Trump's vow to run the government like his business is proving less a promise than a threat.

[DonViejo]

The Shallow State

Trump's vow to run the government like his business is proving less a promise than a threat.

By Robert Schlesinger | Managing Editor for Opinion

March 17, 2017, at 6:00 a.m.

President Donald Trump and his team are famously concerned with the notion that elements of the federal government are working to covertly resist him and thwart his agenda, with some supporters applying the loaded term "deep state" to this fear.

The leaks that have plagued the early Trump administration have indeed been surprising in their frequency and breadth, but Trump and his team would do well to worry more about the shallow state they've built so far than about the deep one. If Trump is frustrated by the bureaucracy, in other words, he would do better to fill it than whine about it.

Presidents learning the challenges of taking charge of the federal bureaucracy is nothing new. As David Remnick wrote recently in The New Yorker, "Previous Presidents have felt resistance, or worse, from elements in the federal bureaucracies: Eisenhower warned of the 'military-industrial complex'; L.B.J. felt pressure from the Pentagon; Obama's Syria policy was rebuked by the State Department through its 'dissent channel.'"

But in the age of Trump, every action and reaction seem more outsized and intense than previous administrations. While even predominately liberal civil servants showed appropriate deference to recent Republican presidents, Brookings' Stephen Hess noted in Politico Magazine last month, "Trump's problem in Washington is clearly of the 'let-Trump-be-Trump' variety," he wrote. "From his inaugural speech on Day One, insulting the past presidents who sat behind him, the new president made it clear that he expected Washington to conform to his campaign style of governing. It hasn't and it likely won't."

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https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-17/donald-trumps-governing-problem-is-donald-trump-not-the-deep-state?emailed=1&src=usn_thereport

[Gothmog]

1. But trump is a bad business person