ABSTRACT
For five years after Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 nobody understood politics, much of the subsequent disruption attributed to “the deep state.” Infuriated by Obama's roast during a White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump had decided to run for president, anticipating support by a bereft white, working-class. In Britain, Boris Johnson played Sancho Panza to Trump's Quixote, while avoiding the Don's obsession with hydroxychloroquine, deferring to epidemiologists, but ignoring the mountain of paperwork generated by Brexit. The evolution of the modern state presents a conundrum insofar as services, benefits, and regulations become necessary to protect citizens from the caprices of weather, capital, or hostile forces. The long-term existential threat of federal program management has been a signal issue of the Federalist Society, a coterie of conservative legal scholars, since its founding in 1982.
