legislation. The unitary executive theory would eliminate that independence, subordinating all power to the White House.
Under such a system, the federal government is reduced to two aforementioned core functions: national defense and border security. Defense spending has already increased by 9%, while immigration enforcement has escalated. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been detained and expelled already; this is only the beginning, as the administration has previously mentioned deporting 13 million people. That’s roughly 4%–5% of the national population.
Warnings from history
Glenn cannot overstate the stakes of this transformation. He warns that “80 million people were killed as a result of movements of this sort 80 years ago in a hideous war.” During the first administration of US President George W. Bush and the so-called Global War on Terror, he saw the unitary theory gaining traction. It was used to justify enhanced interrogation techniques. Vice President Dick Cheney’s office ran meetings — even on Chinese policy — where one assistant directly told CIA Officer Glenn, “But YOU are the enemy.”
Glenn sees Trump’s ideological revolution, grounded in a philosophy of executive supremacy and disdain for government institutions, as part of a lineage of authoritarian experiments with devastating consequences.
The danger is clear: The world’s most powerful democracy is sliding into a system that Merriam-Webster itself would define as fascism — a centralized autocratic regime headed by a dictatorial leader, with severe regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
