With Biden Out and Trump Brought to Heel, the Swamp Wins Again

Well, that didn’t take long.

Ten days ago, President Biden was adamant he would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and defeat “threat to democracy” Donald Trump. Trump was still promising to “drain the Swamp” in Washington, D.C., expurgating DEI and critical race theory from federal agencies, deporting illegal aliens who entered the country in record numbers during Biden’s administration, and end the Swamp’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

As of this morning, Biden is out of the race and out of sight and mind. The Democratic Party’s national media is already in high gear promoting Kamala Harris. And Trump, following an assassination attempt by yet another “lone gunman,” has been brought to heel.

The only thing unprecedented about Biden’s decision not to seek reelection is its timing. Lyndon Johnson similarly announced he would not seek reelection in 1968 – only one of many similarities between this year and that one – but he did it far earlier in the year. That gave the Democratic Party much more time to select and rally around a replacement candidate, albeit in an unsuccessful effort to hold onto the White House.

The change in Trump over the past ten days is much more striking, if unreported. It is understandable that Trump was shaken by the assassination attempt. That explains the lack of fire in his voice while delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention just a few days later. But what is of much greater significance was the content of the speech, not the style.

Trump said himself that he completely threw away the speech he intended to give at the RNC and now would deliver one centered around national unity. Since the acceptance speech, he has disavowed Project 2025 as a product of the “extreme right,” attempting to position himself as a moderate.

He may not have used that word, opting for “common sense” instead, but what else could it mean? If there is an extreme right that he says he is not a part of, then what else could he be but a moderate? Rumors that his campaign is already second guessing the selection of J.D. Vance as running mate due to the liability of his “extremist” positions only further confirms that Trump has been effectively neutered by the assassination attempt in terms of any threat he may have posed to the establishment.

Don’t forget that Trump’s ideological difference from the establishment was always greatly exaggerated. He never questioned the existence of a global standing army, just that it shouldn’t be used so often and for such insubstantial benefit. He promised “not to touch” Social Security and Medicare, which together with the military comprise about two thirds of federal spending.

He claimed to have cut regulations significantly during his first term but did not fundamentally threaten the New Deal regulatory bureaucracy in any way. Even years into his presidency, prior to the Covid pandemic, nothing much had changed. And in 2020, nothing changed for the better.

A Trump now positioning himself as even more moderate than the Trump of his first term is not going to get the job done. Project 2025 may be “extreme,” but extremism is just what is needed right now. There is nothing moderate about the left’s program. They swing for the fences during every at bat and have rarely struck out during the past several decades. If the juggernaut is going to be stopped it won’t be by a president seeking to “unite the country” and meet far left extremism with “common sense.”

The authors of Project 2025 understand they are in a war for the political soul of America against an enemy that does not fight fairly or take prisoners. “Unity” with those who wish to transform America into a totalitarian socialist state is not a solution; it’s a surrender. This is a war, and one side is going to win. And the wrong side has a very, very big lead.

As a libertarian, there are parts of Project 2025 I disagree with, but most of it is precisely what is needed if anything resembling a free republic will ever exist here again.

The supposed “defenders of democracy” on the left claim the program would make the president a dictator because it would threaten the “independence” of certain federal agencies. That is absurd on its face. The president is the only elected member of the executive branch (besides the vice president who isn’t given power to do much). He is given the authority to appoint officers to assist him in executing the laws passed by Congress – not to legislate themselves, much less to operate with any independence from the executive elected by the people.

If anything, even Project 2025 is too moderate for what is needed in Washington. This is a job for a Bowie knife, not a scalpel. The left has achieved its long march through the institutions, not just in government but throughout academia and the corporate world. If their Marcusean revolution to achieve socialism through DEI, ESG, and other euphemistically named weapons against capitalism and individual liberty is to be defeated, the federal government needs to be gutted, not reformed.

This all assumes Trump even wins the election. His attempt to distance himself from Project 2025 has been about as successful as apologies to the mob during a struggle session. The leftwing media smells blood in the water and are now seizing the opportunity to claim Trump’s disavowal is disingenuous. Making this a dynamic of the campaign will only force Trump to put greater and greater distance between himself and the program, further watering down his message.

The Swamp once again seems to have all the bases covered. With Biden out of the way, they have a younger candidate who gives them a better chance to win the election than Biden did, despite her many flaws. They also have the massive ballot harvesting machine they built in 2020 to garner the votes of every nursing home resident and vagrant they can find and “assist” in filling out a ballot with any veneer of legality. There is no evidence the Republican Party has even attempted to do likewise.

Should Trump win despite all of this, he will come into office with a significantly weaker platform than what is needed to even slow down the left’s revolution, much less reverse it. At best, illegal immigration will decrease during his term and foreign policy will be slightly calmer. He may even succeed in brokering an end to the wars in Ukraine and Israel. But without fundamental change to the structure of the federal behemoth, what little we can expect he’d do would be reversed the day he left office.

The left went too far in 1968 with a similar program of endless war overseas and Marxist revolution at home – with an American public far less receptive to the latter than today. It resulted in Republican victories in two straight elections, the second the largest landslide in U.S. electoral history.

Faced with the most popular president in U.S. history who had pledged to do in his second term precisely what Project 2025 pledges to do, the Swamp had to resort to the high risk undertaking of removing a sitting president via a trumped up scandal concocted by spook-posing-as-journalist Bob Woodward and others.

This time around, it is working with an American public that largely accepts most of the Marxist tenets that underpin the Swamp’s agenda. Gone is any talk of free markets or laissez faire. Even self-identified conservatives use terms like “working class” without realizing they are thinking like Marxists. Economically, they are moderate New Dealers at best.

By the time Trump wins, if he does, he will have spent months distancing himself from any policy that could be called “extremist.” The left may riot, and its media hyperventilate with reports of fascism and tyranny, but the Swamp will have nothing to fear.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?