Donald J. Trump ran on a platform that, among other things, promised to "drain the swamp" that is Washington, DC. Part of that draining would entail what his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, would call "the deconstruction of the administrative state." Set in the political environment of 2020, with a raging pandemic and nationwide protests, this work examines the philosophy that guides the Trump Administration's approach and the mechanisms by which it seeks to accomplish the deconstruction. By combining journalistic accounts with presidential and public administration scholarship, the book raises questions about the impact of Trump's approach on the future of public administration. As such, this work makes a strong contribution to public administration and presidential studies and casts a scholarly light on treatments of Trump's contribution to governance and politics.
"'Drain the Swamp' was a familiar chant at Trump rallies in the latter stages of the 2016 presidential campaign and set the stage for Trump's attempts to bend the executive branch to his will. Thoroughly grounded in the scholarly literature, Parshall and Twombly present a comprehensive study detailing Trump Administration attempts to implement the unitary theory of the executive and how these efforts exceeded those of other modern presidents. Altogether, a notable examination of President Trump as chief executive."-Harvey L. Schantz, Professor of Political Science, SUNY, Plattsburgh
"A powerful defense of the administrative state and equally powerful indictment of the attempts of Donald Trump and his ilk to deconstruct it. The growing threats to our democracy go beyond the malignant acts of courts, state legislatures, and Congress. To overlook the administrative branch is to miss a large piece of the danger we face as a nation."-Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government & the Press, Harvard University