The Art of Power Grab: How to Emasculate Congress
There are three essential strategies you can combine if you want to neuter another branch of government and make it completely submissive to you.
Even though the second Trump presidency is only a few months old, it has already distinguished itself with so many tremendous things, such as demolishing various institutions that long performed life-saving functions around the world, not to mention other promising things, such as threatening friendly countries like Denmark to rob them of their territory using military force.
Throughout all of this, one of the other more tremendous things is shift in power — how the Republican-led Congress became completely subservient to the Trump White House.
Normally, whenever members of Congress have some free time left from their main professional activities — engaging in insider trading or begging donors for money — there are quite a few of them who like to poke their finger into the eye of the executive branch, demanding respect and recognition, even if their own party controls the White House. Yet, one of the best things about the second coming of Trump is how easily he has been able to make Congress go from acting like a co-equal branch of government to being a dummy yes-man.
To anyone who wants to neuter an entire branch of government that might serve as a check on one’s power and instead turn them into subservient lackeys, you can use the same approach based on three strategies that Trump has used to emasculate the Republican-led Congress.
1. Warm Personal Relations Coupled with Constant Threats Are More Tremendous Than Just Warm Personal Relations
The basic theory of how Trump has gained near total control over the Republican Congress is that it is a mix of two elements — (1) maintaining warm personal relationships with congressional Republicans and (2) constantly threatening to smear them or in other ways to savage them in public if they don’t fall in line.
This for once just happens to be a quite helpful practical guideline in general: yes, you want to constantly threaten other people so that they would fall in line, but you also want to soften it by maintaining warm personal relationships with them.
You see, when you have warm friendly personal relationships with somebody, they are just more likely to indulge you in hijacking power from their branch of government. Friends don’t interfere with their friends’ unconstitutional power grab.
According to some helpful recent reporting, it seems that in contrast to the first Trump presidency, this time he uses more honey than vinegar to reign over congressional Republicans and he now outsources most of the bullying to his advisers and influencers.
And how exactly does Trump dangle the carrot in front of congressional Republicans? It’s a bunch of cheap tricks that every serious political manipulator should use. For example, Trump gives congressional Republicans his personal phone number, which makes them feel important. When he calls congressional Republicans, even those whom he never met, he uses their first name, which also nicely caresses their ego and makes them imagine that he considers them important. He invites them to Air Force One and he tells them they are so special that they sit in the seat in which, he says, otherwise sits only Melania. He also invites members of Congress with their spouses to the kingly palace of Mar-a-Lago, where they take photos with Trump and thus join a select club of only tens of thousands of other people who had their photo taken with Trump. He gives various Trump-branded merch which he signs for them.
While maintaining warm personal relationships is great, it goes without saying it is not enough. You will, of course, want to combine it with constant threats against them.
One the most tremendous elements behind the greatness of Donald Trump is that he is very non-partisan when it comes to bullying and intimidation: he is just as willing, if not more, to bully and launch a smear campaign against Republicans who don’t submit themselves to him as he is against Democrats who oppose him.
Of the two elements in this combination — maintaining warm personal relations and making constant threats — it is, of course, more important to be making constant threats. After all, as Machiavelli himself taught us, if you must choose between being loved and being feared, it is much better to be feared because:
“men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”
2. Break It Over and Over Again Before You Take It Over
It is much easier to make another branch of government submissive or entirely take it over if you first make it highly dysfunctional. That’s why chronic parliamentary obstructionism is such an important thing to encourage and promote.
The good thing about the Republican Party is that they’ve been practicing Congressional obstructionism for a very long time. Going back at least to golden age of New Gingrich’s obstructionism strategy, the smart Republican strategy was to intentionally make the Congress dysfunctional so they could run on the platform of fixing it.
So do whatever you can to make the other branch of government highly dysfunctional, and then, when you relegate it to the role of a backup dancer, nobody will be particularly upset about it.
3. A Bogeyman Is Worth His Weight in Paranoia
To emasculate another branch of power, it is of utmost importance that you make use of some bogeyman.
If there is a terrifying bogeyman and you’re the only one who can save your great nation from this bogeyman, then if the other branch of government doesn’t completely submit itself to you, they will be interfering with your fight against the bogeyman and thus acting against the people.
Where is nowadays the bogeyman in the United States hiding when he is not under your bed or in your closet? In the federal bureaucracy and public agencies, of course!
The bogeyman in the federal machinery has been intent on doing all sorts of heinous things. USAID, the bogeyman par excellence, was intent on doing the treasonous work of preventing AIDS, Ebola, and similar things around the world for free, not to mention its attempts to spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy condoms for terrorists in Gaza.
It was only thanks to the tremendous efforts of the Trump administration that all of this was stopped. And so, when the executive branch is doing such an important work, no other sane-minded branch of government will want to interfere with this glorious work, and they will instead relegate themselves to a supporting role.
By relying on these three general strategies Trump has been able to emasculate congressional Republicans and seize control over the Congress. In the United States now, Congress no longer needs to bother the White House by giving advice and consent or in some other way serving as a check on executive power, Now it serves a more tremendous function: to suck up and always say yes.