President Trump’s top second-term goal will be ‘to disrupt and dismantle Washington’s inbred status quo’, says Daniel Henninger. Godspeed, say I. Trump’s Republicans are the party of work, in two senses: the party that reflects, represents and promotes the interests of workers and chooses pragmatic policies that work over ideological pieties and foreign policy naïveté. The entrenched and ever-growing administrative, top-down command-and-control state has become an existential threat to liberal democracy. Existing institutions and leaders are not fit for purpose. It is imperative to bring in creative disruptors from the outside. The Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will ‘pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings’.

The peculiar yet growing appeal of populist tribunes around the democratic world is that in addition to their fiercely loyal base, they’ve grown their brand appeal because of who their opponents are. This is because rather than crave recognition from their opponents by tickling their tummies, they punch back harder. This is the secret to Trump’s success in the US, Meloni’s in Italy, Milei’s in Argentina, Poilievre’s in Canada and Farage’s in the UK. They too mostly project common sense, mainstream values and the determination to take on wokeness, without backing off and retreating at the first whiff of the grapeshot. Trump’s cabinet picks – Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Robert F Kennedy Jr (Health and Human Services) – are winding up all the right people in politics, media and the celeb world. Democratic Senator John Fetterman called it ‘god-tier level trolling’. Trump has the mandate to rattle and shake DC and tear up the Washington playbook. The Democrats’ biggest fear is not that Trump will fail but that he just might succeed with his out-of-the-box cabinet choices.

Trump is being urged to reverse Biden’s ‘radical’ electric vehicle policies within the first one hundred days of taking office. Chris Wright, energy secretary-designate, is a member of the ‘drill, baby, drill’ club. He refutes claims of a climate crisis, dismisses activists as alarmists and says ‘net zero’ is a ‘sinister goal’. ‘Nut zero’ is more apt. The Treasury department has been led by a revolving door of Goldman Sachs executives. Energy secretaries have typically been climate change devotees with a bias against traditional sources of energy and no expertise in the sector. No one before Wright, founder and chief executive of the oilfield services company Liberty Energy, had drilled an oil well, mined coal or built a nuclear power plant.

Gabbard is an outsider who has railed against the failures of the Washington insiders. The 2003 Iraq war was the worst US foreign policy disaster of all time. Its biggest strategic victor was, you guessed it, Iran. The biggest victors of the Ukraine war have been China, North Korea and Iran; the biggest losers the people of Ukraine as Russia grinds its way to wresting larger chunks of territory. The pullout from Afghanistan was an absolute shambles, Syria’s murderous dictator remains in power and an amateurish assassin almost felled Trump. But hey, US generals want you to know their preferred pronouns, and the major Western countries have succeeded in hobbling Israel in its efforts to eradicate Hamas and defeat Hezbollah, Iran’s two major proxies in the attempted strategic encirclement and strangulation of Israel.

Consider Kennedy’s nomination as a parable of the times. The stranglehold of Big Pharma on US lawmakers, health bureaucrats, medical profession, hospital system and regulators have long been Kennedy’s bêtes noir, with agribusiness close behnd. Far from providing solutions, Kennedy insists, both sectors have contributed to America’s acute health crisis. Their financial muscle has enabled capture of the levers of political power. If senators who’ve raked in millions from Big Pharma lobbyists were to be excluded from voting on Kennedy’s nomination, the hearings might lack a quorum. That, in a nutshell, is the scale of the challenge confronting Trump in implementing his priority agenda come January. The political, corporate, media and celebrity elites wield cultural power. In response, the deplorables are fighting to take back political power. In Trump, they’ve found a fierce champion. The more he drives the cultural elites nuts, the more his followers love him.

Kennedy is a fitness fanatic who has seen the nation’s suffering from illness caused by profiteering agribusiness and pharmaceutical multinationals with armies of lobbyists to capture lawmakers and regulators. He wants to heal the people through healthy living and eating: make Americans healthy again (MAHA, which coincidentally means ‘great’ in Hindi, as in maharajah). The pandemic made everyone realise how powerful a role health agencies play in our lives, how arrogant the health bureaucrats are regarding their own expertise and dismissive of people’s concerns and questions. By contrast, Kennedy points out that millions of Americans suffer from chronic diseases and obesity, despite vast sums spent on healthcare. According to the Petersen Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation, US per capita healthcare costs ($12,742) are nearly double the average of thirteen comparable industrialised countries ($6,850), yet deliver among the worst health outcomes on life expectancy, childbirths, infant mortality, diabetes and heart attacks. Trusting the experts to be benign and to get it right is not a feature of science or of democracy. Scientists do need to do more to understand the role of forever chemicals in food and water. Governments must lift the liability exemption from vaccine manufacturers and require rigorous and transparent trials of new products including vaccines. They must conduct and publish cost-benefit analyses of alternative public health measures and treatment options.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of made-on-the-fly Covid policies in destroying public trust in the medical profession and health experts, and elevating Kennedy’s profile and credibility. In peddling false promises on the need for and benefits of lockdowns, masks and vaccines, authorities opted for the Goebbels strategy that a big lie repeated often enough becomes the accepted truth. Instead, it turns out the more relevant story is the boy who cried wolf to hide his own failure on the job and was duly eaten by a real wolf. Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins conceded last year that, focused solely on ways to stop the disease, they failed to consider how gravely their interventions disrupted peoples’ lives, ruined the economy and kept kids out of school. This is a confession we are yet to hear from the even more authoritarian Australian health know-it-all scolds.

On 21 November, mired in sex and drug scandals, Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration. His replacement is former Florida AG Pam Bondi who’s threatened to deport pro-Palestine protestors. The fiasco should serve as a reminder to Trump’s transition team not to take support for granted in Congress. Gaetz had antagonised Republicans too when he blew up Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. Many believe he was an unserious candidate. But they will support qualified nominees committed to implementing Trump’s agenda to aggressively dismantle the over-reaching state.